The New Yorker Radio Hour - Gish Jen’s “The Resisters”

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

In the near future, the Internet is sentient and her name is Aunt Nettie. Gish Jen’s novel “The Resisters” imagines a dystopian world with two classes: the “netted” (people who work) and the “surplus” (people who merely consume). The book follows Gwen, a terrific baseball pitcher from a surplus family that’s politically active. When her pitching attracts the attention of Aunt Nettie, she must choose between realizing her talents or staying with her family and being a resister. Baseball, for Jen, epitomizes the magic of chance and natural talent. “I wanted to write about our times,” she tells Katy Waldman. “But, to write in a realistic mode about our times and everything that’s happening, we would have nothing but shock and anger.”    “The Resisters” was published on February 4th. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Gish Jen first came to readers' attention almost 30 years ago. Her debut novel was about an immigrant family from China, and it had this somewhat ironic title, Typical American. Gish Jens' eighth book has just come out, and she talked about it with the New Yorker's Katie Waldman. The Resisters is a new book that's just come out, and it's a dystopia. It's a dystopic fiction. It is set in a future where there is one class, The Netted, who are allied with the internet. The internet, of course, has taken over everything and has permeated every aspect of life.

And then there is the surplus class, and their job is basically to consume all of the goods that this privilege cast produces. So the novel follows a surplus family. The daughter is Gwen. She's sort of this wonderkind baseball pitcher. And so she gets scouted to play for the Olympic team. So The Resisters is definitely a book about politics. But it also happens to be a wonderful baseball novel. And it gets at the sort of aesthetic quality of the game. How unpredictable and often beautiful and sometimes boring. it can be. So when Gish Jen and I talked recently, we started with baseball. So you live in Cambridge, right? So you must be a Red Sox fan. I am a Red Sox fan, but I have to say that, you know, I come from a very, very, very strongly, you know, pro-Yankees family. Really? Okay. Well, you know, it's interesting because, you know, what most people have asked me is, you know, are you a baseball fan? And, you know, I will say that baseball was so important to my family that a couple summers ago, my mother, who was in her 90s, was in septic shock. We all thought, of course, that, you know, her time had come.

A priest was called in for last rites. She was non-responsive. And my brother leans over my mother, and he says to her, mom, he says, the Yankees are in a slump. The Red Sox are eating their lunch. Oh, my gosh. And, you know, my mother opened her eyes. And without missing a beach, she said, that Aaron Boone should be fired. You know, and I think that just says it all, you know.

I come from a family of baseball fanatics. My brother was a star pitcher in Yonkers, New York, when I was growing up. And he had a lot of, I think that a lot of, you know, my ideas about a mirror. America were tied up with his really classically American experience. I mean, in the sense that there's this immigrant kid. They said, you know, we have this Chinese kid who can throw. In any case, I just bring this up because I do think a lot of the emotional attachment to baseball is all attached to these early experiences. All those scenes of Gwen practicing in the backyard.

I would never have been able to write them without having seen my brother, you know, with a target in the backyard. just throwing and throwing and throwing till he could hit those corners, you know, which he did. Yeah. Well, and actually speaking of that, I wonder if I could ask you to read from the passage on page 153. And you're talking about the baseball team that Gwen plays for, for auto America and their rival, which is China, Russia, the amalgam of China and Russia. And you're describing why the rivalry is so intense. But in doing that, you kind of get at the symbolic weight of baseball for Americans. And I should back up and say that it's narrated by Gwen, the main character's father. Okay.

Perhaps this was fear, pure and simple on the part of Gwen's teammates. But feeding their obsession, of course, was the sense that baseball was more than a sport, that it was a crown jewel. There were people who said it wasn't even invented in America. There were people who pointed out it was mentioned by Jane Austen, long before it was ever mentioned here. But if baseball took on a hallowed meaning, it took on that meaning in our American dreams. For was this not the level playing field we envisioned?

The field on which people could show what they were made of? And didn't we Americans believe above all that everyone should have a real chance at bat? Didn't we believe that with the good of the team at heart, something in us might just hit a ball off our shoe tops and send it sailing clear out of the park? If Gwen's teammates were playing Chin Rusher for something, I thought it was for this. For a chance to show, my mother would have said that even if we all returned to the dirt and the wind and the rain like the plants and the animals, we had a bigness in us. Something beyond algorithms and beyond upgrades, something we were proud to call human. Or so it seemed to me.

