Work vs. Education Theme Analysis

Immediately upon their arrival in the United States, Chinese immigrants Ma and Kim begin working at Aunt Paula and Uncle Bob's garment factory in Chinatown. There, Ma and Kimberly perform backbreaking labor putting finishing touches on garments and hanging them in garment bags, often staying at the factory until late into the night. As Kim helps Ma at the factory, she quickly becomes aware that the factory offers roles for every member of one's family through every stage of life, while never paying factory employees enough to ever be able to do anything but work at the factory. However, Kim's trajectory shows clearly that education has the power to not just save Kim from a lifetime of factory work, but to save Ma and future family members from the same fate.

As Kim makes friends with Matt, a boy her age who also works on the factory floor with his mother and brother, Ma cautions Kim to not become too close to Matt or any of the other children at the factory. She insists that if Kim does so, there will be nothing to set her apart from them, and she'll therefore spend the rest of her life working in a factory, as Ma expects those other children will. With this, Ma shows that she has a very clear grasp of the way that the factory traps entire families. Though Kim as the adult narrator notes in hindsight that it was technically illegal to pay by the piece instead of by the hour, she explains that Aunt Paula and Uncle Bob aren't the only factory owners to get around this law by simply converting piece payment to a corresponding "hourly rate" to abuse employees and keep them in dire poverty. Because of this payment system, it's imperative that adult employees bring along their children whenever possible to help with the work, as more hands mean it's possible to get through more items. This in turn introduces young children to the factory system and starts them on a lifelong trajectory in which they begin as thread cutters, graduate to sewing, steaming, or finishing, and finally, as elderly people, return to cutting thread—while bringing their own children into the factory system as soon as they're old enough.

Ma, Kim, and even Aunt Paula all understand that the only way to truly break this cycle is for a child to receive a quality education, specifically through scholarships or grants given that factory pay is nowhere near enough to fund an education at a New York City private school. Fortunately for Kim, she has a natural aptitude for academics, specifically science and math, which allows her to secure a full-ride scholarship to the prestigious Harrison Prep high school and later, to Yale. However, even as Kim understands that working hard in school is her ticket out of dire poverty and factory life, she struggles to complete her schoolwork or to truly devote herself to academics exactly because Ma continues to require her help at the factory. Because of this, Kim's ability to quickly understand material without truly studying becomes her only saving grace. She's able to perform well in school while only doing homework on the subway to and from the factory and fortunately doesn't need to dedicate her afternoons to studying in order to achieve high marks, as Annette and her other classmates seem to do.

In the struggle between work and education, Matt acts as a foil for Kim. He begins skipping school early in high school to take a second job delivering Italian food, and he drops out for good later to devote himself to his jobs. Notably, however, he also doesn't see his laborious and often illegal jobs as a bad thing: he sees them as stepping stones to find better work eventually, but he has no interest in using education to find other work. This conflict comes to a head when Matt and Kim's romance finally develops fully when Kim is a senior. They begin a relationship and even discuss getting married and starting a family, though their ideas of what their future should look like differ dramatically. Kim wants to follow her academic path and move to New Haven so she can study to become a doctor and go on to support their family. Matt, on the other hand, wants to remain in Chinatown and vehemently rejects Kim's desire to be the primary breadwinner. When Kim discovers she's pregnant with Matt's child, she keeps her pregnancy a secret from him, breaks off their relationship, and implies she decided to have an abortion so she wouldn't "trap" Matt in a life he didn't get to fully choose—she insists she couldn't give up her dreams of attending Yale, and she couldn't bear the thought of condemning herself and her child to a lifetime of factory work in Chinatown. However, in the epilogue, Kim reveals that she did indeed choose to continue her pregnancy, as well as become a doctor. She suggests that her son Jason's life in a big house, with access to good schools, after-school sports, and the luxuries she never had as a child far surpasses the life she believes that Matt's daughter will lead, as she believes the five-year-old girl will grow up working in the bridal shop where Vivian works. In this way, the novel shows clearly that while choosing education absolutely entails making sacrifices, it is truly the only way to escape the cycle of poverty that the illegal factory work guarantees.