Sorry for the lack of interesting posts. Baseball has been controlling my evenings lately. But I have to admit that I find it easier to read and watch the game than just to watch them. Too tense! I can’t take it. So I read a magazine (I have an ever growing pile) and watch at the same time.
Last night I brought home a book I was thinking of reading. It’s a memoir called Paper Daughter by M. Elaine Mar, who was born in Hong Kong, emigrated at the age of 5, and grew up in the back rooms of a Chinese restaurant in Colorado. It sounded really fascintating, so I started reading. And finished it. Of course I had to stay up until 12:30 to do so and am now paying for it with the yawning. She wrote about her experience being very intelligent but unable to express her intelligence at school in America. In Hong Kong, she had already learned to read, add, subtract and mutliply. But even though she knew the answers here, she couldn’t express them until she learned English. But her classmates were not welcoming. In fact, they sound like they were pretty brutal to her, calling her all sorts of names. And she also writes about race a great deal, since she became a member of a minority upon entering America. Plus there is the conflict of her growing up, becoming willful in a country that allows willfulness in contrast to Hong Kong, where the children are obedient and respectful of their elders. Elaine and her parents grow increasingly apart. She ends up at Harvard and according to the back of the book, lives somewhere here in Cambridge. This is a really fascinating account of childhood, one completely different from my own.