Could you maybe describe just a little bit what's happening? with Gwen and baseball when the book begins? It turns out that she is quite a talented pitcher. And as the book goes on, she comes to the attention of the netted. They are engaged in international competition. And so they would like to see Gwen come and play for them. She has to decide between a world where she can actually realize herself. I mean, the netted world is one where there have stadia and they're a coaching.

and all the things that she needs to be the pitcher that she has in herself to be. And to stay in the surplus world, she'll never know. Can she throw an 85 mile an hour of basketball? You know, in the surplus world, she will never know that. So, you know, she has to kind of decide whether she would cross this line and also whether it would make any difference, you know? I mean, why stick with a surplus? Is that going to help matters? So she has to ask her some pretty hard questions, as well as the question, of course, of whether she could bring her family with her. You know, is that betraying something? And, you know, does it do any good for her parents to insist that their affiliation is with the downtrodden? Yeah. And I think specifically with this book, it's also interesting because you've got this sort of encroaching state and AI. and baseball seems to represent something sort of natural and unaccountable and miraculous.

So you've written eight books, and many of them are realist fiction. And I'm wondering, why did you decide to write a dystopian novel? Well, of course, dystopias are in the air. I'm hardly the first writer who think to do this. But for me, you know, it was kind of at a funny time of my life in that I was newly an empty nester. My daughter had just gone off to college, and as a parent of someone going out into the real world, I was worried about the future. And so my orientation toward what was going to happen in this country, which had already been there, was really, really pronounced because of my time and life. But there's also another way, I think, in which I wanted to write a dystopia, partly because I wanted to write about our times, but to write in a realistic mode about our times.

and everything that's happening. You know, we would have nothing but shock and anger, you know, like, oh, my God, this is happening. Oh, my God, this is this other thing is happening. And that's not the book I wanted to write. You know, I didn't want my book to be all about reaction to these things happening. I wanted to write about what it would feel like if these things all continued and what, if our word became, what it could become. You know, what would our lives be like? Well, it's funny because you wrote a piece in the New York Times when Steve Jobs died, and it was this lovely kind of ode to the early computer as an alternative to the typewriter.

And you write, what came out of this computer was not further from the human heart. It was closer. It was looser, freer, more spontaneous. And this is 2011. And the resistors, your vision of technology is so much darker. as kind of authoritarian force. So I just wonder, like, how did that transformation happen? Do you see it as like a switch flipped from optimism to pessimism?

No, I don't think that a switch was flipped. I think that I still see technologies enormously liberating. So I'm not actually a technophobe, but it's hard not to notice that authoritarian governments have managed to take technology and use it in frighteningly effective fashion. So I do spend a lot of time in China. So, you know, I have seen what the Chinese government has been able to do with technology. Yeah. And when you do go back to China, what do you see?

Well, you know, so I was sitting down to this book in 2017. And, you know, so I saw already that there were cameras in the front of classrooms. You know, you would have every single question, every single reaction recorded. obviously that has a chilling effect. Already at that time, they were piloting their social credit system. So that was already being rolled out in certain cities. And already, you know, no one could really function there without WeChat. And already it was known that WeChat was censored.

And, you know, everybody was aware of these things. So, you know, already it was becoming clear that technology was a hugely effective tool that they now had. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting that, One journey of the book is just watching Gwen Blossom and her parents being so proud of her as she sort of takes over her own freedom and her own life story. But at the same time, there's kind of this shadow narrative that that's kind of what happened with AI, that humans gave birth to this creature and gave it more and more freedom

and more and more leash, I guess. And then it developed into this kind of nightmare sentence. So I just, I found that sort of symmetry really interesting. Well, thank you. You're the first person to comment on that. But what you see in that, I think, is that, you know, I myself have a little bit of ambivalence about freedom, you know. Look, I look at autocratic leaders and I am against and I am pro freedom. But there's another way in which I, in the case of technology, which, you know, we now are at the point where, you know, chat. bots can develop their own language independent of us, that we can't even understand. A lot of people are quite unnerved by the fact that if you ask a big tech company, well, how does this work that even for them, it's a black box and they don't really know.

And that kind of thing makes us nervous. How could it not? The novelist Gish Jen, speaking with the New Yorker's Katie Waldman. Jen's new book is called The Resisters. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us this week. And don't forget that next week we'll be joined by a living legend, a term I don't use lightly, Pam Greer.

See you then. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo,

Rianan and Corby, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gofen and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Fei-Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.