The Girl at the Baggage Claim
Explaining the East-West Culture Gap
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Drawing on a trove of personal accounts and cutting-edge research, a “timely and extremely important” book (The Washington Post) from the acclaimed, award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon that shows how our worldviews are shaped—and what that might mean for the shared future of the United States and China.
As East and West become more and more entwined, we also continue to baffle one another. What’s more important—self-sacrifice or self-definition? Do we ultimately answer to something larger than ourselves—a family, a religion, a troop? Or is our mantra “To thine own self be true”?
Gish Jen shows how our worldviews are shaped by what cultural psychologists call "independent" and "interdependent" models of selfhood. Coloring what we perceive, remember, do, make, and tell, imbuing everything from our ideas about copying to our conceptions of human rights, these models help explain why the United States produced Apple while China created Alibaba—and what that might mean for our future. As engaging as it is fascinating, The Girl at the Baggage Claim is a book that profoundly transforms our understanding of ourselves and our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Jen (Typical American) gleans insight from the field of cultural psychology and her own experiences as an American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants to explore the nature of cultural divide between Eastern and Western societies. She argues that the culture gap "stems from a difference between the conception of self that dominates the West and the conception of self that dominate the East." She explores the notion of the Western construct as "individualist, independent" and Eastern as "interdependent" and "collectivistic" through a variety of prisms such as education, business, art, and relationships and unpacks tough subjects, such as racism and prejudice in America, with sophisticated insight. Her examples are rooted in her own experience as a first generation Chinese-American, so the book focuses a lot on China and America, specifically describing the experiences of more affluent city-dwelling Americans. Jen is most compelling when she draws attention to the blended constructs of those who straddle both cultures, such as Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee or Chinese-American artist Maya Lin. She articulates the complexities of culture with a novelist's command of language in this rich exploration of the East-West culture gap.
