Gish Jen’s Typical American recounts the story of Chinese immigrants in pursuit of the American Dream. It fictionalizes the assimilation process of one Chinese American family after World War II. The novel also is a probing, often comic look at larger issues in mid-twentieth century American society. What happens to the Changs is what happens to many Americans, to some degree—the dreams and the disillusionments, the successes and the failures—but the story illuminates the process from a fresh perspective. Jen’s 1996 sequel to this novel, Mona in the Promised Land, follows the Changs’ younger daughter as she navigates the difficult process of growing up in an upper-middle-class Westchester County community. The novel raises similar issues of ethnicity and assimilation with gentle humor.

Critics often cite Jen’s similarities to other well-known Chinese American writers, especially Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, who also have written assimilation stories of characters with conflicting loyalties to two countries and stories of clashes between generations. A sign of the depth of Jen’s fiction lies in her comparison to a broader cross-section of contemporary works and writers. Like these other writers, she clearly represents the strengths and weaknesses of American values and institutions.

The focus in Typical American is on the struggles of three Chinese immigrants to become fully American. Jen, though, also focuses on the lure and limitations of American society. All three characters literally think in Chinese—its language, folklore, and maxims—at the same time they are learning to speak English, to become fully American, and to think in English, or American, words. Theresa Chang is perhaps the most successful of the three main characters: She adjusts quickly to life in the United States, achieves status as a medical doctor, and even becomes a “typical” American by having an affair. Helen Chang feels least at home in the United States and has the most difficulty in letting go of traditional Chinese values, like the importance of family. Still, even she becomes resourceful and resilient.

It is Ralph, however, who is at the center of this tragicomedy and who most fully reinvents himself. He is successful in becoming an academic, but he wants money. He breaks up his extended family by forcing his sister, Theresa, to move out of his house, and he is the prime agent of financial loss and of his wife’s affair.

Typical American tells the story of the American Dream through Asian eyes. Like European immigrants, who first see the Statue of Liberty, Asian immigrants first see the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay as the symbol of passage. The formula for assimilation is the same for all, however.

In Typical American , Ralph imitates Benjamin Franklin’s first formulation of the self-made man; he also tries to follow the “positive-thinking” advice of Norman Vincent Peale. Ralph’s name should remind readers of the founder of the idea of American self-reliance and romantic individualism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ralph, too, is duped by a Chinese American (Grover Ding) who has been thoroughly assimilated and who has learned how to cheat others. Ralph’s failure is to believe that money means success. He also fails because in believing so, he gives up the values, including his Chinese heritage, that have made him who he is. In the end, he comes to understand that he is not only a man of his dreams but also a man of his limitations. Earlier in the novel, Ralph and Theresa and Helen criticize “typical American” faults, but by the end, Ralph recognizes that he has become a typical American in his failures as well. True assimilation, he now understands,...