Girl in Translation by Jean KwokMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
For me, the biggest problem with Jean Kwok's Girl in Translation is that the love story felt contrived and instead of adding to our understanding of protagonist Kimberly as a girl caught between two worlds, it just distracted from her larger story. Actually when I think of it, many of the characters in the book felt contrived rather than true-to-life, but because the love story took up much of the ending (including a major twist) it really stood out as out of place. Girl in Translation does contain some poignant insights into life as a first-generation immigrant grappling with poverty and ambition, but they were not as fully-realized as they could have been.
The entire novel spans almost two decades, if we count the last chapter set "twelve years later." When it opens, Kimberly is an 11-year-old who, along with her mother, has just arrived in Brooklyn from Hong Kong. (Her father passed away when she was very young). Kimberly's Aunt Peggy has helped the two family members make a life in America, but it turns out that this life includes a squalid, vermin-infested, heat-lacking apartment and a job in a Chinatown clothing factory (yes, this means child labor).
Because Kimberly had displayed exceptional academic talent in Hong Kong, she decides to use this talent to work to better her family. It is a long path up for a girl who speaks and understands little English and struggles to fit in socially and culturally at school. However, after a few years in public school, Kimberly's smarts land her a full scholarship to a prestigious private secondary school.
An early adversary in the novel turns out to Aunt Paula, who happens to be the owner of the factory. It turns out that Aunt Paula has been purposefully holding Kimberly and her Ma back (not helping them find a safer apartment, demanding more and more work without more pay) out of a jealous spite. The reasons for Paula's jealousy are briefly explored, but for the most part she comes across as a two-dimensional stock villain.
It is at the factory that Kimberly meets Matt, the love interest mentioned above. We see her feelings for Matt develop over her pre-teen years, but by the time the two actually get together (there is "another woman" named Vivian who seems to only exist for dramatic/romantic tension) their interactions seem to be reduced to infatuation. This would be understandable if it were just their teenage relationship that is described this way, but even 12 years after Kimberly makes a fateful decision impacting their future, the descriptions are still along the lines of "I stood outside his apartment because he was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen").
This relationship could have been woven into the story in a more believable way and furthered the conflict between Kimberly's ambitions and her experiences of first love, but it just didn't resonate for me.
There is a lot of push between Kimberly's desire to fit in to with her classmates and her desire to be a dutiful daughter, but again the clichés of popular kids, parties and "fooling around" vs. studying got in the way. It was as if Kimberly were behaving the way a first-generation Chinese American teenager was "supposed" to behave rather than how a full-fleshed human being actually would.
The parts of the novel that worked the best were the ones that really allowed me to get inside the experiences of a young Chinese immigrant (the "girl in translation" of the title). When Kwok introduced Chinese turns of phrase or elements like family foods or celebrations like Chinese New Year, it made the novel a little more believable. There were some vivid descriptions of places (from the squalid apartment to Kimberly's first visit to Manhattan to her private school campus), but no grounding of the novel in time. I assumed it was set in the present-day, but there were no clues and it could really have been any time in the late 20th or early 21st century).
Girl in Translation was a quick and mostly enjoyable read, but the ending frustrated me and the entirety of the novel could have been more true-to-life. The ideas, fully realized with full-fleshed characters and more realistic relationships, could make for a truly moving novel, but as it is Girl in Translation is just so-so.
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