A Lifetime of Reading Taught Min Jin Lee How to Write About Her Immigrant World

In “Strawberry Girl,” one of Lenski’s most famous novels, the protagonist, Birdie, the new girl in town, goes to a one-room schoolhouse, where she encounters the Slater boys, who hate “book-larnin’.” The Slater boys “beat up to a jelly” the schoolmaster, shutting school for weeks. After fires, illness and neighbor squabbles, the book ends with the youngest Slater boy, Shoestring, wanting “to git book-larnin’.” When I finished the book, I recall nodding solemnly, gratified that the Slater boy might have a chance to leave poverty and a violent family.

In Elmhurst, my mother, father, two sisters and I lived in a rental apartment on a side street off Grand Avenue, with neighbors who labored long hours as cooks, waiters, cabdrivers, house painters, plumbers, hairdressers, doormen and small shopkeepers. My parents worked in Manhattan in their tiny store in a squalid building in Koreatown. During their first year, they ran a newsstand. In my class roster at P.S. 102, there were no Cabots or Lowells. I can recall a Patel, Gonzalez, Nieto, Rossi, Steinberg, Mehta, Gambetta, Csernovic and Rivera. For reference, the rich kid in my school had his birthday party at McDonald’s — his mom was a nurse, his dad a cop.

At work, my mother and father split a deli egg sandwich for lunch to save money. Dad wore two sweaters at the underheated store. My sisters and I wore off-brand sneakers from Fayva Shoes. But when I read about Lenski’s Florida “crackers,” I thought they were the hardscrabble ones, deserving all my sympathy. The girls in Lenski’s story wore dresses made from flour sacks. This was a fate that could be avoided with education, I reasoned.

Before middle school, I found Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” the quintessential New York immigrant novel, which underscored the power of education. When the young mother, Katie Nolan, who finished only the sixth grade herself, gives birth to her daughter, Katie’s immigrant mother, Mary, tells her that though she was a “greenhorn” who hadn’t known enough to help her own children, Katie could raise her children differently. Mary instructs her daughter to nail down an empty milk can in the dark corner of a closet to save coins in and to read to her children daily from good books so that they may read and write.

On payday, Katie, a janitor, throws coins into a tin, and each night she reads a page of Shakespeare and the Bible to her daughter, Francie, and, later, her son, Neely. Despite their hardships, Katie’s children begin to earn good money, surpassing the wage rate of the less educated adults.