The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap

· Sold by Vintage
Ebook
336
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

Drawing on a trove of personal accounts and cutting-edge research, a “timely and extremely important” book (The Washington Post) from the acclaimed, award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon that shows how our worldviews are shaped—and what that might mean for the shared future of the United States and China. 

As East and West become more and more entwined, we also continue to baffle one another. What’s more important—self-sacrifice or self-definition? Do we ultimately answer to something larger than ourselves—a family, a religion, a troop? Or is our mantra “To thine own self be true”?
 
Gish Jen shows how our worldviews are shaped by what cultural psychologists call "independent" and "interdependent" models of selfhood. Coloring what we perceive, remember, do, make, and tell, imbuing everything from our ideas about copying to our conceptions of human rights, these models help explain why the United States produced Apple while China created Alibaba—and what that might mean for our future. As engaging as it is fascinating, The Girl at the Baggage Claim is a book that profoundly transforms our understanding of ourselves and our time.

About the author

GISH JEN is the author of four novels, a book of stories, and a previous book of nonfiction, Tiger Writing. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She teaches from time to time in China and otherwise lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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