We don’t often pause to think about the courage and sacrifice of ancestors who first came to America to ensure a better life for their children and grandchildren.
Author Jean Kwok shared her life story and offered some words of advice Monday night at Cedar Crest College in Allentown.
She is the author of “Girl in Translation,” which became a New York Times bestseller after it was published in 2010, and “Mambo in Chinatown,” which was just published in June.
While works of fiction, both books reflect Kwok’s own life experiences.
The Chinese-American woman was born in Hong Kong and came to the United States with her parents when she was five years old.
She lived in a condemned building, went to school even though she spoke no English, and – along with the rest of her family – worked in sweatshops for six years, beginning soon after she arrived.
Kwok said first-generation immigrants are incredibly heroic and sacrifice so much for their children.
“People give up their language, their family, their culture, their diplomas. They give up everything to come here so their kids can have a better life and a better chance.
It’s a cliché, but it also is true.”
“My family had a dream of America,” she said. “When we live in the United States, we tend to underestimate what America represents to the rest of the world. It is still a powerful symbol of freedom. And it certainly was for us.
“No matter how our difficult our experiences in the United States were, my parents never regretted coming here. They were always so glad that we had the freedom to choose our own futures here.”
She illustrated her often humorous talk with photos of herself at different stages of her life and even showed a short video of herself dancing the mambo, which was made to help promote “Mambo in Chinatown.”
More than 60 people were in the audience, most of them freshmen in the honors course at Cedar Crest, where they are reading “Girl in Translation.”
Kwok said “Girl in Translation” has been published in 17 countries and is taught in schools all around the world. She said her books have been welcomed throughout Asia, including mainland China.
She said officials in the Chinese government love “Girl in Translation” because they see it is as a criticism of the United States.
“It’s their way to show their people that circumstances in the U.S. are also not ideal, which is true. People expect the streets to be paved with gold and they’re not.”
Fleeing China
Kwok’s parents had fled the Communist revolution in China before she was born and went to Hong Kong, which at that time was a British colony. They lived there for about 10 years.
She said her parents were wealthy before they left China. Explaining why they went, she said: “Not only did they confiscate all of your wealth, but anyone who owned land, had gone to university or had a profession like a teacher or a dentist was pretty much doomed.”
She said if any family had a person like that within three generations, all members of that family were labeled suspicious and sometimes imprisoned or killed.
She said her oldest brother and one of her sisters stayed in China and remained there for 20 years. “They had to endure the Cultural Revolution and many difficult times.”
Kwok said about the only way to get out of China was through bribery, so her family lost most of its money just to reach Hong Kong.
They left Hong Kong long before 1997, when the British turned the port city over to the People’s Republic of China. “They wanted to be well gone before that happened.”
Kwok did not address the massive pro-democracy protests going on in Hong Kong when she spoke, but later said China left Hong Kong with more autonomy than her family had expected it would when they left for the United States.
“They still allow Hong Kong to operate differently from the rest of China,” she said. “We thought they would be fully reintegrated.”
No streets of gold
Her family lost the rest of its money by the time they got to the United States.
“When we arrived in the U.S. we basically had nothing, except for debt.
“We had in our minds the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the women in fur coats, but what we found instead were the slums of Brooklyn. The streets were covered with trash, the windows were broken. The neighborhood was dangerous.
“My family didn’t know if this was normal or not. There was a combination of fear and ignorance. They were afraid to speak up after leaving China, where you could be killed for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. For all we knew, everyone in the United States lived the way we did.”
They found themselves living in an unheated apartment in a condemned building, whose only other tenants were rats and roaches.
“That apartment was overrun with roaches and rats,” said Kwok, who slept on a mattress on the floor.
“What a roach thinks is food is very different than what we think of food. If I was brushing my teeth and forgot to cap the toothpaste, I’d turn around and a roach would be feeding on my toothpaste.”
She said the building they lived in got so cold in winter that the windows were covered in ice on the inside. “We had to put on all the clothing that we had just to stay warm.”
She said what literally saved them was a nearby toy factory had thrown out yards of fluorescent green prickly material used to make stuffed animals. “No one wants a fluorescent green prickly animal. We dragged it home and made clothing and blankets out of it. That material was very heavy but it was warm.”
Sweatshop
Everyone in the family worked in a clothing factory in New York’s Chinatown. Kwok worked there every day after school between the ages of five and 11. “It was a huge, cavernous place, filled with dust. I was not the only child there by any means.
Every able-bodied person in a family needed to work. It was essential to our survival.”
She said they were paid by the piece, not by the hour, which is illegal. “The pacing there is incredible. Nobody dares stop for a moment. If you do, you get fired.”
“Girl in Translation” is the story of a gifted young Chinese immigrant who works in such a sweatshop.
Kwok said some people worked in such sweatshops their entire lives, until they died. “My main goal in life was to escape from the factory.”
The working conditions were barbaric and in violation of health codes, but Kwok said the question of whether such factories should have been abolished is not as simple to answer as it may seem.
“Those factories were a source of livelihood for whole families. If you eliminated them, what would they do?”
She said most of those New York City sweatshops have closed since she was a girl. She said their operators moved back to China, where labor is cheaper.
