Beautiful Country: A Memoir

by Qian Julie Wang

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Evocative, ironic, aspirational and crushing, Qian Julie Wang has written an unforgettable memoir of the soul shaking experience of being undocumented. Not theory, not analysis, but life as lived in a maelstrom of conflicting opposites, balancing memory against present, known and unknown, despair and perseverance, love and hunger, always hunger. Fervent and cinematic, Beautiful Country is an extraordinary debut.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world—an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent • A TODAY SHOW #READWITHJENNA PICK

In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive.

In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly “shopping days,” when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all.

But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here.

Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385547215
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	10,797
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

QIAN JULIE WANG is a graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College. Formerly a commercial litigator, she is now managing partner of Gottlieb & Wang LLP, a firm dedicated to advocating for education and civil rights. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two rescue dogs, Salty and Peppers.

Read an Excerpt

How It Began

My story starts decades before my birth.

In my father’s earliest memory, he is four years old, shooting a toy gun at nearby birds as he skips to the town square. There he halts, arrested by curious, swaying shapes that he is slow to recognize: two men dangling from a muscular tree.

He approaches slowly, pushing past the knees of adults encircling the tree. In the muggy late-summer air, mosquitoes and flies swarm the hanging corpses. The stench of decomposing flesh floods his nose.

He sees on the dirt ground a single character written in blood:

冤

Wrongly accused.

It is 1966 and China’s Cultural Revolution has just begun. Even for a country marked by storied upheaval, the next decade would bring unparalleled turmoil. To this date, the actual death toll from the purges remains unspoken and, worse, unknown.

* * *

Three years later, my seven-year-old father watched as his eldest brother was placed under arrest. Weeks prior, my teenage uncle had criticized Mao Zedong in writing for manipulating the innocent people of China by pitting them against one another, just to centralize his power. My uncle had naïvely, heroically, stupidly signed his name to the essay and distributed it.

So there would be no high school graduation for him, only starvation and torture behind prison walls.

From then on, my father would spend his childhood bearing witness to his parents’ public beatings, all while enduring his own humiliation at school, where he was forced to stand in the front of the classroom every morning as his teachers and classmates berated him and his “treasonous” family. Outside of school, adults and children alike pelted him with rocks, pebbles, shit. Gone was the honor of his grandfather, whose deft brokering had managed to shield their village from the rape and pillage of the Japanese occupation. Gone were the visitors to the Wang family courtyard who sought his father’s calligraphy. From then on, it would just be his mother’s bruised face. His father’s silent, stoic tears. His four sisters’ screams as the Red Guards ransacked their already shredded home.

It is against this backdrop that my parents’ beginnings unfurled. My mother’s pain was that of a daughter born to a family entangled in the government. None of her father’s power was enough to insulate her from the unrest and sexism of her time. She grew up a hundred miles away from my father, and their hardships were at once the same and worlds apart.

Half a century and a migration across the world later, it would take therapy’s slow and arduous unraveling for me to see that the thread of trauma was woven into every fiber of my family, my childhood.

* * *

On July 29, 1994, I arrived at JFK Airport on a visa that would expire much too quickly. Five days prior, I had turned seven years old, the same age at which my father had begun his daily wrestle with shame. My parents and I would spend the next five years in the furtive shadows of New York City, pushing past hunger pangs to labor at menial jobs, with no rights, no access to medical care, no hope of legality. The Chinese refer to being undocumented colloquially as “hei”: being in the dark, being blacked out. And aptly so, because we spent those years shrouded in darkness while wrestling with hope and dignity.

Memory is a fickle thing, but other than names and certain identifying details—which I have changed out of respect for others’ privacy—I have endeavored to document my family’s undocumented years as authentically and intimately as possible. I regret that I can do no justice to my father’s childhood, for it is pockmarked by more despair than I can ever know.

In some ways, this project has always been in me, but in a much larger way, I have the 2016 election to thank. I took my first laughable stab at this project during my college years, writing it as fiction, not understanding that it was impossible to find perspective on a still-festering wound.

After graduating from Yale Law School—where I could not have fit in less—I clerked for a federal appellate judge who instilled in me, even beyond my greatest, most idealistic hopes, an abiding faith in justice. During that clerkship year, I watched as the Obama administration talked out of both sides of its mouth, at once championing deferred action for Dreamers while issuing deportations at unprecedented rates. By the time the immigration cases got to our chambers on appeal, there was often very little my judge could do.

