The Immigrant Experience Theme Analysis

As Girl in Translation follows Kim and Ma's journeys, it pays special attention to the ways in which both of them, but particularly Kim, think of and handle their status as Chinese immigrants. For Kim, being an immigrant entails rejecting many of the conventions surrounding how to be properly female and Chinese in order to be successful at school. For Ma, the difficulty and foreignness of life in the U.S. provides the justification for clinging to Chinese customs and language as much as possible. For both women, the experience of being an immigrant is one that's isolating and in Kim's case, makes her feel alone in both her very Chinese life at home and her very American life at school.

For both Kim and Ma, being in the United States means having to learn a new language. The way that Kim experiences language in particular encapsulates some of the difficulties and complexities of being an immigrant. From the start, Kim struggles to come to terms with the fact that while she was a star student in Hong Kong and the top of her class, in the U.S., her inability to understand English means that she receives extremely poor grades (except for in math and physical sciences) for the first few years in school. She also receives poor grades due to her inability to complete certain assignments in light of her poverty, as when she's unable to complete any of Mr. Scoggins's assignments about current events—he tells students to read their parents' newspapers or talk to their parents, two things that Kim knows would be impossible for her. Ma, however, never truly learns English; she remains unable to say much more than "please," "thank you," and "I'm sorry." This is notably due to the fact that she spends most of her time in a factory with other Cantonese-speaking Chinese immigrants. Learning English isn't nearly as pressing of an issue for her as it is for Kim, who seeks to enter the prestigious (and English-speaking) worlds of school and medicine.

Another consequence of not knowing English that's almost more damaging to Kim is the social price she pays for not knowing the slang, social customs, or etiquette rules of her new home. This is exacerbated by the fact that Hong Kong was a British colony, which means that the little English she does know is British English. This results in her asking her teacher for a rubber only a week into school, not understanding that in American English she asked for a condom, not an eraser. She's also completely lost when Annette explains various American slang terms, most notably that being called a know-it-all is an insult, something that goes against everything Kim has ever been taught about the importance of education and knowledge.

Similarly, Kim also discovers that her life doesn't at all fit with the neat vision of immigrant life that her classmates appear to believe. Early on in her friendship with Annette, Kim mentions that she spends her afternoons helping Ma at the factory. When Annette returns to school the next day and informs Kim that according to her father, it's illegal for kids to work in factories, and so Kim must've made up a story, Kim also learns that she has to keep important parts of her life secret. She believes it's impossible for middle-class, white Annette to understand what's it's like for an impoverished Chinese immigrant struggling to pay back crushing debt, so she simply omits these truths from her public-facing life in order to appear more American.

All of this, from the struggles to hide her poverty at school to her struggles to keep her social life secret from Ma, works together to make Kim feel absolutely alone in her world. Notably, Kim isn't able to feel truly at home until she's forced to admit her poverty to Annette and her pregnancy to Ma. In doing so, she finally allows her family and closest friend to see that she is truly caught between cultures and as a result, is finally able to ask for help in reconciling her Chinese identity with her American identity. The fact that she's able to go on to become a doctor, have a seemingly well-adjusted bilingual son, and care for Ma in a fancy house in the epilogue is a testament to the power of openness about her conflicting identities to remedy some of the struggles she experiences as a result.