Paper Daughter: A Memoir

Born in Hong Kong to parents who immigrated there from the Toishan region of mainland China, Elaine Mar came to America in 1972, when she was not quite 6. Colorado was quite a shock to a girl who had previously shared a five-room apartment with four other families. "She must be rich," Man Yee (her Chinese name) thought, emerging from the basement room where she and her parents slept to explore her Aunt Becky's three-bedroom house in a working-class Denver neighborhood. Not so: her aunt, father, and other relatives worked in the kitchen of a restaurant owned by others, and Mar's pungent memoir of her odyssey from poor immigrant to Harvard undergraduate shatters stereotypes about Asians as the "model minority." She was a smart girl and a good student who soon preferred the American name Elaine and "only spoke Chinese when absolutely necessary," but she found it hard to decipher the "cultural cues" on which social success in school depended. Honestly chronicling conflicts with her parents, whose horizons and expectations seemed unbearably limited, Mar outlines her youthful rebellion and their response with mature understanding. Her observation of American life is as clear-eyed and unsentimental as her self-portrait of a girl adrift between two cultures. --Wendy Smith