She said one goal of “Girl in Translation” was to explain that children really do live – and work -- as she did in her first years in this country. She said many people cover up such pasts out of shame – “when I was a kid, I didn’t confide in anyone” --- but many have told her their own lives were like the one she portrays in the book.
After “Girl in Translation” received critical acclaim, instead of her family being shocked that she had written about their past, they were proud “that we had actually survived it.”
Stereotypes
Kwok’s experiences being a stranger in a strange land are not just recent history, she explained after her presentation.
“Despite the stereotype of the successful Asian-American, we and Pacific islanders are the fastest growing poverty group in the United States today.”
“They’re all around us,” she said. “They’re the people who are invisible to us. They’re the ones who drive the taxis, who give you your food at the take-out counter. No one thinks about them. But they have their dreams, they have ambitions.”
“That’s why my second book is about a girl who works in a restaurant at the beginning, as a dishwasher.”
Humor
Her stories got laughs from the audience several times. A few examples:
• “I wore weird clothes, because my mother made all my clothing. I really love my mother, she’s a wonderful woman. She’s a terrible seamstress. One leg would be shorter than the other.”
• “My brothers insisted on cutting my hair, so I had weird hair, bad hair.” Her hair now goes down to her waist. “That is a direct result of that childhood trauma.”
• She never saw anyone who was not Chinese before she arrived in this country. “I thought every human being had dark hair and dark eyes.”
On the first day of school, the teacher put her next to a kid with blue eyes and blonde hair. She thought the boy was both bald and blind.
Language
When she arrived in the United States, said Kwok, she was totally lost in the new culture, an outsider in every way. “I didn’t even speak any English at all when I first got there. And I had teachers who did not care that I did not speak English.”
Once she learned English, she started doing well in school.
Kwok stressed that a person’s intelligence should not be measured by their ability to speak English: “I hope people realize that, if they can just part that current of language, they can find a totally different person on the other side than what it may appear like from the way they can speak English and from the way they look.”
In Chinese, she said, the phrase “that’s just like picking up a dead chicken” means “that’s like getting a free lunch.” And “let’s get a moon tan” means “let’s go out on a romantic date at night.”
Family
“At home, I was a disaster as a Chinese daughter,” she said. “I still am. I hate to clean, I’m terrible at cleaning. And I hate to cook. I burn everything. To this day, I can’t make dumplings. I’m clumsy, so I would drop everything. Everything a Chinese daughter is supposed to be good at I was not good at.”
“All my mother ever wanted in life was a tall, fat daughter who was a lawyer, so I failed miserably. She would try to fatten me up her entire life.”
She said her parents were thrilled when she got accepted at Harvard University, not because she would be attending an excellent school, but because they would not need to find a husband for her.
She said to this day, members of her family feel sorry for her husband because he married her. “He does have to cook a lot and clean everything.”
She said her family did not have high expectations for her. “When I came home with a white guy, they were not extremely thrilled. But they were happy somebody was willing to marry me.”
She now lives in the Netherlands with her Dutch husband and their two sons, ages eight and 10. She said her next book will be about a woman who moves to Amsterdam to start a new life.
Ballroom dancer
Kwok stressed she once was a ballroom dancer, not a barroom dancer. “I was not a stripper in case, you are wondering,” she told her audience.
“Mambo in Chinatown” is the story of a young woman torn between her duty to her family in Chinatown and her love of ballroom dancing.
After graduating from Harvard, Kwok worked for three years as a professional ballroom dancer at Fred Astaire Studios in New York City – even though she described herself as clumsy.
“For someone like me, it was really a revelation to become a dancer and to learn to be graceful.” She said she won top professional female dancer in a national competition.
She eventually gave up ballroom dancing to attend Columbia University, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction “because what I really want to do was write.”
Author vs. writer
“Being a successful writer is kind of like being a star,” she told the students. “That’s fun in a lot of ways. I’ve been all over the world.”
She’s been on TV – including CNN – and even had a Dutch documentary done about her life.
“That’s what the life of a successful author is like,” she said, but added the life of a successful writer is much less glamorous. “It’s like you need to finish a 400-page book. So what do you do? You procrastinate, right?
“Being a writer is kind of like being in school – this unending amount of work, you hand it in and people just give you criticism that’s meant to improve you.
“Is writing fun? Is hard work fun? No. Going out is fun. Parties are fun. Roller coasters are fun. Being with a really cute person of the opposite sex is fun.”
But she added: “I don’t need my work to be fun. I need it to be satisfying. It’s from satisfaction that I can truly be happy.
“Satisfaction comes from doing what I was meant to do, figuring out why I was put on this Earth and working as hard as I can to do it. It might not be fun for the moment, but it’s fun for your life. That sense of deep satisfaction is what’s going to lead you to true happiness.”
She also had this advice for the students: “Don’t be afraid of rejection or failure. For every success, we have a hundred rejections. You have to look at failure as an opportunity. The difference between people who succeed and people who don’t is the people who succeed get up and they try again and again.
“If you look at my website, it looks like my life has been one smooth ride and I’ve won everything I ever applied for. It’s not true. I get rejected all the time. Every year I don’t win a National Book award, I cry a little bit and I die a bit inside. I’ve had so many rejections. Every single successful person I know has had these rejections. You just don’t put them on your website.”