“So many of our American ideals are caught up with baseball, right? The idea that we should have a level playing field. The idea that everybody should have a chance at bat. The idea that you know you never know what’s going to happen, the endless possibility. I think, also, you know it’s kind of a ritual area, right? It’s a way, it’s a place in which we enact all of our American ideas. It’s governed by rules to which all agree but rules that finally help us, you know, realize ourselves. So there’s a lot about baseball which is just… Just says America. But you know, it is striking. I mean, it is a social commentary? Well… You know, here in America, our great metaphor is baseball. And yet, it is a game which only men play at the highest league or level, right?” Author Gish Jen discusses her book The Resisters on NPT’s A Word on Words.
Gish Jen Recommends
Afterlife, Julia Alvarez
Rage Baking, Kathy Gunst
The Grammarians, Cathleen Schine
The Man in the Red Coat, Julian Barnes
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
About Gish Jen
Gish Jen has published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters.
Video Transcript
– Hi, I’m Gish Jen and this is “The Resisters”.
– [Mary] In this world that you’ve created how did we get from here to there?
– The way that we got from, kind of the America that we know to the AutoAmerica in my book is just by little acts of acquiescence. Things that we do every day the little ways we give up our privacy. We say, “Oh, well they can have our data, “I don’t really care,” you know? It’s mostly for convenience, you know? And it is true, even now there are people who are having AI write their emails, for example. All these little moments, where we just sort of said, “Sure, why not?” As opposed to, you know, “I would prefer not to.”
– Let’s talk about Gwen. She’s a natural baseball player. Why baseball?
– So many of our American ideals are caught up with baseball, right? The idea that we should have a level playing field. The idea that everybody should have a chance at bat. The idea that you know you never know what’s going to happen, the endless possibility. I think, also, you know it’s kind of a ritual area, right? It’s a way, it’s a place in which we enact all of our American ideas. It’s governed by rules to which all agree but rules that finally help us, you know, realize ourselves. So there’s a lot about baseball which is just… Just says America. But you know, it is striking. I mean, it is a social commentary? Well… You know, here in America, our great metaphor is baseball. And yet, it is a game which only men play at the highest league or level, right?
– [Mary] Talk to us about the knitting in this book.
– Well, you know, it always really struck me that, you know, I mean this is a feminist book anyways but one of the reasons, just thinking about women, it’s always interesting to me the way women would kind of carve a little space out for themselves by knitting. You know what I mean? And, you know, there’s a way in which you’re… Yes, you’re doing whatever you’re supposed to be doing but you’re also actually doing whatever you want to be doing.
– [Mary] Do you knit?
– I do knit. I knit a lot when I was younger. It was part of my assimilation in the sense that my mother didn’t knit. My mother was from China, they didn’t do things like that. A neighbor down the street just kind of took me in and she gave me, actually, a crochet hook, also and knitting needles and her leftover bits of yarn. And she taught me. And I don’t know why she took it upon herself to teach me. But when I first knitted things they were made up of all these little scraps that she had. It was just very sweet.
– Gish, thank you so much for being here today.
– Oh, it’s my pleasure.
– And thank you for joining us for A Word on Words. I’m Mary Laura Philpott, keep reading.
– [Gish] And pigeons, by the way were used at all the ball games.
– [Mary] Really?
– [Gish] Yeah, that’s how they used to get news from what happened, you know, who won the game up to the newsrooms.
– [Mary] They sent a pigeon?
– [Gish] Yeah, it was all done by pigeon.
