Bad Bad Girl

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice...

Growing up in an affluent neighbourhood in 1930s Shanghai, Loo Shu-hsin is told that it is 'no good for a girl to be smart'—and yet when rumours of the revolution reach their enclave, she is the one sent abroad for an education. In New York, she meets Chao-Pei, a Chinese engineering student, and they set out to make a life together. By the time their daughter—Gish Jen—is born, her parents have only sporadic contact with their families, who are locked in repressive Maoist China. And in her struggle to discipline her American daughter, Loo Shu-hsin finds herself repeating the punishing refrains—'Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!'—that punctured her own childhood.