Chinese & Chinese Americans - Biography, Rocky Mountain States - Regional Biography, Peoples & Cultures - Women's Biography
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Overview
When she was five years old, M. Elaine Mar and 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. From surviving racist harassment in the schoolyard to trying to flip her straight hair like Farrah Fawcett, from hiding her parents' heritage to 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.Synopsis
When she was five years old, M. Elaine Mar and her mother emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver, Colorado, to join her father. There she worked with her family in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, while living in the basement of her aunt's house. Quickly mastering the english, she soon began to excel at school, but before long she found herself caught between two increasingly disparate worlds, the Chinese tradition and the independence of the America in which she lived.She fell in love with a red-haired boy who leads her away from the family, blocking out her family's vision of an arranged marriage in Hong Kong; eventually, alone she arrived in Harvard and a new future.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
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 na ve 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.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
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.Kirkus Reviews
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 bridgebetween 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.Book Details
Published
June 1, 2000
Publisher
ISIS Large Print Books
Pages
447
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780753157893