SOURCE: Heung, Marina. “Authentically Inauthentic.” Women's Review of Books 13, no. 12 (September 1996): 25.

In the following review of Mona in the Promised Land, Heung asserts that the characters are not well developed and that Jen fails to adequately resolve the questions of multicultural identity raised in the novel.

As Mona in the Promised Land opens, Ralph Chang, his wife and two daughters are moving to an affluent suburb of New York City called Scarshill—a move that signals the immigrant family's progressive assimilation into middle-class America. Gish Jen continues the saga of the Chang family that she began in her first novel, Typical American, framing their exploits in the terms of America's founding narratives. The earlier novel was a classic immigrant narrative, detailing the development of new identities and criticizing the American myth of success. This sequel, although set in the late 1960s, adopts a distinctively postmodern stance, exploding accepted...