The Statue of Liberty, bright lights, and skyscrapers--these are quintessential landmarks of New York City. This is what 11-year-old ah-Kim (aka Kimberly) Chang is looking forward to when she and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to the U.S. Instead, she finds herself living in a broken down area of Brooklyn in a small apartment with no heat in the freezing winters and no air to cool them from the sweltering heat. The apartment also has many nightly visitors, such as giant roaches and rats. Despite her harsh living conditions, Kimberly has to balance school, which luckily, she has a great talent for, and helping her mother at the sweatshop in Chinatown. Faced with endless struggles, Kimberly continues to shape her own destiny and fights to create a better life for her and her mother.
Kwok’s debut coming-of-age novel about the life of a Chinese-American immigrant girl from adolescence to adulthood is engaging, thought-provoking, and heartwarming; it provides a glimpse into the lives and repressed hardships many immigrants faced, while expressing the universal struggle of holding onto your own identity while striving to fit in.
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