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A review by sjgrodsky
The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap by Gish Jen
3.0
Gish Jen has good ideas on a good topic. She'd be a wonderful person to meet for coffee: warm, funny, quirky, and very very smart.
That said, the book has frustrating flaws. Why, for example, is her description of the fundamental attribution error -- an important part of her argument -- so sketchy that I had to consult Wikipedia for a clear explanation? I know she can write very well. Why didn't she?
Another example: why does she construct this story of the girl at the baggage claim in the preface, then keep me guessing on the resolution until the epilogue? It's only there, after slogging through hundreds of pages, that I finally deduced that the entire story was fiction.
How is this fair, exactly? After all, Gish Jen promised me in the preface that I would understand the logic of the girl at the baggage claim being not being the girl she was supposed to be. She promised me that I would understand why a Chinese family might pull a bait and switch operation on an American school and why they would expect it to succeed.
And then in the epilogue, I find out that there was no girl at all, and no Chinese family determined to deceive Milton
Academy. The whole story was fiction. So the bait and switch was Gish Jen pulling a deception on me.
Gish Jen is a graceful and expressive prose stylist, but I don't like being deceived.
That said, the book has frustrating flaws. Why, for example, is her description of the fundamental attribution error -- an important part of her argument -- so sketchy that I had to consult Wikipedia for a clear explanation? I know she can write very well. Why didn't she?
Another example: why does she construct this story of the girl at the baggage claim in the preface, then keep me guessing on the resolution until the epilogue? It's only there, after slogging through hundreds of pages, that I finally deduced that the entire story was fiction.
How is this fair, exactly? After all, Gish Jen promised me in the preface that I would understand the logic of the girl at the baggage claim being not being the girl she was supposed to be. She promised me that I would understand why a Chinese family might pull a bait and switch operation on an American school and why they would expect it to succeed.
And then in the epilogue, I find out that there was no girl at all, and no Chinese family determined to deceive Milton
Academy. The whole story was fiction. So the bait and switch was Gish Jen pulling a deception on me.
Gish Jen is a graceful and expressive prose stylist, but I don't like being deceived.