Date: Friday, May 14, 2010
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: Asian American Writers Workshop
Street: 110-112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor (bet. 6th and 7th Ave)
City/Town: New York, NY
Seen from one angle, Jean Kwok is an archetypal immigrant success story: the youngest child of Chinatown sweatshop laborers, learning English and working hard to put herself through Harvard and Columbia. From another, Kwok is unusual: forgoing the financial stability offered by a career in medicine for the perils of one in literature, supporting herself as a professional ballroom dancer and moving to the Netherlands. Her memoir, Girl in Translation, thus vividly captures the tensions experienced by an immigrant growing up between cultures–the conflicts between Hong Kong and America, practical poverty and intellectual richness, language and miscommunication, and family responsibility and personal desire.
Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong. She has worked as a dishwasher, blind-reader, summer program director, ballroom dancer, media advisor, and ESL teacher, but currently lives in the Netherlands, where she is finally able to write full-time. She can neither drive nor swim.