Kelly Yang mines her experience as child immigrant in US for touching debut novel

Front Desk recounts the highs and lows of a family-run motel as seen through the eyes of a former 10-year-old desk clerk – as the author, a Harvard Law graduate who teaches writing skills in Hong Kong, once was herself

Reading Time:5 minutes

A young Kelly Yang outside the motel her parents managed in the US.

Published: 9:30pm, 9 May 2018Updated: 2:26pm, 8 Apr 2021

There’s a moment in Kelly Yang’s debut novel, Front Desk, when 10-year old Mia Tang is being mocked for wearing second-hand floral trousers. It’s California in the early 1990s and the rest of the kids at school are in jeans, but Mia’s stuck in a pair of thin, pyjama-like trousers that her mother bought in a bundle at a charity store.

It’s a small scene but, for Yang, who was also dressed in charity shop floral trousers as a young girl in California, it was one of the hardest to write.

“The more difficult things for me were the small moments that Mia had,” Yang says. “I thought I was done with that part of my life and having to relive it was painful. The shopping bags [which Mia’s mother carried around to make her look like she had been shopping], for example, are kind of humiliating, but that’s what we did, that’s what people do sometimes.

“We bought all our clothes at the Goodwill. I still have classmates who, when I reach out to them on Facebook, they say, ‘You’re the girl with the weird floral pants.’”