Paper Daughter: A Memoir

With gritty, intimate detail, M. Elaine Mar takes us into the back rooms of a Chinese restaurant and the upper floors of an immigrants' social club, places whose addresses say "Denver" but whose interiors speak of another country. By revealing this little-seen, insular pocket of America, Mar debunks the notion of a classless, integrated society. Her portrait of childhood inside a struggling ethnic enclave challenges the stereotype of Asian Americans as a "model minority" highlighting instead the barriers to success that exist in every American ghetto, from Chinatown to Harlem to Appalachia. In her unforgettable journey from enduring racial harassment on the playground to graduating from Harvard, Mar tackles the larger issues of class and ethnicity with wit and intelligence.