So Jen chose again to “do something with words.”

After spending a year in China teaching English at a coal mining institute, Jen enrolled in the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she earned an MFA in 1982.

She married O’Connor the following year.

Her Own Voice

Jen says her first novel, Typical American, came out of her time in China, when she “began to understand what it meant to be Chinese, and to realize what part of who I am came from my parents.”

She wrote the book, a tale of three Chinese immigrants in search of the American dream, when she returned to Radcliffe in 1987 as a Bunting Institute Fellow. It immediately garnered critical acclaim and national attention at a time, Jen says, when multiculturalism became a popular theme in literature.

The 1996 sequel that followed, Mona in the Promised Land, continued the story from the perspective of the family’s teenage daughter as she converts to Judaism.

“I was jotting down story ideas, and I came up with Chinese-American becomes Jewish,” Jen says. “And I said, ‘Oy!, can’t write about that!’ Then I realized I liked the way it made me laugh. I asked myself, why is that so funny? It led to many discoveries.”

Jen’s unique take on the conception of ethnicity and American identity seems to parallel her struggle to find her own niche.

She says that she sees the issue of identity as “incredibly complex.”

“I find the degree to which literature contends with these complexities to be interesting and exciting, and the degree to which it relies on old ideas about ethnicity to be boring and unfortunate,” Jen says.

Mona, then, a novel about “the invention of ethnicity,” displays Jen’s ability to turn the expected on its head.

Jen’s fascination with identity and ethnicity translates readily into her love for travel, though she goes only “where we can take the kids.”

Jen explains that “you need to see firsthand how people are.”