Probably the closest I’ll ever come to meeting Gish Jen is a Zoom interview I’m registered for this month, but I’m pretty sure she’s as smart, charming and funny as her work. Consider: Born Lillian, she changed her first name to Gish (both evoking the hallowed silent-movie star). She dreamed up a dystopia that features baseball, of all things, in THE RESISTERS, the book before this one. She’s wonderfully weird and imaginative. The title story of her new collection, THANK YOU, MR. NIXON, is a tour de force of ironic fantasy that recalls the former President’s 1972 visit to China, not for its political significance but for Pat Nixon’s red coat.

It’s rare that a writer’s skill and depth are matched by her wit --- and maybe that’s why Jen has not yet won a major literary award, despite worldwide acclaim. (Hollywood is the same: Comedies rarely take home the Oscar.) It’s not that her work lacks seriousness, but she is skeptical of pretension, self-dramatization and pomposity, and has a keen sense of the absurd.

"[L]et me say again how enjoyable, intricate and impossible to categorize these stories are, mixing humor with melancholy, sarcasm with sweetness, rapture with grief."

THANK YOU, MR. NIXON isn’t explicitly autobiographical, yet it reflects a fundamental tension in Jen’s own background. Born in the United States to immigrant parents, she defied their traditional expectations by becoming a writer. Chinese culture values interdependence, as she made clear in a 2017 nonfiction work, THE GIRL AT THE BAGGAGE CLAIM: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, while the West specializes in me-centered individualism. “The Chinese wear their Nikes, they drink lattes at Starbucks,” she said in an interview at the time, “but the Chinese are not like us and it is the height of hubris to imagine that they are like us, or will become like us.” Even in sophisticated, highly assimilated Chinese-Americans like herself or renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, she said, “[T]here is an interdependent part that persists.”

The chronology of the book spans the enormous changes of the last 50 years, ranging from President Nixon’s visit, through the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the rise of China as a major economic power, and the emergence of COVID-19. Yet the best of these stories reveal how the delicate strands of traditional Chinese culture and psychology, often a mystery to foreigners, endure despite the Westernization of the younger generation. That’s why, to me, Jen’s older characters, straddling two worlds, are often the most fascinating, with a resonance beyond the specifics of this culture or that.

“It’s the Great Wall!” gives us Grace Chen de Castro and her “Caribbean Sephardic Jewish” husband, Gideon, on a tour of China with Grace’s straight-backed, dignified mother, Opal. They are traveling with a bunch of brash, ignorant Americans, and when the tour guide’s English proves inadequate, Opal becomes the unofficial interpreter. She finds herself tasked with translating not only words but subtleties of feeling that are peculiarly Chinese. The reunion with her family after 40 years in the U.S. reveals --- shockingly --- a depth of sorrow that her daughter never suspected.

The role as go-between is echoed in “Duncan in China.” A young Asian-American man, unsuccessful compared to his business-whiz brother, gets a job as the “foreign expert” in a Chinese school. But on an expedition to a sacred mountain, he is reduced to a neophyte, puzzled and moved by the thousands of old women climbing alongside him, intent on a spiritual quest. “A few had fantastic, baroque fingernails such as Duncan had thought were no longer permitted…. And how was it that so many of the women had bound feet?” The student with him says, “It is hard to change the minds of the old,” but Duncan envies their faith.

The “half-half” unlucky-in-love daughter of Grace and Gideon, and granddaughter of Opal (characters and families often overlap in these stories; figuring out how they fit together is fun, like a particularly clever jigsaw puzzle), is the title character of “Amaryllis.” It’s about the poignant relationship between a modern young woman and an elderly Chinese man, Ed, the grandfather of a friend. Here is Amaryllis watching Ed doing tai qi in the park: “His group was beginning their routine --- slow, even, hypnotic movements that made the old people seem younger….  Or, no, not so much younger as of indeterminate age --- somewhere between life and death.” And here she is giving him a bath: “Amaryllis could not believe how old and small his body was, how shriveled and bony and veiny. Here and there a strand of hair sprouted, each one an event. His ribs stuck out as if they had outgrown him. And yet he was happy.”

Intergenerational connection --- or the lack of it --- is certainly at the core of many stories in this book. Although some are shorter, slighter and more satirical, Jen never plays it just for laughs (or tears, for that matter). “Gratitude” makes fun of the lengths to which the wealthy Koos of Hong Kong will go to recapture their errant daughter, Bobby, but there’s enormous sadness, too; in “No More Maybe,” the efforts of visiting Chinese parents to be modern and useful to the kids backfire in amusing and heartbreaking ways (don’t miss the joke about Japanese cars); and in “Detective Dog,” Betty (the elusive Bobby Koo’s sister) is the earnest, self-doubting mother of two boys, with a foot in each culture: trying to follow her mother Tina’s dictum, “No politics, just make money,” but also struggling to be a good parent in Western terms.

THANK YOU, MR. NIXON affected me profoundly. It made me think about how all immigrants are outsiders to begin with, and on some level remain so. It made me question my own unconscious assumptions about Chinese culture --- which is especially important in an era when anti-Asian hate crimes are on the rise. And, lest I make Jen’s work sound unappealingly educational, let me say again how enjoyable, intricate and impossible to categorize these stories are, mixing humor with melancholy, sarcasm with sweetness, rapture with grief.