Girl in Translation »

Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Brooklyn as a young girl. Jean received her bachelor's degree from Harvard and completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia. She worked as an English teacher and Dutch-English translator at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and now writes full-time. She has been published in Story magazine and Prairie Schooner.

Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, an inspiring debut about an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures.

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.

Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.

The Barnes & Noble Review

It's easy to forget while you're reading that Jean Kwok's novel is not actually a memoir of the Chinese immigrant experience. Each page of its insistent narrative pushes the reader through the vicissitudes of life in a decrepit Brooklyn apartment, labor in a Chinatown sweatshop, and the relationship between a mother and her young daughter Kimberly with an astonishing scope of striking details. Indeed the faded red of an oft-washed pair of handmade underwear, the heft of a bolt of lime green polyester plush found in the trash and used to create blankets, jackets, and slippers, and the steamy exhale of the factory's pressing machines, are each imbued with a dimensionality that could only come from real life.

And in fact, they did. Kwok writes, "Though Girl in Translation is a work of fiction, the world in which it takes place is real," and one she knows as intimately as her protagonist Kimberly, having come to America as a child not speaking a word of English, yet managing to excel in school and eventually landing in an Ivy League college. As a work of fiction, Kwok has crafted a powerful story of one young woman's tenacity in the face of a constant stream of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But it's more than that. Girl in Translation is a vividly rendered telling of a child's struggles as she navigates the boundary between traditional and contemporary cultures, hardships and successes, and matters of the heart. As Kimberly grows to womanhood we can't help but root for her, on the one hand confident she's tough enough to make it, on the other holding our breath, hoping she'll never stop trying.

--Lydia Dishman