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    A Study Guide for Gish Jen's "The White Umbrella"
    A Study Guide for Gish Jen's "The White Umbrella"
    A Study Guide for Gish Jen's "The White Umbrella"
    Ebook37 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Gish Jen's "The White Umbrella"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Gish Jen's "The White Umbrella," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535840514
    A Study Guide for Gish Jen's "The White Umbrella"

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      A Study Guide for Gish Jen's "The White Umbrella" - Gale

      11

      The White Umbrella

      Gish Jen

      1984

      Introduction

      The White Umbrella is one of the first short stories written by noted American author Gish Jen. It was first published in the Yale Review in 1984 and has since been reprinted in a number of anthologies, including Home to Stay: Asian American Women's Fiction, edited by Sylvia Watanabe and Carol Bruchac (1990); My Mother's Daughter: Stories by Women, edited by Irene Zahava (1991); and America Street: A Multicultural Anthology of Stories, edited by Anne Mazer (1993).

      Set somewhere in the greater New York City area, The White Umbrella is about a young Chinese American girl and what happens one day when she goes with her younger sister to the house of her piano teacher for a lesson. The story hints at the unnamed girl's awareness of herself as a Chinese American, in contrast to the all-American girl who is in the middle of her lesson when the other girls arrive. The story also involves the girls' mother, who has just started working outside the home for the first time and is uncomfortable about it. The White Umbrella offers insight into what it might feel like to be a member of an ethnic group in a town where almost everyone else has an American cultural background. Jen later built on stories such as The White Umbrella to develop the picture of Chinese American life in the novel for which she is best known, Typical American (1991).

      Author Biography

      Jen was born Lillian Jen on August 12, 1955, in Long Island, New York. She is the daughter of Norman and Agnes Jen, immigrants from Shanghai, China, who met in the United States in the 1940s. Jen's mother was sent to the United States to further her education, while her father was an engineer who had been employed by the U.S. Army. Both expected to return to China but were prevented from doing so by the Communist takeover of China in 1949.

      As a child, Jen lived in Yonkers, New York, and she wrote her first story when she was in fifth grade. The family later moved to the Jewish suburb of Scarsdale, where Jen attended high school and read avidly

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