A review by lishiyo
Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self by Gish Jen

4.0

Lots of things to chew. As a Chinese American woman, there were so many observations that ring true to me both about my motherland and the country I grew up in, especially the comment that my American generation recognizes in independence a flipside that is loneliness and a lack of community, while I see my relatives in China determined to cultivate more Western values like independent thinking and individuality in their children. I've always felt that both orientations, independence and interdependence, are important for societies to thrive even if their average temperatures for comfort falls more on one side of the spectrum or the other - it's not that one is better or worse than the other, that yin is better than yang, that the mountain is better than the sea; they have their own strengths and weaknesses and nurture their own ecosystems, ones that invariably have some species more or less suited to it than others but a great variety nonetheless.