Jean Kwok

From the bestselling author of Girl in Translation, a novel about a young woman torn between her family duties and her secret escapes into a more Western world. The elder daughter of a ballerina and a noodle-maker, immigrants from Beijing, Charlie Wong grew up in Manhattan's Chinatown. Although she is an ABC (American-born Chinese), at twenty-two she has hardly left that neighbourhood, her entire world fitting within its familiar boundaries. She still lives in the only apartment she has ever known, a tiny one-bedroom she shares with her father and sister, and works as a dishwasher at the local noodle shop. When Charlie somehow lands a job as a receptionist at a ballroom dance studio uptown, her expectations are upended. Far from the streets of Chinatown, she is introduced to an entirely new world, one that encourages her to imagine a bigger life than what she has known. Keeping it an elaborate secret from her father, she spends more and more time at the dance studio, and awkward Charlie's natural talents – and dreams – begin to emerge. But as a local witch has told her, 'What one sister gains, shall the other lose,' and soon enough, Charlie's blossoming coincides with the appearance of chronic illness in her younger sister. Charlie is forced to try to reconcile her two selves and her two worlds – Eastern and Western, old and new – to rescue her sister without sacrificing her newfound confidence and identity.