Girl in Translation is the story of a young, impoverished immigrant from Hong Kong. I may be wrong, but it reads as if it were less a novel than a barely fictionalized autobiography (Jean Kwok, the author, made her way from an unheated tenement to Harvard; Kimberley Chang, the central figure, escaped to Yale.) Mutatis mutandis, and all that. It's a familiar kind of work: a bildungsroman, of course, but also an immigrant novel, a coming-of-age adventure, and thanks to an inartistic tacked-on ending, an H. Alger rags-to-riches saga. Sometimes I felt that I was reading a century-later re-imagining of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, things Irish replaced with things Chinese — except that there is not a single tree in this novel's bleak landscape, not even a symbolic one. Plus ca change, plus de meme chose.
While it's not original or innovative, nor written with any particular flair, Girl in Translation is nevertheless valuable for the world it opens up to us. Plus it's on the whole uplifting, even if there are some unfortunate moments in which "triumphant" shades over into "triumphalist."
There's not much to admire about the Brooklyn of this novel; it's an unpleasant place. Manhattan's Chinatown, where much of the action takes place, is no better.
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