A Paper Daughter Talks

In Paper Daughter: A Memoir, M. Elaine Mar MPP 1996 reveals her tension and uncertainty as she sought balance growing up in two different worlds: at home with her Chinese family and at school with her American peers. At home, Mar was expected to adhere to the values her parents brought from Hong Kong. Her mother, for instance, never let her drink water when she ate because she didn’t want her to “wash down food like that,” says Mar. “You needed to be grateful for that food.” At junior high in the 1980s, she saved her lunch money for clothes, knowing her mother would never let her have money to buy the Izod shirts the other kids wore.

Mar had intended to write a very different book, one based on an article she had written for Harvard magazine (“Blue Collar, Crimson Blazer,” November/December 1995) about working-class students and their experiences at Harvard. Once she and her agent started to flesh out ideas for the book, however, they needed to make a decision: Would the book be autobiographical or based on interviews with other working-class students? “The parts about me were getting in the way,” says Mar. “I had lived with myself my whole life and was happier writing this book in a more literary way.” Mar decided to write a memoir about her experiences. But the aim of Paper Daughter was the same: to talk about class in this country.

Paper Daughter started off as the title of one chapter about her mother, then Mar realized that the words “paper daughter”
resonated on so many different levels. Her mother was Mar’s grandfather’s “paper daughter” because Mar’s mother only really knew her father through the letters they exchanged after he had moved to the United States. Mar, who considers herself a “working-class paper daughter to Harvard,” also realized that she is tied to this world by so many different pieces of paper: a high school diploma, her British passport, and her American Social Security card.

Much of this book focuses on her identity: from when she arrived in the United States and was forced to take on the American name of Elaine, to her role as a daughter and her journey toward self-discovery. Looking back, she remembers the first time one of her poems was published in her high school’s literary magazine. The author was listed as Elaine Mar. “I was troubled by that,” says Mar. “My teacher thought it was very arrogant of me to want it to run as M. Elaine Mar, but I felt the name Elaine Mar was very naked. It hadn’t come from anywhere. The initial is everything I brought into it. My name was always written differently: on my Social Security card, on my British passport. But they’re all me. I couldn’t claim just my Chinese name, or just Elaine without the initial. A piece of me was missing.”

One critic questioned how someone so young could have enough distance in her life to write a memoir. But Mar, in
her early 30s, says, “If I wrote about these events 20 years from now, it might be different; it might not.” She feels that she’s had enough distance from the period of her life that she wrote about — from age 6 to 22.

Distance was certainly on her mind as she wrote Paper Daughter. “There isn’t a lot of distance between the reader and the character because I wanted to bring the reader into my experiences. Most people who read literary-type books don’t know about this kind of experience. My intention was to write a story for those who didn’t grow up the way I did.”

She admits that it’s “revealing” that this book has been marketed toward the Asian reading market. “It’s frustrating because I’ve written about an experience that is universal to others,” says Mar. “I wrote about being embarrassed about my emerging sexuality, about feeling out of place….I wanted to bring the reader into my experiences, and most people who read literary-type books don’t get to see what it’s like to grow up in an ethnic enclave. People eat in Chinatown, and they go there to buy cheap fabrics, but they don’t understand that people actually live there.

“Chinatown, Harlem, the South Side of Chicago: they’re ethnic ghettos in the old sense of the word ghetto,” says Mar, who doesn’t think the United States is the “melting pot” many others believe it is. “Does that mean that eventually everyone can attain economic status and still hold on to a vestige of their old culture? Or does that mean that they’re able to make an ethnic dish for Thanksgiving? It’s a good thing to have a memory of where you came from. The question is whether you have a choice to remember that or you don’t,” says Mar.

Before coming to the Kennedy School, she worked as a youth caseworker, a career she felt constrained by. “I’m not saying I wasn’t doing any good. If you manage to talk to a suicidal child, and he or she finishes the eighth grade, you’re definitely making a difference to that individual. But I wanted to do more, on a bigger scale, so I decided to pursue an MPP,” she says.

After graduating, she worked in Dorchester, Massachusetts, with a family strengthening program but realized that she’s “not great with the political process things, like crunching numbers.” Again, she struggled. “I’m not great at being a cog in the machine, so I decided that writing is another way to make change that was more appealing to me. It drew on talents I’m better at. But I haven’t given up. It’s become a force of habit to care about the public sector.”

Now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mar has received great professional feedback about her narrative voice since Paper Daughter was published, so she’s leaning towards fiction these days. “Sometimes, in fiction, you can get your point across better. You can take liberties, and you’re able to make the message part of the background, instead of the
foreground. That communicates better to people. They can spend more time thinking about the message, instead of being told,” says Mar.

—Aine Cryts