Bad Bad Girl

By Gish Jen

The award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .

Gish's mother--Loo Shu-hsin--is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: "Bad bad girl You don't know how to talk " She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D. in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves--never to return.

Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life together: marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents' marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own childhood: "Bad bad girl You don't know how to talk "

Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with each other across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated lifelong embrace.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593803736
• ISBN13: 9780593803738
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.3"