Episode 45: Jean Kwok, Author of The Leftover Woman

The novel begins with the mystery of Sylvie Lee's disappearance after she visits her dying grandmother in the Netherlands. Sylvie, who was raised in the Netherlands for the first nine years of her life before joining her family in America, leads a life that appears successful but is filled with hidden secrets. Her younger sister, Amy, travels to the Netherlands to search for her, uncovering family secrets, racial tensions, and the complexities of immigrant life. The story is told through multiple perspectives, including those of Amy, their mother, and Sylvie herself, revealing the deep emotional bonds and struggles within the Lee family.

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn, Kimberly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day and Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. She disguises the more difficult truths of her life, including her poverty and her secret love for a factory boy. Through Kimberly's story, Jean Kwok exposes the lives of countless immigrants caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires. The novel dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood. It is a classic American immigrant novel, a story of hardship, triumph, heartbreak, and love, and all that gets lost in translation.