Owning Legacy

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Welcome to our show that explores the inner lives of some remarkable thinkers. I’m Jim Cotter and on this episode, “Finding.”

Gish Jen has spent a lifetime navigating internal cultural conflicts, yet this best selling novelist has found peace, with a person of East-West divide that could serve as a model all.

Gish Jen: Your job as a person, your imperative is to be flexible and to respond to the needs of others as opposed to in the West where we imagine ourselves as kind of like avocados with a big pit inside of us. And, your imperative is to be true to that pit. So these are two very different things.

Thomas Newman is among today’s most highly respected and successful film composers. Part of a Hollywood musical dynasty, he has found his own unique musical voice.

Thomas Newman: Part of it is knowing that having an idea isn’t the end of having another idea. I think the worst enemy for me is I wrote this and therefore it has to be great. And just puts me in a terrible position. I’d rather say I wrote this and I’m gonna now put it away from myself and let it come at my ears and make sure I like it, as opposed to liking it because I wrote it.

That’s all ahead on Articulate.

(Excerpt from Gish Jen’s The Resisters):

Of course, Gwen’s team, the Lookouts, were hardly a tidy bunch at any time ranging in age from 14 to 23, they were not only every possible color, shape, and size, but had noticeably wide-ranging ideas about appropriate baseball attire. People sported sweatshirts and jeans, but also a bowler hat, a Cape, a dashiki, and a kilt. Still, all accepting as they were, they made a good team and anyone could see that there in their midst, Gwen felt, for once in her life that she belonged.

The Resisters is the eighth book, the sixth work of fiction from the best-selling author Gish Jen. A woman, intimately familiar with the struggle to belong on the page she has dissected from every imaginable angle. The battles that have waged within her first-generation Chinese American for decades, the group versus the individual, tradition versus change, East versus West.

Gish Jen: I do come from a different cultural background than a lot of artists in the United States, you know? So they grew up, with everyone asking, “What do you think, how do you feel about this? What is it that you want?” I didn’t have any of that. So it’s not like I have this loud voice that’s coming forth and I just need to kind of get myself to have the nerve to express it. It’s much more like I had to be very quiet so I could hear what it is that I think and then it’s just there and I just write it down.

From an early age, Jen was outspoken, opinionated, and driven— all these that would serve her well as an American but that was unbecoming of the dutiful wife for traditional Chinese parents, Norman and Agnes hoped she would become.

Jen: I was frequently told that I had too much to say, I mean, my mother told me that every day. I was the bringer of news from the outside world into the households, you know? So the president has been shot, my mother said to me, “You’re crazy.” So that was, that was a very tough moment for me because I wasn’t crazy because the president really had been shot and all these, a million ideas about, things that were okay for girls to do, okay for girls to wear pants, you know pants to school. Oh, and there’s, so there’s a lot of, there’s definitely a lot of rub the whole way, especially for me as a girl. The girls were supposed to be this that, girls were supposed to be graceful. Girls were not supposed to talk so much about all those kinds of things.

Outside the family home, things weren’t much easier. In suburban Yonkers, New York, the Jen’s stuck out. Gish and her four siblings were ostracized and tormented by neighborhood kids, who would throw rocks disguised as snowballs. But this didn’t break Jens’ spirit. Reading became an escape. She found allies in her favorite authors, Isaac Asimov, Louisa May Alcott, Albert Camus. In high school she changed her name from Lilian to Gish, honoring Lillian Kish, the first lady of American cinema. Yet the more, the young Gish tried to find herself the more difficult it became to live the kind of life her parents envisioned for her. Years later she would learn that her internal struggle came down to two radically different notions of Selfhood. The pit-self of the West, centered on the individual versus the flexi-self of the East dedicated to serving the group.

Jen: Your job as a person, your imperative is to be flexible and to respond to the needs of others, as opposed to in the West where we imagine ourselves as kinda like avocados with a big pit inside of us. And your imperative is to be true to that pit. So these are two very different things, so, but it’s not that everybody gloms together and everybody thinks alike, It’s not that. However, kind of in this kind of struggle between, so, I want to be a writer. That’s a very kind of pit-like thing to do. If that’s at odds with my duties as a daughter, as a mother, from the point of view of my parents, that would be, but of course, your duties come first. You know what I mean? So this idea that you should realize yourself is, is not really, that’s just not paramount. It’s not that you can’t do it, but it doesn’t come first. And so here in America, of course, your first obligation is to realize yourself, you have to be true to that pit. They don’t have that idea.

When the time came for Jen to attend college, she nurtured a private love of writing, but wouldn’t give up hope of one day pleasing her parents. At Harvard, she studied law and medicine, but couldn’t commit to either in a last ditch effort to secure a future her mom and dad would approve of. She enrolled at Stanford business school. That was a disaster. She hated every minute of her first year and dropped out early in her second.

