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Title: Paper Daughter : A Memoir by M. Elaine Mar ISBN: 0-06-093052-7 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 25 July, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.97 (34 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Lonely daughter, sad heart
Comment: From the first page, this moving memoir captures the essence of the transplanted life of a jook-kok, a Chinese-American child born in the old country. Born in Hong Kong, Elaine (her "American" name) immigrates to the United States when she is five years old. All her early childhood memories, the safety of a poor but well-ordered life are based on the identity and acceptance of her Hong Kong relatives.
In America, Elaine's nuclear family lives with her father's sister and her family in Denver, Colorado. Most of this extended family works long, ardous hours in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, preparing "Chinese" food and washing dishes. With the adults engaged in economic survival, Elaine and her young cousin, San, spend many hours supervised by Elaine's non-English speaking mother.
The most painful hours of Elaine's life are spent in school. She enters first grade with few language skills, unable to express herself adequately. Unable, as well, to defend herself against the taunts of the children, who call her "chink" and "slant-eyes". Gradually, as her command of language improves, as well as comprehension of American social nuances, Elaine begins to blend in with her classmates. With the longing of a child's heart, she is thrust daily into the fractured world of Chinese vs American. In spite of the painful solitude Elaine endures, she retains a strong sense of self, blindly reaching to make her life tolerable. Her mother will never comprehend the daughter's suffering, she has her own pain, and there are no Chinese words for what the child is experiencing.
This is a heartbreaking story of culture shock and self-survival. Elaine's acceptance in America depends upon her ability to adapt, to read the signs of her environment. Ultimately, her life is split in half, between Chinese and American. She makes difficult choices, at the cost of her Chinese heart. She has written this memoir to reclaim that heart, and to tell her family she has not forgotten. But they cannot read English words and she is forever outside the embrace of her two cultures. In the last sentence, M. Elaine Mar tells us, "Like my grandfather, I'd immigrated, with no way to send for my family."
Rating: 5
Summary: Paper Daughter is a beautiful and nuanced book about family.
Comment: Paper Daughter is a rich memoir of cultures crossing, as many reviewers have noted. It is also a valuable addition to the literature of class in America. But I find it has stayed with me most of all as a story about family, and especially about the terrible love that connects so many of us with our parents.
Mar's rendering of her early childhood in Hong Kong is beautiful, capturing the satisfaction of a child who feels safe, known, and well-cared-for; she describes her family's meager resources with care and no rancor, making clear that for her, the world was rich and complete. One of my favorite images in a long time is of little Man Yee arriving at school asleep, snuggled up against her mother's back for the walk there. And if there is one moment of plain peace in this novel, it is when Mar, having completed with her mother the arduous and anxious journey from Hong Kong, is reunited with her father at the airport. Nuzzling against him as heart contracted and released. This was my father, and he remembered me."
What felt to a little girl like an idyll for her family, one room in a crowded walk-up with uncertain plumbing, was of course not really tenable, and her parents were compelled to make the choices they did. And surely even if Mar's American acculturation had not divided her so painfully from her parents, something else would have. Who among us has not, at some time, looked around at her family, no matter how valued, and felt herself a stranger in a strange land? (After a recent reading from Paper Daughter, Elaine Mar told the audience that she believes that when she and her mother speak Chinese, she understands almost 100 percent of what her mother says, but her mother only understands about 70 percent of what Elaine says. Thinking of myself and my own mother, I thought "yep, that's about right," even though both my mother and I are native English speakers.)
Mar's is a classically American story, of upward class mobility and the distance it puts between a young woman and her immigrant parents. But in spite of its honest treatment of an isolation so overpowering it sometimes made her nearly suicidal, Paper Daughter is nevertheless a novel infused with loyalty, love, and humor. Mar's appreciation for detail, and especially for the contours of the heart's many hungers, helps her paint a picture in which every face holds beauty and sorrow.
There is no love more intense than the one that ties us to the parents who raise us, and there is no chasm deeper than the one that opens up between those parents and ourselves. We fight with each other desperately, perhaps just to keep from letting go altogether. In Mar's family, poverty, fear, and displacement added intolerable stress to the mix, as they do for too many families. Her parents feel she can never appreciate their sacrifices, and truly it seems that they can't understand her suffering either. Yet from this impasse Elaine Mar has created a book that honors both.
Rating: 1
Summary: Eh, no big deal
Comment: I read somewhere that the events in a person's life are only interesting to that person. So true in this case. Yeah, yeah, Asian girl picked on my American classmates. Asian girl must learn proper American table manners. blah blah blah. The flowery, overly-detailed descriptions were lame and contrived. It could have been a good story if it wasn't so full of self-pity and a narcissistic attitude. Poor child, auntie won't hug her. Poor dear, she can't date outside her ethnic background. It seems more like the diary of a confused and angry adolescent. Now, Amy Tan, that's an interesting writer!
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Title: Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong, Kathryn Uhl ISBN: 0295968265 Publisher: University of Washington Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family by Lisa See ISBN: 0679768521 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers by Elise Trumbull, Carrie, Phd Rothstein-Fish, Patricia M., Phd Greenfield, Blanca Quiroz ISBN: 0805835199 Publisher: Lea Pub. Date: 01 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Girl from Purple Mountain: Love, Honor, War, and One Family's Journey from China to America by May-Lee Chai, Winberg Chai ISBN: 0312302703 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 19 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Honky by Dalton Conley ISBN: 0375727752 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 18 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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