Gish Jen is the award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.

Gish’s mother Agnes Jen – Loo Shu-hsin – born in 1925 to wealthy Shanghai family where the chauffeurs wore leather gloves, expensive Persian opium was served to society women via a sous chef, and girls are expected to behave and be quiet.  No domestic chores were required of her as a child, but the sudden disappearance possibly sacking of her beloved nurse-maid Nai-ma caused an open wound, potentially poisoning her future maternal facility, combine this with the Cultural Revolution, a famine, other news from home of labour camps and beheadings while navigating a life in the US where you have to cook your own food and look after a moody husband and five children. Every act of disobedience prompts the same “Bad bad girl! Your don’t know how to talk!” She gets send to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still her father would say. “Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.” Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a PhD. In America. It’s 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution in the horizon, she leaves- never to return.

Gish’s younger sister Lisa, who had wedding-dress fitting where Gish did not, and their brother Reuben, the “number one son” whose education was of more interest than the daughters’.

There is an unforgettable beating that takes place in the family garden after Gish has run away from home twice. “Who do you think you are, you can just run away? Last week, this week- do you think you can run away every week?” her mother holds her down, while her father Chao Pe beats her with a stake until her legs are bleeding and swollen. Reuben is held down by the Haggerty Road Gang in their New York neighbourhood while his arm is broken in a couple of places with a big rock. Chao-pe never touched Agnes, when “men in China were taught that you had to hit your wives in order to manage them”. Parents are ever flawed, ever human, grappling with their private heartbreaks, as this book is anot a forgiveness, but an acknowledgement that it was hard.

Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents’ marriage is unravelling and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”

Gish Jen’s novel is about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with each other across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spaning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in complicate lifelong embrace.

Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen, Granta £18.99/ Knopf $30, 352 pages.