The Americanization of Chang : TYPICAL AMERICAN <i> By Gish Jen (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence: $19.95; 296 pp.) </i>

As a little boy in China in the last days of Nationalist rule, Ralph Chang keeps his hands clapped to his ears because they are round and stick out. His teachers scold him, his mother scolds him--how can he learn that way?--and his irascible scholar father regards him as a fool and a rice barrel; good, that is, only at eating.

Through the rest of Gish Jen’s lustrous novel about a Chinese family struggling, advancing, disintegrating and re-forming in New York, no further mention is made of the round ears. Yet at the end, after the comic disasters and the dreadful ones, the misapprehensions, false starts and odd achievements, we think of them. They hang on a middle-aged, much sadder and only a little wiser Ralph; still a child with his hands clapped stubbornly to the sides of his head.

Jen has done much more than tell an immigrant story, a story of the clash of Chinese culture and American reality. Or rather, she has done it more and in some ways better than it has ever been done, because her vessels of discovery--Ralph, his wife Helen and his sister Teresa--are made so finely and achieve such speed.

And also because her writing has a power of unexpected attack as if the English language had been engaged in useful stretching up to now so as to ready it for this Chinese-American voice. When a writer writes as well as Jen, the language itself becomes the narrative and the characters. Hers is percussive; it detonates and sizzles like a sausage over a hardwood blaze.

Ralph wins a grant to study in the United States, much to the disbelief of his father, who gives him his wristwatch on parting but refuses to look at him. And Jen describes Ralph’s fierce determination to do nothing but work, even on the voyage over:

“He studied in the sun, in the rain, by every shape of moon. The ocean sang and spit; it threw itself on the deck. Still he studied. He studied as the horizon developed, finally, a bit of skin--land! He studied as that skin thickened, and deformed, and resolved, shaping itself as inevitably as a fetus growing eyes, growing ears. Even when islands began to heave their brown, bristled backs up through the sea (a morning sea so shiny it seemed to have turned into light and light and light), he watched only between pages. . . .

“As for the train ride to New York--famous mountains lumbered by, famous rivers, plains, canyons, the whole holy American spectacle, without his looking up once.”

You can’t approach any place, let alone New York, with such single-minded momentum; you crash. For a little while, Ralph revels in the superficial ease of American ways. His math courses--he is studying engineering--are simple at first; he buys cheap groceries, large banana splits, a secondhand lamp. And everyone is very nice; especially Cammy, the red-haired department secretary. But then:

“The problem sets got harder. His lamp turned out to have a short in it. His problem sets started to come back red. More red. Who had ever thought the rice barrel could become an engineer?” Or a lover. Cammy’s friendliness is not what he takes it for. He manages to offend people. His papers are not in order. He moves desperately from room to room to escape an imagined deportation threat; he works in a chicken butcher’s. He contemplates suicide.

Rescue comes from his sister Teresa and her friend Helen. They have emigrated as well; they set up an orderly if cramped household. Teresa goes to medical school; Ralph gets a decently paying draftsman’s job while resuming his studies. He had overdosed on foreignness; it had come too suddenly. Now the three of them can adapt more gradually while giving each other the comfort of their culture and their past.

The adapting, in the early stages, is a delicate comedy of manners, written seriously. Teresa is active and enterprising by American lights; yet at home, as the spinster sister, she takes a tactful background role when Ralph and Helen cement one end of the triangle by getting married.

Helen, traditionally brought up, is quiet, delicate and apparently retiring. Jen’s description is wonderfully subtle. Shy, Ralph finds her, and not a talker. She has a downward glance, she looks at his shoes.

“But Helen was not a listener either, so much as something else. Attentive. She sensed when a guest needed more tea before the guest did, expressed herself by filling his cup, thought in terms of matching, balancing, connecting, completing. In terms, that is, of a family, which wasn’t so much an idea for her as an aesthetic. Pairs, she loved, sets, and circles. Shoes, for instance (he was right), and cartons of eggs--and, as it happened, can openers that rolled easily around a lid, never sticking.”

Yet, when the furnace breaks, it is she who goes down to the basement, reads the instructions, figures out what’s wrong. Later, when they have prospered somewhat, it is she who decides on a house in the suburbs, and it is she who adapts most wholeheartedly.

Up to then, they had been Americanizing slowly and cautiously. It is a strain for each of them, in different ways. Ralph knows he has become less Chinese when his close friend and mentor, Chao, becomes his department chairman and he doesn’t feel bad about it. On the other hand, he suffers agonies preparing for his tenure review. While lightly campaigning with his colleagues, he quietly screams to himself: “You have the brains of a dung fly” and “Why should I listen to you with all that hair in your nose?”

With the suburban house, Americanization is in full swing. They are all energized: Ralph works like a maniac on the lawn, their two daughters move and run more, Helen cooks more and joins a bridge club. And yet American boundlessness, as it expands, works deeper injuries. The injuries are to their ways and manners, but ways and manners mean culture, and to this Chinese family, culture is character. It is their characters, finally, that bleed.

Teresa falls very gradually into a love affair with Chao, who is married and whose wife is a friend of all of them. It is comic and touching and runs very deep, but it infuriates Ralph and he abuses his sister so brutally that she leaves home--a shocking thing in the Chinese tradition--at least for a while. Meanwhile, Ralph himself, who feels that being a professor is not really an American-style success, is suckered by a captivating but crooked Chinese-American promoter. It is a disaster and a collapse. Grover, the promoter, lures Ralph into a ruinous venture, and tries to seduce Helen. By the end, raw violence has overtaken the household, entangling Ralph and Helen and almost killing Teresa.

Jen times the descent into near-ruin and violence with a certain theatricality; she uses a stagelike device to jump blithely over considerable stretches of time between one finely grained episode and the next. Perhaps the near-ruin is melodramatic in its narrative details--Grover is a monster down to the chortle, and Teresa’s disaster comes almost too plainly as nemesis.

But the author is writing of the pain of souls; she has written with such marvelous strangeness and familiarity of Ralph, Teresa and Helen that they have achieved, through grave and comic details, a soul-like refinement. And souls move fast, and in terrifying absolutes.