Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok is a novel during the Immigration Era through a chinese-american girl's point of view. Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn. In Hong Kong, she was the smartest and most adored student in her class, however, when she arrived at her new school she became the dumbest and the social outcast of the class. Her teacher mocks her and on top pf that she begins living a secret double life. Trying to be exceptional schoolgirl during the day and a Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Kimberly has to learn how to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between her two identities.
The setting of Girl in Translation takes place in the late nineteen hundreds. I think that the setting thios bbok takes place in is very significant to the story. If it weren't for the time period I think that things would have gone better for Kimberly. Her life at school might have been easier and she wouldn't have had to balance out her double life at the factory. She could have focused more on her swchool work and not her work at the Chinatown sweatshop.
Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.
