From the author of Searching for Sylvie Lee, the iconic, New York
Times-bestselling debut novel that introduced an important
Chinese-American voice with an inspiring story of 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.
