Paper Daughter: A Memoir [Hardcover]

M. Elaine Mar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1999

M. Elaine Mar and her mother emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver to join her father when she was five. Working with her family in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and living in the basement of her aunt's house, she mastered English and excelled in school. But as her home and school life - Chinese tradition and American independence - became two increasingly disparate worlds, Mar tried desperately to navigate between them.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

From 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 292 pages
• Publisher: Harperflamingo; 1st edition (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060182938
• ISBN-13: 978-0060182939
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,138,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Paper Daughter is a beautiful and nuanced book about family., October 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Paper Daughter: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Paper Daughter, January 3, 2001

By 

Rina (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Paper Daughter: A Memoir (Paperback)

When I first started this book, it was incredibly captivating, because there were experiences Elaine had to which I can relate -the familial obligation, the confusion, the language barriers, the financial problems, etc. I was thrilled that an Asian American woman author chose to write about a deeply personal experience.

As I neared the end of the book, I started getting confused. Mar seemed to be making a chronological list of things that have happened to her, but she offers very little insight into her particular experiences. I frequently asked myself, "What did she learn from this?" I felt as if Mar was spiraling downward, instead of trying to get something positive out of the pain and abuse of her childhood. It seems like she could have learned so much from her negative experience; instead, she kept running and running.

In addition, I was confused about several other things, like the missing chunk of time between her elementary and high school years. Too little happened during that time for her to eloborate on? And what about the conclusion? Her story seemed to end abruptly, and she was running away again.

Mar's childhood seems to have endless potential to provide her with the oppportunity to grow, but we don't anything learn about this. That was what stuck out the most, that she didn't seem to grow. I was especially curious to learn about her life in college - though she didn't write about that - because she was away from home and there were probably myriad revelations and self-discoveries.

If she writes another book, I would definitely read it, because although I didn't enjoy Paper Daughter a lot, I think that Mar is heading in the right direction in writing about her experiences as an Asian American. I think all she needs is a little push.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lonely daughter, sad heart, March 7, 2001

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Paper Daughter: A Memoir (Paperback)

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."