Early Life and Education
Gish Jen is a second generation Chinese American. Her parents emigrated from China in the 1940s, her mother from Shanghai and her father from Yixing. Born in Long Island, New York, she grew up in Queens, then Yonkers, then Scarsdale. Her birth name is Lillian, but during her high school years she acquired the nickname Gish, named for actress Lillian Gish.
She graduated from Harvard University in 1977 with a BA in English, and later attended Stanford Business School (1979-1980), but dropped out in favor of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she earned her MFA in fiction in 1983.
Read more about this topic: Gish Jen
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.”
—Ralph Nader (b. 1934)
““We’ll encounter opposition, won’t we, if we give women the same education that we give to men,” Socrates says to Galucon. “For then we’d have to let women ... exercise in the company of men. And we know how ridiculous that would seem.” ... Convention and habit are women’s enemies here, and reason their ally.”
—Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947)