Sign Up for DUSON Spring Book Club

Sign Up for DUSON Spring Book Club

bookRegister by January 31 for the DUSON Spring Book Club for Faculty and Staff, presented by the Institute for Educational Excellence and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Copies will be distributed the week of February 10, and the discussion group will take place on Tuesday, March 17, from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm in Pearson 1103.

This semester's book is Jean Kwok's Girl in Translation, an inspiring debut novel about a young immigrant in America, a smart girl who, living a double life between school and sweatshop, understands that her family’s future is in her hands.

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders, her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself, back and forth, between the worlds she straddles.
 
Through Kimberly’s story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and a world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant—a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.

Sign up now by clicking here.

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