Book excerpt: When she was five years old, M. Elaine Mar and her mother emigrated from Hong Kong to Denver, Colorado, to join her father. There she worked with her family in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, while living in the basement of her aunt's house. Quickly mastering the english, she soon began to excel at school, but before long she found herself caught between two increasingly disparate worlds, the Chinese tradition and the independence of the America in which she lived. She fell in love with a red-haired boy who leads her away from the family, blocking out her family's vision of an arranged marriage in Hong Kong; eventually, alone she arrived in Harvard and a new future.