The Other Side of Paradise

Starred review from May 4, 2009
A fresh, forthright, affecting memoir by Jamaican performance artist Chin finds warmth and humor in her abject, parentless childhood. The “Paradise” of the title is the slum of Montego Bay, Jamaica, where Chin spent her hardscrabble adolescence, and her remarkable memoir is framed around her mother's rejection of her and her older brother, Delano, and the uncertainty about who Chin's father really was. Born to a young, street-savvy girl with a “penchant for distinguished older men with money” (in this case, a local Chinese businessman who always insisted he was not Chin's father), Chin spent her early years along with Delano under the care of their stern, God-fearing, illiterate grandmother. Early on, the spirited, defiant youngster learned to lie about her parentage, while the poverty and neediness of the siblings rendered them charity cases for relatives in Bethel Town and Kingston. Once, their mother came to visit them from where she lived in Montreal, Canada, though she quickly foisted them onto other relatives for good, leaving Chin, at age nine, to fend for herself in the shack of her harsh great-aunt whose boys routinely attempted to rape her. Nonetheless, Chin excelled at school, thanks to financial help from the man who refused to acknowledge his paternity, and became an emigrant success story later in New York. Her courage in coming out as a lesbian underscores her intrepidity in making this story her own.