Jen: I will say that my parents did not speak to me. My siblings, nobody would speak to me. I mean, everybody was so angry at me. My mother didn’t talk to me for over a year. And I know it was hard. It was the full-court press on the part of my sibs too. I mean, it was just so unacceptable for somebody basically to take off in this very Western individualistic direction. But it was something that I had to do. I mean, it’s almost honestly, I think if I could have made myself go to Business School, get a nice job. If I could have made myself do it, I would’ve made myself do it, but I couldn’t.

But just as her family was turning away from her, Jen was falling in love with a star of her business school class, David O’Connor. He supported her unconditionally first in her choice to drop out of Stanford. Then in her decision to spend a year in China, ultimately cheering on her move to the Midwest to pursue her long-standing dream at the Iowa writers’ workshop. In 1983, they wed and Jen’s parents were so relieved to see their headstrong daughter married at all that they welcomed the pair back into the fold. But the best part for Jen was being with David, never felt like a compromise.

Jen: I still think that was kind of a magical thing, I mean I can’t, I mean it truly, it was this really kind of depressed person who wanted to do this thing that she didn’t really was not very at all clear about what that would look like. He never asked me like, kind of like, “Well, what would that look like? What would success look like?” Or,  “how do you think, do you think that you would ever get a teaching job?” Or he never asked me any of those questions. When we got married, we’re given tons and tons of crystal. And we had Julie pack them all up and brought them all out west to Stanford, right? And then we’re coming back and, I’m just like, “What, I, Oh my God, I’m so overwhelmed by these kinds of duties, the sense that we had to take care of all these items.”  David opened a window, took a glass and he threw it out. And that was that and we had a very huge garage sale that Saturday we got rid of all of it, it was just David, but he was so wonderful that way. It was just like, forget it, boom, gone.

O’Connor’s, self-assuredness rubbed off on Jen. And so to quiet the chorus of other voices in her head, they threatened to drown out her own ideas. She followed his example by throwing distractions away.

Jen: When I first sat down at my desk, I would make like a little visual icon of anybody whose voice I did not want to hear and I would take them and I would move them and I would put them in the hall. So starting with, of course, my mother, right, bang. My editor, early on certain people in my writing class. So I didn’t want to hear, I would remove the more just so that I can hear myself.

And the more she listened, the more she found, she had to say about families like hers. Newcomers to the west, walking your precarious line between old and new world values, between being a good Chinese daughter and achieving in America and much of her fiction, grandparents, parents, and children clash about what they owe to each other versus what they want for themselves. In 1991’s Typical American, the protagonist, Chinese grandfather, Ralph resists assimilation.

(Excerpt from Gish Jen’s Typical American):

He refused to be made of an American citizen. He thumbed his nose at the relief act meant to help him as though to claim his home was China, was to make China indeed his home. And wasn’t it still, even if his place and it was fading like a picture hung too long in a barbershop. Even if he didn’t know where his family was any more or was it exactly because he didn’t know where his family was? For certainly he felt more attached to them for their having turned abstract, missing them more than he had liked them. The missing being simpler.

Much like Ralph, Jen’s own parents were reticent to build a life in America. They came to the U.S separately in the 1940s for graduate school and they always planned to return home. But once communism took hold in China, they weren’t allowed to go back. A generation on, Jen has reconciled her Eastern roots with our Western surroundings. And to a great extent resolved her own bi-cultural identity crisis. Today, she understands the forces at play within her own spirit and has come to cherish the values her parents instilled in her.

Jen: Today as an adult. I feel that kind of like the richest parts of me are not those, I mean, yes, that hard one individualism, which I certainly have in the end, as you know, I did what I wanted. I became this writer that my family did not want me to be. And yet I would say that kind of that the older, this older self, that I fought so hard to kind of get rid of. I would say that boy, if I could do something to the world, I would somehow give it to all my individualistic friends who I think are just suffering, frankly, from the levels of individuals that they’ve been brought up on. Because I see so much isolation, I see so much protection of the pitch to the degree that they’re very anxious. And I want to tell them, “You know what? If you actually brought up with this other self, it’s fine to be ordinary. You know, not everybody has to be extraordinary.” It’s like a, not in a bad way. Like you’re not extraordinary, but like you’re really fun. It’s really fun for you to meet your extraordinary.

Nevertheless, Gish Jen is extraordinary. Her latest book, 2020s, The Resisters, is in some way, a radical departure from her earlier works. But at its core, it tells a familiar story of a strong willed outsider who survives by finding a way to live on her own terms. Not because she’s selfish, but because it’s what she must do to survive. And today at age 65, Gish Jen has discovered how to be exactly who she needs to be, a writer.

Jen: It’s my home, I’m a fish in Waterland. That’s what I was put on earth to do.

AJC: Isn’t that a lovely idea though, that you’ve.

Jen: I think it’s hell. It’s caused me no end of difficulty, but.

AJC: But While you’re in the action of doing it.

Jen: But while I’m doing it. It’s just, it’s simply what I was put on earth to do.

AJC: Well, long may you stay and do.

