Debut novelist Jean Kwok is touring the country reading from her book, Girl in Translation. A full tour schedule is available on the publisher’s website or the author’s website.
Kwok writes clearly and deeply and brings you right into the dingy dank apartment that Kimberly Chang and her mother share with rats and roaches and the run down freezing cold sweat shop in New York City's Chinatown where they work for pennies per garment. Kwok’s prose rings true not only because it is semiautobiographical but also because this is the truth about immigrants in New York City not just in decades past but today – the hope is that the future will be different.
Freedom is a Relative Concept
Aunt Paula is an amalgam of all the evil relatives and friends who “assist” people in starting better lives in the United States. Once here, as Kimberly and her mother realize, they are little more than indentured servants working off the cost of transportation, paperwork and more, freedom is years away and life in the United States is no better than it was in Hong Kong or elsewhere.
Kimberly bares the weight of her generation with exquisite aplomb and knowledge that it is up to her to achieve a better way of life for her family. She sets her goal and drives herself relentlessly toward it and succeeds.
Friendships in a New Country
Kwok deftly handles the blending of the American and Chinese cultures as Kimberly and her mother begin their new lives. The way she portrays the mother’s understanding of Aunt Paula’s betrayal is gentle and yet without compromise. Through dialogue, both internal and external, Kwok celebrates the creation and maintenance of friendships, the bedrock of fostering a new life in a new county.
This story has been written many times before, as it has been said, “there are no new ideas, only new takes on old ideas,” and Jean Kwok does this expertly through her divine prose. Her style keeps you reading and unwilling to set her book down for even a moment. It is the type of book you gobble up in one sitting leaving you hungry for her next book.
Semi-Autobiographical Novel Exposes Difficult Life of Immigrants
Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong immigrated to Brooklyn with her family when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She entered public elementary school unable to speak a word of English and was later admitted to Hunter College High School, one of New York City’s most prestigious public high schools. She was admitted early acceptance to Harvard and graduated with honors in English and American literature. She then earned an MFA in fiction at Columbia.
Girl in Translation
By Jean Kwok
Riverhead Books
ISBN # 978-1-59448-756-9
Jacket Design: Lisa Fyfe
Jacket Photograph: plainpicture/ballyscanlon
Author Photograph: Sigrid Estrada
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