"From Hong Kong to Harvard" proclaims the publicity cover letter accompanying M. Elaine Mar's first book. As a memoir, it is but one drop in the growing flood of reminiscences engulfing publishing houses, and Mar's publisher saw fit to highlight the author's nicely alliterative path from the squalor of an Asian metropolis to the ivied halls of academia. But the phrase oversimplifies Mar's tale.
"Paper Daughter" is a thoughtful and at times gracefully lyrical retracing of Mar's life, one not atypical of her generation. Opening with the crowded chaos of Hong Kong, where her family of three shares a hallway kitchen and bathroom with nine other people, the memoir focuses on her adolescence in suburban America, as an Asian girl trying to make sense of both racial epithets and teenage hormones.
Mar resists telling her story with the benefit of cloying hindsight; instead, her voice has a refreshing novelistic immediacy. Schoolyard hierarchies and American customs are just some of the knotty mysteries the young narrator must unravel, and she does so with a gumption steadfastly discouraged in Confucian society, but which proves useful to survival in a strange new land.