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

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.

Gish Jen is the author of four novels, a book of stories, and a previous book of nonfiction, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction, the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fulbright Foundation. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and lives with her husband and children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

www.gishjen.com

Preface 
 
Part I: We Edit the World 
 
1 Three Edits 
2 A Telling Irritation 
3 Some Helpful Background 
4 The Asian Paradox 

Part II: The Flexi-Self 
 
5 What Is a Flexi-Self? 
6 Boundary Blurring 
7 The Genius and the Master 
8 Testing, Testing 
9 Patterns and Training 

Part III: The Big Pit Self 
 
10 How WEIRD We Are 
11 America, an Explanation 

Part IV: Meetings and Mixings 
 
12 Our Talking, Our Selves 
13 In Praise of Ambidependence 
14 Greatness in Two Flavors  

Epilogue 

Acknowledgments 
Appendix A: Key to Self Text 
Appendix B: Recommended Reading  
Notes  
Bibliography 
Illustration Credits 
Index