Kimberly Chang has her world turned upside-down when she moves with her mother from their home in Hong Kong to New York. But their new life doesn't quite live up to their expectations - living in a vermin-ridden apartment in Brooklyn, the pair only have a sometimes working oven to keep warm. They have nothing but debt and neither of them speaks a word of English.
While her mother spends her days earning two cents a garment at a sweatshop, intellectually gifted eleven-year-old Kim faces a new and trying challenge: school. Exiled by language, estranged in a new culture and weighed down by staggering poverty, Kim must learn to translate not just her language but who she is as she straddles these two very different worlds.
In this powerful story, Jean Kwok spins a moving tale of hardship and triumph, of heartbreak and love, of all that's said without words and all that gets lost in translation.
So, my mom told me to read this after she finished it (she heard about it through her book club), and I tend to really like the books she does, so I thought it was worth a try. I wont go into too many details (I want to avoid spoilers), it is about a Chinese woman's life, how she was the best student in her school in China, how she moved to America and struggled to learn English; and the results of all her work. While I found this book to be on the sadder side, I would recommend it to anybody. You can tell a beautiful (and true) story like this without a little sadness. I loved it.
