In this heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting memoir, Elaine Hsieh Yu retraces her trajectory from Chinese daughter of an unstable mother and absentee father to Stanford graduate with a successful Silicon Valley career and a family of her own.

Elaine was four when she moved from Hong Kong to Hawaii with her parents and two older brothers. Less than two weeks later, her parents had a terrifying fight on the phone. Soon afterward, her father burst into their apartment, and Elaine heard the whip of his belt and her mother and brothers screaming as she hid beneath a blanket. She, her mother and siblings later fled to a tiny apartment, “a place my father couldn’t find.”

Safety had its price: poverty, food insecurity, racism, and a world that “stretched only as far as the bus could take us.” With her volatile mother calling her a burden one minute and a treasure the next, Elaine learned to rely only on herself, even after a man in the neighborhood molested her.

Near the end of second grade, her family moved to East Los Angeles, to a nicer apartment rented for them by her father. Though remarried, he would reappear in Elaine’s life at intervals. A few kind teachers, a mentor from Big Sisters, a mom whose love “wasn’t always calm, or easy or perfectly expressed” but constant and a deep resilience helped her overcome a tumultuous upbringing. She attended Stanford and eventually took a job at Apple.

The author has an extraordinary ability to resurrect universal childhood hurts and the pit-of-the-stomach fear of not being enough. Her depiction of her younger self stoically enduring terrible events endears her to readers. She also vividly explores 1970s Hawaii and Southern California and the seemingly insurmountable gulf between privilege and poverty. These all make Ugly Dumpling a wholly immersive read.

Indeed, this is an irresistible book that belongs on the shelf alongside Crying In H Mart and other exceptional Asian-American memoirs.

Also available as an ebook.