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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 921 MAR | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"A moving account of a young woman's struggle to shape her identity and imagine a future she can call her own. Against the odds, M. Elaine Mar emerges whole, and the story she tells is unforgettable." --A. Manette Ansay, author of River Angel and Sister
One woman's journey from Hong Kong to Harvard, told through the eyes of an immigrant who exists in two worlds, belongs to neither, and struggles to reconcile her place in both.
When she was five years old, M. Elaine Mar and her mother emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver to join her father in a community more Chinese than American, more hungry than hopeful.
While working with her family in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and living in the basement of her aunt's house, Mar quickly masters English and begins to excel in school. But as her home and school life--Chinese tradition and American independence--become two increasingly disparate worlds, Mar tries desperately to navigate between them.
Adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality leave Elaine isolated and confused. She yearns for store bought clothes and falls for a red-haired boy who leads her away from the fretful eyes of her family. In his presence, Elaine is overcome by the strength of her desire--blocking out her family's visions of an arranged marriage in Hong Kong.
From surviving racist harassment in the schooIyard and trying to flip her straight hair like Farrah Fawcett, to hiding her parents' heritage and arriving alone at Harvard University, Mar's story is at once an unforgettable personal journey and an unflinching, brutal look at the realities of the American Dream.
Reviews (5)
Bookseller Publisher Review
Paper Daughter takes a different approach to that of the current crop of autobiographies by Chinese women. Rather than concerning itself with life in mainland China, it deals with the displacement of a young Chinese girl from her country of birth, and her difficulties adapting to a new life in America. Elaine was born in Hong Kong in 1966 into a poor family living in one tiny room in a tenement block. Her evocative language captures the sights, sounds and smells of the city's crowded streets and colourful marketplaces. In 1972, her family emigrated to America to live with an aunt in Denver. Her story then becomes one of trying to fit into an entirely new culture. She is given an American name and struggles to learn a new language. The usual dramas of adolescence are exacerbated by her `differentness' - being Chinese and poor - and leads her into conflict with her parents and their traditional Chinese beliefs. The book closes with her acceptance into Harvard University, and her hope that finally she has found a place where she belongs. Mar's simple narrative style makes Paper Daughter a highly readable account of the experience of being caught between two cultures. Fiona Jarratt is a bookseller at Black Mask Books, South Yarra (Vic). C. 1999 Thorpe-Bowker and contributors
Publisher's Weekly Review
Asked by her third grade teacher to tell the class "what it's like being Chinese," Mar stumbled for a moment and answered, "Um, I like it, I guess." Her plainly told memoir, which recounts her passage from life in a crowded Hong Kong tenement to being a Harvard graduate, is the longer answer to her teacher's nave question. Opening the book with her first memory (the crunch of chicken bones between her teeth), Mar goes on to depict, with a strained simplicity, her arrival in Denver at the age of five and the difficulties of dealing with the competing demands of her traditionally minded parents and her new American peers. For Mar, being from Hong Kong is not all firecrackers and dragon dances, though she assures her classmates that these are weekly pleasures there. In elementary school, her greatest desire is to "obscure" her "foreignness." Nightly, she peers into the mirror, pinching at her face, hoping to shape her nose into something narrower and more "American." Rather than delve into the motivations of those around her, Mar often attempts to preserve the confusion she experienced as a child: "I didn't understand anything about America. In Hong Kong, everybody liked me. Now no one did." The result is a curiously shallow look at her life. She closes the book with an epilogue summarizing her years at college during which the breach between her and her parents widened. Attending Harvard, she concludes, was her own irreversible immigration. Agents, Lane Zachary and Todd Schuster. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A funny, sometimes brutally honest, account of one Chinese immigrant's path from the tenements of Hong Kong to the halls of Harvard. What Mar captures most vividly is the difficult position occupied by many first-generation teenaged immigrants who are attempting to forge new identities as American kids while constantly being expected to serve as a cultural bridge for their more slowly integrating older relatives. She instinctively realizes that lying is the best response to such conditions, so she lies about her parents' education, the restaurant where she works, and her parents' occasionally socially awkward behavior. Her new identity as an American is constantly under threat of exposure by her inability to tell the same lie consistently to her several groups of acquaintances, and more than once she is nearly unmasked. In one particularly vivid episode, her entire fragile self-image is shattered when the word ``seedy'' is used to describe the restaurant where she works. She has sneaked a look at her recommendation to a special summer program of study at Cornell, and found that the psychiatrist who interviewed her during the application process was much more intrigued by her class status than by her intelligence. Much of her struggle consists in convincing her parents to allow her to do the many everyday activities taken for granted by the average American adolescent, but which seem incomprehensible within traditional Chinese culture'activities ranging from taking German in high school to spending time alone with her non-Chinese boyfriend. While much of her story focuses on her desperate attempt to fit in as a teenager, Mar simultaneously details her effort to rebuild a bridge between her new American identity and her Chinese past. Millions of Americans from diverse cultural backgrounds will find reflections of their own stories in this memoir; many more will find a deeper understanding of the complex relationships upon which our culture is founded.
Booklist Review
Mar grew up in two different worlds--that of her strict Chinese parents and the unfamiliar and strange American culture at school. Whereas Elaine's childhood was spent adjusting to a foreign culture, her parents had faced hunger and poverty in China. But like most immigrant families, Mar acclimated to U.S. life better than her parents did, which created tension. Her parents wanted their daughter to retain the Chinese culture and traditions, but they needed her as a translator and liaison to the world outside of the home. As Mar reached the painful teenage years, she began to yearn for trendy clothes and the right to live her own life instead of taking part in her family's failing restaurant business. She feared that she would never escape. But her acceptance to Harvard eliminated those fears. The disappointment with this memoir is that, after much detail of each of her grade-school years, Mar devotes only three short paragraphs to her four years at Harvard, leaving readers to guess what her life is like now. --Michelle Kaske
Library Journal Review
Mar came here from Hong Kong at age five, lived for years between two cultures, and ended up at Harvard. Sounds like a nice addition to the burgeoning genre of Chinese American memoir. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
