Front Desk (Front Desk #1) (Scholastic Gold)

by Kelly Yang

“Mom,” I asked her, “why did we come here? Why did we come to America?” I repeated. My mother looked away and didn’t say anything for a long time. A plane flew overhead, and the picture frames on the wall shook. She looked in my eyes. “Because it’s freer here,” she finally said, which didn’t make any sense. Nothing was free in America. Everything was so expensive.

It’s going to be okay. I’ll make friends, and if I don’t, I’ll borrow books from the library.

When you’ve moved schools as many times as I have, you start to think of everyone as temporary. Friends come and go. You might have a best friend, but you know in the back of your mind, she’s not always going to be there. You’ll change schools or she’ll change schools, and that’ll be that.

“Don’t be sorry. Be better,”

There used to be a time when I let my cousins walk all over me. They were all boys, and I was the only girl, and in China, girls are kind of like spare tires. It’s nice if you have one, but they’re not important. Even my grandmother, whom I loved and missed so much, believed this. She believed it like she believed the sky was blue. Like it was a fact. Girls were just not as useful as boys.

Many of the events in Front Desk are based on reality. Growing up, I helped my parents manage several motels in California from when I was eight years old to when I was twelve years old.

Kelly Yang’s family immigrated from China when she was a young girl, and she grew up in California, in circumstances very similar to those of Mia Tang. She eventually left the motels and went to college at the age of thirteen, and is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School. She was one of the youngest women to graduate from Harvard Law School. Upon graduation, she gave up law to pursue her dream of writing and teaching kids writing. She is the founder of The Kelly Yang Project, a leading writing and debating program for children in Asia and the United States. She is also a columnist for the South China Morning Post and has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. Kelly is the mother of three children and splits her time between Hong Kong and San Francisco.