Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

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Summary:

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life–like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition-Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.

My Review:

I’ve read quite a bit of fiction and non-fiction this year that has been centered around China. Girl in Translation tops the list as being the most moving and easy-to-relate-to story of the mix.

Kimberly begins her narrative of this story at the age of 11, newly arrived from Hong Kong. She’s an incredibly smart girl facing an impossibly hard life in the United States – in New York. In spite of having an Aunt, Uncle-by-marriage, and cousins in New York, she and her mother are forced to live in squalor (due to jealousies between the sisters), to attend a sub-par school and to work the after-school hours in a factory where she and her mother earn less than $2/hr … combined.

In spite of all of this, all of the struggles and heartaches, Kimberly pushes herself to continue and to, eventually, make a better life for her mother and herself.

It was the little things that really made this book for me – the constant insertion of English words that seemed at first gibberish to me before I began to understand that she was narrating what she was hearing. For example: achiff such spectacles was in fact achieve such spectacular . I also snorted and giggled as I was exposed to translated insults passed from Kimberly to her cousin. I was interested in learning how different the Chinese are when it comes to “sayings”. In the US we might say we might say that is is dangerous to be too honest, but the Cantonese have a saying for it.. “If you are straight as an arrow, you’ll have to beg for a living.”. These are scattered throughout the book and do a fantastic job of setting the perfect tone, that of a girl who learns to live in the US and manages to translate her story for us in a way we’d understand.

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Girl in Translation Book Trailer