How to use this Page

Full Name : Jean Kwok
Website: Jean Kwok
Birthplace: Hong Kong
Raised In: New York City
Current Location: The Netherlands
Genre: Fiction
Most Recently Published Work: Girl in Translation

Can you tell us a little about Girl in Translation?

Girl in Translation is the story of a young Chinese immigrant girl named Kimberly Chang who starts leading a double life: exceptional school girl by day and a factory worker in the evenings. Since she needs to hide the harder truths of her life – her extreme poverty, the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders—she learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself, back and forth, between the worlds she lives in. In the end, she needs to choose between the worlds she straddles and the two very different young men who love her.

Girl in Translation is a work of fiction but it is based upon my own life. Like my characters Kimberly and her mother, my family and I also immigrated from Hong Kong to New York City when I was a child. We too went from being fairly well off to needing to start our lives all over again. When my family started working in a sweatshop in Chinatown to survive, I had to go along to help work, even though I was only five years old. We lived in an apartment that didn’t have any central heating, and was swarming with cockroaches and rats. The only way to have any warmth at all was to keep our oven on throughout the long bitter winters. Fortunately, like Kimberly, I also had a talent for school. Although I struggled initially, I was soon able to learn English and ultimately went on to study at Harvard.

When Kimberly and her mother moved into their first rundown apartment I could see all of its cracks and roaches. I even felt the cold. The stories visual strength is due in part to your connection to the main character. So why a novel and not a memoir?

The main reason I chose fiction rather than memoir was because I never wanted to talk about my own background. I thought I’d be able to hide behind the fact that this is a novel but when the book began to receive a great deal of international attention, it became clear that the autobiographical aspect was an essential part of my message. People wanted to know if working class immigrants could actually live under such harsh circumstances, and I understood it was important to answer, “Yes.”

The book has been received so warmly by critics and readers alike that my shame has now turned into pride. I am glad I was able to tell our story because I know there are so many other Americans in similar situations.

There's a beautiful ease to this story. Once I started reading I couldn't put it down. What to you think made this story such a page turner?

I’m always so glad to hear that. I did work hard on making it that way. Another reason I chose to write a novel instead of a memoir was because in order to make the book a compelling read, I needed to experiment with language and structure in ways that are not possible in a memoir. It took me ten years to learn enough craft to write this book.

I was interested in the idea of using the first person narrator – the “I” voice– in a new way. I wanted to put the reader into the head and heart of a Chinese person and there by give readers the experience of actually becoming a Chinese immigrant for the course of my novel: to hear Chinese like a native speaker and to

Display Comments Add a Comment

A guest blog from Olivia Scott-Berry from Penguin's teen site, Spinebreakers

I’ve never wanted to hate but couldn’t help loving so many people all at the same time.

Every now and then an event comes along and you think, you know what? My biology homework can wait, Masterchef can be recorded, dinner is reheatable- It’s a Wednesday night, but I’m going out! (It’s a phenomenon I like to call ‘the dilemma of the sixth-former’)

The Penguin General Bloggers' event then, was something pretty special. Imagine this: you receive an email telling you that seven of the most brilliant authors are going to be giving readings, and that you will get to talk to them afterwards and there are going to be goody bags. Can you honestly tell me that you would have said no, I have to finish this sheet on quadrat sampling?

Arriving at the event, I knew that I had made the right choice between my education and my passion for books, because not only were the free books stacked high, but the room was packed with people each with their own unique take on the publishing world- editors, bloggers, authors- people who I was really excited to talk to and hear their experiences and get some advice.

It was probably one of the most daunting things I’ve ever done as a Spinebreakers - by definition we are readers, which is an activity that calls for quiet and aloneness and the kind of imagination that thrives in that environment more than any other- but it was gratifying to see that the authors were just as true to their sixteen-year-old bookworm selves as I was and acknowledged the paradox of the modern author’s duties. (Not that any of that showed in their amazing readings!)

Equally gratifying was the real interest people took in Spinebreakers and what we do, and I only hope that I represented us well to this group of amazing people, who, after all, were not just composed of authors, but of bloggers too. It was incredibly humbling but also inspiring to see all these people who do what we do at Spinebreakers but to a whole other level, and who do it so well (as you can probably tell from the fact that I’ve written up my report the very next morning without going on iplayer once!)

If you’re anything like me, you probably want to hear all about the books, but I thinkthat whatI took away from last night was the knowledge that I can allow myself to meet the authors- it is not a sacrilege and it could in fact enrich the whole experience (even now I am itching to reread Anatomy of a Disappearance after hearing it in Hisham Matar’s own voice). So I’m going to compromise and tell you a little bit about the books (which you must read, all of them!), and a little bit about the authors:

 

Wild Abandon, Joe Dunthorne

If you ever wanted to know what it’s like to grow up in a modern commune, it sounds like (I haven’t read it yet- even the Penguin editors are waiting anxiously for their proofs to arrive) Wild Abandon will be the perfect book for you, and if you didn’t- you will now just to hear Joe Dunthorne’s comic take on it. The man himself? Two words: Funny. Shorts. (Get yourself down to one of his poetry readings now).

Landfall, Helen Gordon<

Add a Comment

Oh, how I wanted to love Girl in Translation, the semi-autobiographical first novel by the entirely graceful-seeming Jean Kwok.  Girl is an assimilation novel, a tale of a young immigrant.  Kimberly Chang is eleven when she arrives to New York from Hong Kong with her mother.  She lives in an abominable apartment, helps her mother after school in a Chinatown sweatshop, and relies on her native intelligence not just to get through, but to be selected as a full-scholarship student at an elite private school.  Even her best friend, Annette, does not guess the full extent of Kimberly's poverty.  The boy who seems to love her can't imagine it.  And Kimberly and her mother get no help at all from Aunt Paula, to whom they owe their come-to-America debt.

Kwok herself was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to New York.  She, too, worked in a sweatshop.  She went to Harvard and then to Columbia, and certainly she knows the world of which she writes.  Though published as an adult novel, this book is an adolescent's story told with simple, straightforward prose, within an unyielding chronological structure.  This happened next is the operative framework of the story.  The unadorned language sounds, consistently, like this:  "I'd never had alcohol before.  I took a swig.  The taste was bitter and made my eyes water, but I managed not to show my distaste.  After my initial swallow, I sipped only a little from the bottle.  Matt drank as if he did it all the time."

A few weeks ago, after finishing a reading at Rutgers, one student noted that I was swaying the whole time I read.  It was if you were dancing, she said, and I realized, again, just how important music is to me—in what I write but also, unfortunately, in what I read.  I have to learn to get past that, to take pleasure in stories that are simply put, simply arranged.  I felt, reading Girl, that I would very much like to know Jean Kwok, for a whole spirit pervades her pages.  I felt impatient, though, about the story's voice, about the looseness of tension, about the plain-ness of effect.

Display Comments Add a Comment