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Paper Daughter: A Memoir ReviewPaper Daughter is a rich memoir of cultures crossing, as many reviewers have noted. It is also a valuable addition to the literature of class in America. But I find it has stayed with me most of all as a story about family, and especially about the terrible love that connects so many of us with our parents.
Mar's rendering of her early childhood in Hong Kong is beautiful, capturing the satisfaction of a child who feels safe, known, and well-cared-for; she describes her family's meager resources with care and no rancor, making clear that for her, the world was rich and complete. One of my favorite images in a long time is of little Man Yee arriving at school asleep, snuggled up against her mother's back for the walk there. And if there is one moment of plain peace in this novel, it is when Mar, having completed with her mother the arduous and anxious journey from Hong Kong, is reunited with her father at the airport. Nuzzling against him as heart contracted and released. This was my father, and he remembered me."
What felt to a little girl like an idyll for her family, one room in a crowded walk-up with uncertain plumbing, was of course not really tenable, and her parents were compelled to make the choices they did. And surely even if Mar's American acculturation had not divided her so painfully from her parents, something else would have. Who among us has not, at some time, looked around at her family, no matter how valued, and felt herself a stranger in a strange land? (After a recent reading from Paper Daughter, Elaine Mar told the audience that she believes that when she and her mother speak Chinese, she understands almost 100 percent of what her mother says, but her mother only understands about 70 percent of what Elaine says. Thinking of myself and my own mother, I thought "yep, that's about right," even though both my mother and I are native English speakers.)
Mar's is a classically American story, of upward class mobility and the distance it puts between a young woman and her immigrant parents. But in spite of its honest treatment of an isolation so overpowering it sometimes made her nearly suicidal, Paper Daughter is nevertheless a novel infused with loyalty, love, and humor. Mar's appreciation for detail, and especially for the contours of the heart's many hungers, helps her paint a picture in which every face holds beauty and sorrow.
There is no love more intense than the one that ties us to the parents who raise us, and there is no chasm deeper than the one that opens up between those parents and ourselves. We fight with each other desperately, perhaps just to keep from letting go altogether. In Mar's family, poverty, fear, and displacement added intolerable stress to the mix, as they do for too many families. Her parents feel she can never appreciate their sacrifices, and truly it seems that they can't understand her suffering either. Yet from this impasse Elaine Mar has created a book that honors both.
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