Kimberly Chang has her world turned upside-down when she moves to New York with her mother from their home in Hong Kong. But their new life doesn't quite live up to their expectations - living in a vermin-ridden apartment in Brooklyn, the pair have only an intermittently working oven to keep them warm. They have nothing but debt and neither of them speak a word of English. While her mother works to earn two cents a garment at a sweatshop, intellectually gifted eleven-year-old Kim faces a new and trying challenge: school. Exiled by language, estranged in a new culture and weighed down by staggering poverty, Kim must learn to translate not just her language but who she is, as she straddles these two very different worlds.