The film composer Thomas Newman is part of a Hollywood musical dynasty, but as a young man, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to live up to the family name.

Thomas Newman: I never felt entitlement. I guess I’ve just always been, I’ve always had grit. I think if I’ve had any quality that’s driven me forward, it’s just a sense of, shoulder, shoulder down, and let’s keep moving forward.

Thomas Newman’s father, Alfred, was a nine-time Academy award-winning composer who spent nearly two decades as music director of 20th Century Fox during the 1940s and ’50s. He also wrote the iconic fanfare for the studio. The next generation of Newman’s brought cousin Randy, who’s become one of America’s most beloved songwriters and film composers. The rest of the family is littered with accomplished classical musicians and composers and growing up, it was a given that music would be an important part of Thomas’s life. His mother would drive him and his two siblings to lessons with best teachers, sometimes hours away, but the Newman children didn’t get much advice from their famous father, who would spend long hours holed up in his studio.

Newman: My dad was, I think in the days when he was alive, it was enough to make a living. And, then mother would do most of the parenting and that’s just not as true now as it was then. I always believe my dad loved us a lot. He would get up late and work late. He would rarely have dinner with us. There was a Sunday dinner he’d have with us, which was typically roast beef and mashed potatoes. And he’d have a flagon of Heineken ale, I remember, but he was 55 when I was born. So, so much of what my father was had already happened by the time I was born. And in the time I was alive and he was alive, he was sick, a lot of the time, he was a terrible smoker and died of lung cancer.

Newman was only 14 when his dad passed away. And though his mother was supportive, the young Thomas felt the loss deeply, naturally shy and reserved. It took a decade and two degrees from Yale for him to figure out where he belonged in music and in life.

Newman: Maybe by the age of 24, 25, I was kind of nowhere, it was like, okay, now what? Do I love music enough to stick with it? And the answer was a kind of vague ‘Yes,’ I really did like it, but I think it made me think that I had to bend as opposed to break and what was good about what I did and what wasn’t and now, okay, I’m gonna reengage. I just wanted to always put it above me. I wanted to enjoy it.

This was one of many values reinforced by Newman’s mentor. Stephen Sondheim was already a legendary musical theater composer when they met. Yet, he treated Newman as an equal.

Newman: He listened to the things I had to say as if what I had to say had some interest, and I don’t think I’d ever been really spoken to that way before. So he was and he was very open about process and collaboration in a way that he was not afraid to share vulnerability with me as a matter of what it meant to be collaborative. So I think I learned basic lessons in how humans interact.

AJC: Mmh, I’m sure that that translated to the film world from the musical theater world.

Newman: It does your ability to be a team player, to know how to try to make something better, not to outsize something based upon, an idea of oneself. All those are, I think, really important qualities to have because you were in the service of something. It doesn’t, a movie doesn’t start with me. It kind of ends with me. And it’s, it’s kind of an obligation I have to kind of carry it out in a way that’s respectful to the makers.

30 years on, those makers have included the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Robert Bradford. And he’s been a go-to collaborator for Sam Mendez since the director’s first film, 1999’s, five-time Academy-award-winning American Beauty, the tragic-comic tale of a suburban man’s chaotic midlife meltdown.

Newman: I tend to like, I think scenes that have psychology in them and that are subtextual in their musical nature. That they’re not redundant to image and that I can actually bring something to a movie that a director never would have thought of. And that’s always a joy for someone to say, I never thought this scene had a kind of depth that it has now with this bit of music underneath.

Thomas Newman uses unusual, sophisticated, melodic, and harmonic devices to create uniquely evocative scores. And he’s written some of the most memorable soundtracks in recent movie history. The Shawshank Redemption, Road to Perdition, 1917. Today Thomas Newman has secured his place in his esteemed family’s legacy by keeping an open mind, listening carefully, and never being afraid to scrap it all and start again.

Newman: Part of it is knowing that having an idea, isn’t the end of having another idea. I think the worst enemy for me is “I wrote this and therefore it has to be great,” that just puts me in a terrible position. I’d rather say, “I wrote this and I’m gonna now, put it away from myself and let it come at my ears and make sure I like it.”  And as opposed to liking it because I wrote it because “I spent five hours writing it dammit and it better be good.” Giving up as an act of kind of self-acceptance in a way, these are all ways of measuring the product. And in the end you do want that kind of measurement. You don’t want it to be born beautiful, but somehow weak. It needs to be beautiful, but it has to be ultimately built to last.

Most of the time, Thomas Newman works to serve someone else’s vision, but despite being one of the most revered movie composers alive, he still goes to the piano to make music just for himself, like this, a congregational song called, “Speak So I Can Hear You” written for his late mother, Martha. And though this is a deeply personal piece of music, in their own way, all of Thomas Newman’s compositions feel like they come from the very soul of the man. That in the service of evoking, a universally heartfelt idea or emotion, he must give not only of his prodigious musical talent but also truly of himself.