Call Me Emma: One Chinese Girl Finds Her Way in America

Makee’s wide-eyed and insightful semi-autobiographical debut centers on a teenage immigrant whose adolescence is as hard to navigate as her new home in New York City. Yixuan emigrates from China with her family at age 14. At her high school, she adopts the Anglified name Emma and struggles to adapt to the enormous differences between U.S. and Chinese teen culture. “American classmates are useless!” she thinks as her lab partners slack off and flirt. Gradually, she finds her place, developing a passion for art, a crush on a schoolmate, and a grasp of the complex racial issues at her multicultural school. At the same time, her home life grows strained as her parents and sister have more trouble acclimating. “America is for young people like you,” her father tells her. “Not me.” Makee’s artwork has the simplicity of a teenager’s notebook sketches but bursts with telling details: school cafeteria lunches (“free but not so tasty”), vegetables grown in Chinese American yards, Yixuan’s first Thanksgiving dinner. The result is both a painfully candid coming-of-age tale and a warts-and-all portrait of America. (May)