From a Chinatown sweatshop to a degree at Harvard, Jean Kwok has lived the American dream. She discusses child labour, teenage love and the power of education with Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Aged five, Jean Kwok wasn’t concerned with Barbie-dolls or dresses. As the youngest of seven siblings who had emigrated from Hong Kong with her parents, Kwok spent her after-school evenings in a New York Chinatown sweatshop, helping her family earn the pittance that sustained them. Today, that life couldn’t be further away.

Kwok, now 42, lives in Holland with her clinical psychologist husband and two children, and has just published her first novel, a fictional account of her experiences as a first-generation immigrant. In Girl in Translation, the struggles of plucky 11-year-old heroine Kimberly Chang mirror the life of her creator. Like Kwok, Kimberly earns two cents a garment in a sweatshop and, like Kwok, her extraordinary intellect wins her both a scholarship to a prestigious high-school and acceptance into an Ivy League college. (Kimberly
goes to Yale, while Kwok studied literature at Harvard.)

On the phone, Kwok is bright, engaging, and positive, punctuating even the hardest parts of our conversation with cascades of giggles. In Girl in Translation Kimberly grows up in grinding poverty, living in an unheated, cockroach-infested apartment throughout New York’s long, bitter winters. These painful passages are extracted straight from reality. For six years the Kwok family’s Brooklyn home was heated from a single oven, while the ceiling would crumble while they slept. “When I look back I can’t believe we lived under those conditions for so long,” she says. “I would never, ever want to do it again.”

Kwok’s parents lost everything in their move to America, a pattern replicated by immigrants the world over. “They wanted to give us opportunities and freedom, knowing that they would sacrifice themselves in the process,’ she recalls. The novel is an acknowledgement of this sacrifice. In the book, Kimberly’s mother (unlike Kwok, the character grows up in a single parent household) is an accomplished musician, forced to put down her violin for the daily factory grind. In a memorable moment the pair visit a music shop, where Kimberly has only one childish wish: to have her mother play the piano in order to show that they were ‘more than what we seemed at the factory.”

This scene encapsulates the novel’s essence. Kwok is acutely aware that her mother, who speaks no English, comes across as uneducated and inarticulate, whereas in Chinese she is “eloquent, and very special”. Language becomes more than just a matter of communication. Spoken English in the book often appears confusing and jumbled to her. Her thoughts, on the other hand, are fluent and expressive, with a sugared taste for the beauty of Cantonese rhythms. A proposed moonlight stroll is described as “go[ing] out and get[ting] a moon tan”, while a vicious and untrustworthy person has a “wolf’s heart and a dog’s lungs”.

For Kwok, writing the novel – a ten-year process – has proved unexpectedly cathartic for two reasons. Kimberley is based half on herself, and half on her brother Kwan, a highly gifted physicist, who was 11 when he came to the US and had an exceptional mind. (Kwan went to MIT aged 16, and earned his PhD with the highest doctoral examination scores ever received in MIT’s history). Tragically, he died last November in a plane crash. It is, Kwok says simply, “the worst thing that has ever happened to me”.

But for Kwok the novel has helped to keep his memory alive. Part of the reason may be because it has opened up a past that has never been discussed with family or friends: Kwok’s decision to write fiction, rather than memoir, was deliberate. But the attention the story has received in the media and the literary world (it has already sold foreign rights in 12 languages) has struck home. “People say: is this possible? Can people live like that in America?”, she says. “Actually they do, and we did.”

While Kwok grew up in the 1970s and 80s – the novel is set in an unspecified era to make the message universal – the topic of poverty in developed countries still has relevance today. Kwok is aware of the sour end of the American dream, where 39 million people live below the poverty line, and immigrants are often exploited or underpaid. As such Kwok believes in “paying more for clothing” to know that it has been produced ethically.

Girl in Translation is ultimately a Chinese Cinderella story, and at times it does descend into cliché. But unlike the usual hackneyed rags to riches fairytale, it’s not beauty and a prince that save Kimberley: its brains, hard work, and a deep faith in the power of education. While Kwok has a deft hand at portraying the angst of teens, it’s not a man who saves her protagonist. “She is going to save herself.”

Girl in Translation is published by Riverhead