★★★★☆ Kelly Yang is not a bicycle

Front Desk

Kelly Yang

Front Desk describes the experiences of 10-year-old Chinese immigrant Mia Tang helping to run a small motel in California. If this sounds implausible, I'm here to inform you that Front Desk is largely autobiographical. As Kelly Yang writes in her Author's Note

Many of the events in Front Desk are based on reality. Growing up, I helped my parents manage several motels in California from when I was eight years old to when I was twelve years old.

She goes on to tell us that many of the specific events in the novel really happened to her as a girl. Her About the Author bio reads as follows

Kelly Yang’s family immigrated from China when she was a young girl, and she grew up in California, in circumstances very similar to those of Mia Tang. She eventually left the motels and went to college at the age of thirteen, and is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School. She was one of the youngest women to graduate from Harvard Law School. Upon graduation, she gave up law to pursue her dream of writing and teaching kids writing. She is the founder of The Kelly Yang Project, a leading writing and debating program for children in Asia and the United States. She is also a columnist for the South China Morning Post and has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. Kelly is the mother of three children and splits her time between Hong Kong and San Francisco.

Impressive CV!

The story is mostly about Mia's difficulties and the difficulties of her family. They struggle with extreme poverty and with mistreatment as immigrants, not to mention the greed of the motel's owner. Prejudice is an ugly presence through much of the book.

There was one other prominent theme throughout the book: the power of the written word. Because her family moved to the USA when she was ten years old, Mia's native language is Chinese, and English is difficult for her. (The bicycle remark in my review title relates to that, but I won't spoil it.) She struggles to write well. When she succeeds, she uses her writing to change her life and those of others around her.

This reminded me of my own experience as a professor. In my classes there were native English speakers (mostly Americans) and non-native speakers (including many Chinese students). As a prof, I naturally read a lot of their writing. It always struck me that the non-native speakers had a hidden advantage. Good writing is hard work. A good writer makes every word count. Chinese students writing English have no choice. They simply could not write English without thinking about every word. American students, on the other hand, could write English easily, without much thought. As a result, the Chinese students were better writers. It is true that their writing occasionally suffered from minor idiomatic infelicities that made it clear the text was not written by a native English speaker, but in clearly and creatively expressing thoughts the Chinese students did better than all but exceptional American students.

If this was a blessing, it was one in disguise. Indeed, it is a blessing the Chinese students would have preferred to do without. But when I read that Kelly Yang started college at thirteen and graduated Harvard Law, I can't help but think of it.

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