asianamlitfans | Jul. 21st, 2010

A Review of Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation (Riverhead Hardcover, 2010)

This novel has been on my to-read list for some time and on a recent plane trip, I recently devoured it in one sitting. The protagonist is a very winning and likable character, Kimberly Chang, who immigrates to the United States at a young age alongside her mother. They are put under the care of Kimberly’s aunt and her mother’s sister, who directs them to their new home, a squalid New York City apartment. Girl in Translation is a bildungsroman in that it tells of Kimberly’s coming-of-age, how she navigates the complications of growing up as an immigrant and struggling to overcome her background as an impoverished, inner-city child. Much of Kimberly’s success is predicated on education and if there is a message that the novel offers, it is in situating the importance of the educational institution as the site whereby class mobility can occur. Indeed, Kimberly’s mother is stuck in a dead-end job working in a New York City sweatshop. Kimberly, too, is recruited into the work in order to help her mother fill deadlines. This job is, of course, provided by Kimberly’s aunt, who by this time, seems to be positioning both Kimberly and her mother to be in her continual debt. Fortunately for Kimberly, she excels in her studies, even despite the rather middling public school in which she is first enrolled. After she scores in a high percentile on a standardized exam, she fortunately receives a scholarship to a very exclusive prep school.

Kwok is extremely adept at depicting the challenges that Kimberly faces as an immigrant student, one who does not possess the class advantages of most of her peers. With the beneficent presence of another outsider, Amber, Kimberly is able to make the transition eventually and finds her own stride. Kwok adds a spritely plot complication through the inevitable romances that Kimberly must navigate. On the one hand, there is a handsome Chinese American admirer she grows up with in the sweatshop factory named Matt and then there is a Caucasian student who enlists Kimberly to tutor him but has for other designs upon her.

The novel is very readable and while its more optimistic ending could be read superficially, the politic in Kwok’s novel can be seen in the intersections of race, labor, gender, class, and immigration. The novel evokes the challenges of Chinese Americans in relation to labor through the sweatshop social context, in particular, and exposes the pitfalls of the American education system. Indeed, while Kimberly is fortunate enough to possess an exceptional intellectual acumen, there are many other students who we see fall through the cracks and are not able to have such an auspicious narrative trajectory. This book thus follows a long line of Asian American literary texts that explore the labor settings that have long situated the immigrant life; here I am thinking most specifically of Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, as well as some other contemporary analogs such as Sung J. Woo’s Everything Asian and Suki Kim’s Interpreter. In thinking about Kimberly’s life alongside the other characters who populate such novels, we see how tenuous upward mobility can be. If there is any danger and peril in reading Kwok’s work, it is that Kim’s upward mobility might be read too broadly or too optimistically. Indeed, Kim is in some ways an extraordinary and exceptional character. While she spends most evenings and nights at the sweatshop, she still manages to get top-notch grades with minimal studying. Girl in Translation succeeds most because we want Kimberly to overcome the many obstacles in her way, while showing awareness of the structural systematics which finally deter so many other working class immigrants from realizing their own “American” dreams.