Chinese American Identity

The narrator immigrated to the United States from China at age five, and throughout Part I of the novel, she has a contentious relationship with her Chinese American identity. To begin with, she feels neither fully American nor fully Chinese. Visits to China leave her embarrassed and frustrated about her difficulties with a language that, for most of her life, she has only spoken in her parents' house. She is unable to read or write it, hindering her ability to get around when visiting China, and even when she speaks to Chinese relatives, her language is different because it is essentially frozen in the year her parents emigrated. To a lesser but nevertheless significant degree, she does not use English exactly the way a native speaker does. He points out that she uses idioms like "don't judge a book by its cover" differently (54). This...