The Yellow Pearl: A Story of the East and the West

She was never enough of either. In 1911, Margaret Pearl keeps a diary of the only thing she has left: herself. Born to a Chinese mother and an American father, she has spent her years in China feelingforeign. Now, after her father's death, she is shipped to a grandmother she's never met in America, where her aunt Gwendolin regards her mixed blood like a stain. The diary becomes her refuge and her witness, recording every sideways glance, every whispered criticism, every moment she must perform a version of herself that no one expects her to be. But as she navigates the cold formality of her American relatives and the weight of their expectations, she begins to wonder whether the answer to who she is lies in the country she's been sent from, not the one she's arrived in. Teskey writes with sharp, empathetic precision about the particular loneliness of belonging to two worlds and neither. The diary format gives intimate access to Pearl's inner life: her wit, her pain, her quiet defiance. Over a century later, this novel still cuts because its central question has not been answered: where do you go when home is a concept someone else decides?