poverty

The New York Times created an economic risk assessment that allows you to calculate your risk of living in poverty in the next five, ten, or fifteen years. Hilariously, it is called “Chasing the American Dream,” and you can try it for yourself by clicking the link.

I’m always a fan of attempting to predict my future, despite (or because of?) the possibility of it adding to my list of anxieties, so let’s go!

Thoughts Before

As a white middle-class graduate school educated individual, I’ve got race, class, and education on my side. But I’m also a single woman who currently relies on fundraising (though I don’t know if that will even be considered). So who knows? I’m definitely curious whether my privilege will win out. Continue reading →

Wow. I did not expect to be gutted by this story of a young Chinese girl and her mother. Having moved to New York expecting a better life, they instead find poverty and hopelessness. More than many books, Kwok did a phenomenal job portraying the shame built into poverty and the way it affects all aspects of life. But at the same time, neither Kimberley nor her mother allow their dire situations to stop them from loving each other and ambitiously pursuing a better future. The sad thing is…Kimberley is extremely gifted. Not all immigrants manage to get perfect SAT scores. So while she found a way out of crushing poverty, most do not have the same privilege.

Then there’s the relationship between Kimberley and Matt. While she struggles to survive the foreign world of private schools, Matt is the one who knows her secret life illegally working at a factory in order to pay for a roach-infested, freezing apartment. Their friendship is slow and sweet, and the turns they take had my heart in knots. I appreciated the realistic feel of their choices and emotions, but I never stopped wanting to shake them and say, “Stop living real life! Just be happy together in a fantasy world! Why won’t this book just give me what I want!?”

But life doesn’t give you want you want, even when scholarships fall in your lap. So while Kimberley is blessed with an enormous advantage, she never quite escapes the fact that life is a struggle.

Book Jacket

When young Kimberley Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to America, they speak no English and own nothing but debt. They arrive in New York hopeful for a better life, but find instead a squalid Brooklyn apartment and backbreaking labor in a Chinatown sweatshop. Unable to accept this as her future, Kim decides to use her “talent for school” to earn a place for herself and her mother in their adopted country. Disguising the most difficult truths of her meager existence, Kim embarks on a double life: an exceptional student by day, and a sweatshop worker by evening. In time, Kim learns to translate not just her language but herself, back and forth between two worlds, between hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.

Release Date: April 2010