First off, she’s really Lillian. Lillian Jen.

Gish Jen? Well, there’s a story behind that unusual name.

Before there was Gish Jen, acclaimed novelist (Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land) and short-story writer (Who’s Irish?), there was Lillian Jen, shy and dutiful daughter of Chinese immigrants.

Sometime during her adolescence, though, the process of assimilation had worked its subtle and profound transformation. By the time Jen was attending Scarsdale High, she was hanging out with an artsy, bohemian crowd. Turning up their noses at the Hollywood trash playing in Westchester’s multiplexes, they would head into New York to check out the latest foreign films.

One of the guys took to handing out nicknames to everyone, a sovereign knighting his subjects. A girl bearing the last name of Houseman was dubbed A.E., after the English poet. Lillian became Gish, like actress Lillian Gish. She had never seen any movies starring the queen of the silents. “We just thought it was cool,” she says.

Renamed, reborn.

“Lillian was kind of a nice Chinese girl,” she explains. “Gish was the one who was propping the door open to stay up late and sneak back into the building.”

It’s a classic American story. Celebrities as different as Ralph Lauren and 50 Cent can relate to it. Before they were household words, they bore names you probably wouldn’t recognize.

Lillian is still on the checkbook, but she’ll always be Gish to her friends, and to her multitude of readers.

What they can turn to next is The Love Wife (Knopf, $24.95), a heart-tugging novel about a suburban Boston family that mirrors the changing face of America — a Chinese-American husband, Carnegie Wong, and his Caucasian wife, nicknamed Blondie; their two adopted Asian daughters and their biological son.

Carnegie was raised by a driven, badgering, no-nonsense single mother “alive to the real miracle of America: namely, mortgages … Where else could people come with nothing and end with whole blocks of real estate?” Carnegie defines himself as everything she was not — scientific, ironic and wholly American.

Even after Mama Wong succumbs to Alzheimer’s and dies, she remains Carnegie’s nemesis, having dispatched a distant relative from China to be nanny to Carnegie’s children, to make them more Chinese.

Lanlan’s arrival sets off intense debates among the Wongs about ethnicity and identity, not to mention family roles. To tell this story, Jen forgoes traditional narration altogether. Instead, in the style of a documentary movie, she lets all the family members speak for themselves.

The technique may have been a gamble, but it has paid off handsomely. The result is a feast of gab, of proclamation and rebuttal, some of the quirkiest, funniest, most intelligent fictional talk in years.

In person, Gish Jen is equally engaging, a blend of nuanced insight and self-deprecating humor. We meet at an outdoor cafe in Cambridge, Mass., near the Harvard Square office where she does her writing. That’s a quiet refuge, away from her children, 13-year-old Luke and 5-year-old Paloma.

A doting mother, she exclaims about the cake the kids baked for her recent 49th birthday, a concoction made of Cocoa Krispies, applesauce and something called “strawberry fluff.” Yes, she ate it, she says with a smile.

Women juggling career and motherhood often get “extremely grouchy,” her pal Maryann Thompson observes, but Jen doesn’t. Thompson marvels at the writer’s predilection for “always seeing the humorous side of life in all its surreal qualities.”

That comic sensibility pervades Jen’s fiction, too. It reached its peak, perhaps, in Mona in the Promised Land, where a Chinese-American teenager provides the laughs by trying to re-invent herself as a Jew. At the temple youth group, her home away from home, her buddies call her Mona Chang-owitz.

Jen used to attribute this perspective to being the daughter of immigrants. “I always saw things with two lenses, so I could always see the discrepancy between the way things were and the way they were supposed to be. That kind of seamless disjuncture and incongruity is always funny.”

Now that she’s a mother, she leans toward a genetic explanation. She says her children come to comic pranks and sayings quite naturally. And her father, a hydraulics engineer educated in China, drew on humor as a way to survive the taunts of bigots who doubted his skills.

“He would tell stories about going out into the field, and some guys were giving him trigonometry textbooks, and he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this.’ And then they’d hand him another one. He always thought it was, like, the funniest thing. A lot of people would have been offended.”

Gish’s parents, Norman and Agnes Jen, came to the United States separately in the mid-1940s.

Both were from well-to-do families in the Shanghai area. Eventually, the two met, married and settled in Flushing. Norman taught engineering and physics at City College of New York.

The next destination for this striving, ambitious immigrant family was suburbia. After about five years in Yonkers, they moved up the ladder to tony Scarsdale.

The ethos of hard work and determination took Gish to Harvard. It also undermined any notion that she might consider a career in writing.

An English major, she nonetheless thought of herself as pre-med or pre-law. No matter that Robert Fitzgerald, the great translator, admired her work in a poetry class so much that he insisted she think again.

After graduation and an unhappy year working for a New York publisher, Jen signed up for Stanford Business School. Under “heavy, heavy parental pressure,” she was “doing the practical thing.”

But why bother to attend classes when she hated the thought of business? “I must have read a hundred novels that year, and I did not go to school,” she recalls. “Apparently, it was quite the topic in the faculty dining room. ‘Have you seen her in your class?’ That sort of thing.”

Jen never did finish the MBA program, but she married a man who did, David O’Connor. Her parents had always worried that her intelligence would frighten away potential suitors.

Dropping out made them furious. Her father cut her off financially, and her mother wouldn’t speak to her for a year. (Gish’s siblings did “the practical thing.” Her three brothers went into business, her sister into medicine.)

That Jen later earned a master’s in fiction writing at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop didn’t mollify her parents. What, after all, could she do with that degree?

When her first book, Typical American, came out to glowing reviews in 1991, Time magazine wrote her up and The New Yorker published an excerpt. But none of that mattered. What finally made her legitimate in her parents’ eyes was the imprimatur handed down by The World Journal, the largest-circulation Chinese-language newspaper in North America:

“It was like a wedding announcement: ‘Gish Jen, daughter of Norman and Agnes … ‘ After that, everything was OK.”

Newsday is a Tribune Co. newspaper.

AT THE FAIR

Miami Book Fair coverage continues all week in Lifestyle, with daily profiles of writers scheduled to attend.

Today: Gish Jen on ethnicity and identity. Details, Page 6.

Tuesday: The Sweet Potato Queen: Jill Conner Browne’s southern-fried sisterhood of laughter.

Online: Previous stories, including the full schedule of events, can be found at

An evening with . . .

Gish Jen is scheduled to read from her work (with Esmeralda Santiago and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni) at 1:30 p.m. Saturday during the Miami Book Fair, in the auditorium of the Wolfson Campus of Miami Dade College, 300 NE Second Ave., downtown Miami. Free, with seating on a first-come basis. For information, call 305-237-3258 or visit miamibookfair.com.