The Limits of Hospitality in Gish Jen’s The Love Wife

Gish Jen’s 2004 novel The Love Wife highlights the foreign presence within American national boundaries but plays with the reader’s expectations of a novel of immigration to deconstruct the categories of citizen and immigrant, foreigner and native, protagonist and antagonist, host and guest. This blurring between antagonist and protagonist in the novel captures the dynamics of hospitality: through a delicate series of adjustments, concessions, and compromise, guest and host can exchange places with one another. Tapping into fears particularly emergent in the post-9/11 era of immigrants as poised to infiltrate America, Jen’s novel engages with the anxiety evoked by the foreigner’s presence but complicates this notion through her careful examination of the ethnic- and gender-inflected dimensions of that response, as well as through the resolution of the plot. Considering the trope of hospitality within contemporary Asian American works also helps illuminate fiction’s role in evolving definitions of “Asian American” and “America” in the “post-national” era.