Home life Gish Jen’s mixed brood BY AMY FINCH
	The Love Wife By Gish Jen. Alfred A. Knopf, 398 pages, $24.95.

Cultural identity looms large in Cambridge author Gish Jen’s novels and short stories. What does it mean to straddle two countries, to feel like an outsider because people think you look like one? One of Jen’s most visible thematic threads has traced the ways race can position a family in the larger world. In The Love Wife, issues of race and self-definition play out primarily within the borders of one family, the Wongs. Unlike the Changs, from her first two novels, Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996), the Wongs aren’t connected by ethnicity and blood. Carnegie, born in the US to a Chinese immigrant, has married Blondie, a golden-haired, blue-eyed, Wisconsin-born babe. They adopt an abandoned baby of indeterminate Asian heritage, Lizzy; they travel to China to adopt another girl, Wendy; and finally, at age 43, Blondie gives birth to a son, Bailey.

The Love Wife is told from the voice of one family member at a time; and time itself does flip-flops, as characters comment on one another’s reflections. Reading the book feels like viewing a documentary in which a family sit around and discuss their past, and we see flashbacks of that past. This technique allows the story to unfold from the comfortable perspective of hindsight. Nothing dreadful happened to these characters or they wouldn’t here to look back. It may seem a strange way to tell a story, but this approach infuses The Love Wife with anticipatory tension, as characters offer teasing glimpses of what’s to come. It also gives voice to the tyrant Mama Wong, who continues to dictate to her son even after she’s dead.

At the outset, Blondie contemplates the arrival of Carnegie’s distant cousin Lan from China. Mama Wong’s will has stipulated that Lan should come to New York to live with the Wongs, presumably as nanny to the children. On the morning of Lan’s arrival, Blondie is ruminating on the "improvisation" that is her family, which Mama Wong had derided as unnatural. Blondie sits up in bed and admires the crazy mess of sunflowers in the yard. Surely Mama Wong would have disdained their "awkward glory. So crowded; disorderly; addled." The Chinese appreciate the cultured and the cultivated, Blondie muses, and these flowers are anything but.

Although Blondie likes to project composure and self-assurance, she’s uneasy about Lan and about Mama Wong’s reasons for sending for her. Mama Wong, it seems, was openly and forever disappointed in Carnegie, and she disliked Blondie outright. Her cruelty and cunning and Blondie’s insecurities help shape the trajectory of The Love Wife. Blondie begins to feel like an outsider in her own home as Lan forms bonds with Lizzy and Wendy. At Carnegie’s 40th birthday dinner, Blondie looks at her family and Lan and thinks, "Any passerby would have thought that Lan and Carnegie were the husband and wife of the family, and that I was visiting with my son, Bailey."

Carnegie at first figures his mother wanted Lan to come so the girls would be "more Chinese." Maintaining racial individuality in this household is a challenge. Carnegie and Blondie wage an unspoken contest over Bailey, each hoping his or her genes will prevail. And Lan hopes that Lizzy and Wendy will not grow up to be "100 percent American." As for the girls, their having been adopted leads to the inevitable skepticism as to whether they’re a real part of the family. Lizzy in particular feels like an alien because her background is a total mystery — she could be Japanese, for all anyone knows. She battles Blondie over and over.

Jen’s characters struggle to define themselves in a family united not by blood but by chance — who are you if you’re not your mother’s child? The Love Wife probes that profound human need to be part of a family and to have your own place within it. Toward the end, Blondie describes a new, different sunflower garden. "I could have spent an afternoon face-to-face with the pebbly plates of the flowers. . . . The larger stalks especially seemed to emit their own light; their green was peace; if there were a place I’d want to go in my next life, it would be there, into that pure light." Jen has created characters of such complexity and truth, it’s tempting to credit the lyricism to Blondie.

Gish Jen reads this Sunday, September 19, at 3 p.m. at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main Street in Concord; call (978) 369-2405. This Wednesday, September 22, she reads at 6:00 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, as part of the Harvard Book Store series; call (617) 661-1515.