An immigrant novel revisited: Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation Brygida Gasztold  ORCID: 0000-0003-1985-1713 (Koszalin University of Technology, Poland) e-mail: bgasztold@gmail.com Keywords: immigrant narrative genre, adaptation, Jewish-American literature, Chinese-Ameri- can literature, immigrant women Abstract: The article explores the genre of immigrant narrative, comparing two early-twentieth- century novels written by the Jewish-American writers Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska with a contemporary novel penned by the Chinese-American author Jean Kwok. Taking adaptation the- ory (Sanders 2006 and Hutcheon 2006) as a starting point, I examine how Kwok’s novel adapts, revises, and reimagines a familiar pattern across time and cultures in order to make it representa- tive of Chinese Americans. The analysis draws attention to experiences of Chinese immigrant women, their class membership and socio-economic status. Jean Kwok’s debut novel Girl in Translation (2010) 1 offers an iteration of the famil- iar genre of the immigrant novel, according to which immigrants come to America, ex- perience economic exploitation and the seamy side of urban life, but their hard work and education finally lead them to success in the form of economic and individual stability. Kwok’s novel retells and extends a familiar tale, as an 11-year-old girl, Kimberly Chang, leaves Hong Kong before the transfer to the Chinese and, together with her mother, tries to survive on the paltry wages of a Chinatown sweatshop in Brooklyn. After the initial hardships associated with mastering the English language and American mores, the girl excels at school, earns a scholarship to a prestigious private school, goes to Yale on a full scholarship, and then on to Harvard Medical School. As success comes at a price, her educational and professional accomplishments are not exactly paralleled by happiness in the private sphere, yet the ending implies a promise of such. The aim of my paper is to analyze Kwok’s novel in the light of the immigrant narratives that had preceded it, namely the early-twentieth-century novels written by Jewish- - American writers, such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925). González notices “a notable historical parallelism between the Jewish and Chinese people, and between the Jewish and Chinese diasporas. In the United 1 Kwok is an author of Mambo in Chinatown (2014) and Searching for Silvie Lee (2019), in which she further explores her American immigrant experience. SCRIPTA JUDAICA CRACOVIENSIA Vol. 19 (2021) pp. 79–92 https://doi.org/10.4467/20843925SJ.21.006.16415 www.ejournals.eu/Scripta-Judaica-Cracoviensia