A funny, sometimes brutally honest, account of one Chinese immigrant’s path from the tenements of Hong Kong to the halls of Harvard. What Mar captures most vividly is the difficult position occupied by many first-generation teenaged immigrants who are attempting to forge new identities as American kids while constantly being expected to serve as a cultural bridge for their more slowly integrating older relatives. She instinctively realizes that lying is the best response to such conditions, so she lies about her parents’ education, the restaurant where she works, and her parents’ occasionally socially awkward behavior. Her new identity as an American is constantly under threat of exposure by her inability to tell the same lie consistently to her several groups of acquaintances, and more than once she is nearly unmasked. In one particularly vivid episode, her entire fragile self-image is shattered when the word “seedy” is used to describe the restaurant where she works. She has sneaked a look at her recommendation to a special summer program of study at Cornell, and found that the psychiatrist who interviewed her during the application process was much more intrigued by her class status than by her intelligence. Much of her struggle consists in convincing her parents to allow her to do the many everyday activities taken for granted by the average American adolescent, but which seem incomprehensible within traditional Chinese culture—activities ranging from taking German in high school to spending time alone with her non-Chinese boyfriend. While much of her story focuses on her desperate attempt to fit in as a teenager, Mar simultaneously details her effort to rebuild a bridge between her new American identity and her Chinese past. Millions of Americans from diverse cultural backgrounds will find reflections of their own stories in this memoir; many more will find a deeper understanding of the complex relationships upon which our culture is founded.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-018293-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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