In May 2016, just shy of eight thousand days after I first landed in New York City—the only place my heart and spirit call home—I finally became a U.S. citizen. My journey to citizenship was difficult to the very end: torrential rain accompanied me on my walk through lower Manhattan to the federal courthouse where I was sworn in. I brought no guests, not even my parents.

The rain did not matter. I reveled in joyful solitude, my face soaked in rainwater and happy tears. At the end of the ceremony, a videotaped President Obama greeted me as a “fellow American,” and it dawned on me that though I had become American decades ago, I had never before been recognized as one.

Six months later, I awoke to a somber and funereal New York, mourning for a nation that chose to elect a president on a platform of xenophobia and intolerance. It was then that I dug up my voice. Staring shame and self-doubt in the face, I tossed my first attempt at this project and put my fingers to the keyboard anew.

I document these stories for myself and my family, and not the least my uncle, our innominate hero. I write this also for Americans and immigrants everywhere. The heartbreak of one immigrant is never that far from that of another.

Most of all, though, I put these stories to paper for this country’s forgotten children, past and present, who grow up cloaked in fear, desolation, and the belief that their very existence is wrong, their very being illegal. I have been unfathomably lucky. But I dream of a day when being recognized as human requires no luck—when it is a right, not a privilege. And I dream of a day when each and every one of us will have no reason to fear stepping out of the shadows.

Whenever things got really bad during my family’s dark years, I dreamed aloud that when I grew up, I would write our stories down so that others like us would know that they were not alone, that they could also survive. And my mother would then remind me that it was all temporary:

With your writing, Qian Qian, you can do anything.

One day, you will have enough to eat.

One day, you will have everything.

May that resilient hope light the way.

Table of Contents

How it Began 1

Chapter 0 Home 5

Chapter 1 Ascent 6

Chapter 2 Dances and Shadows 12

Chapter 3 Type B 24

Chapter 4 The Beautiful Country 33

Chapter 5 Silk 43

Chapter 6 Native Speaker 57

Chapter 7 Dumplings 74

Chapter 8 Sushi 86

Chapter 9 Lights 97

Chapter 10 Chatham Square 108

Chapter 11 Hair 112

Chapter 12 Shopping Day 122

Chapter 13 McDonald's 128

Chapter 14 Sleepover 139

Chapter 15 Trapdoors 147

Chapter 16 Solid Ground 154

Chapter 17 Auntie Love 160

Chapter 18 Normalcy 171

Chapter 19 Marilyn 180

Chapter 20 Graffiti 190

Chapter 21 Julie 196

Chapter 22 Hospital 209

Chapter 23 Mothers 218

Chapter 24 Surgery 231

Chapter 25 Gifted 240

Chapter 26 Graduation 251

Chapter 27 Tamagotchi 257

Chapter 28 Community 269

Chapter 29 Gone 280

Chapter 30 Home 288

How It Begins 292

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/28/2021

In this extraordinary debut, civil rights lawyer Wang recounts her years growing up as an undocumented immigrant living in “the furtive shadows” of America. During China’s Cultural Revolution, her uncle was thrown in prison for criticizing Mao Zedong, leaving his parents and younger brother, Wang’s father, to pay for his “treasonous” ways in the form of public beatings and humiliation. This fueled her father’s desire to find a better life in America, the “Beautiful Country.” In China, Wang’s parents were professors, but upon arriving in New York City in 1994, their credentials were meaningless. “Pushing past hunger pains,” they took menial jobs to support Wang, who worked alongside her mother in a sweatshop before starting school at age seven. During her five years in the States—“shrouded in darkness while wrestling with hope and dignity”—Wang managed to become a star student. With immense skill, she parses how her family’s illegal status blighted nearly every aspect of their life, from pushing her parents’ marriage to the brink to compromising their health. While Wang’s story of pursuing the American dream is undoubtedly timeless, it’s her family’s triumph in the face of “xenophobia and intolerance” that makes it feel especially relevant today. Consider this remarkable memoir a new classic. Agent: Andrianna Yeatts, ICM Partners. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

07/01/2021

In this powerful debut, Wang reflects on her childhood experiences as an undocumented immigrant. Her family traveled to the United States to escape communist rule in China when she was seven years old. The family settled in Manhattan's Chinatown, where they experienced disillusionment and poverty as they worked exploitative jobs while fearing the ever-present threat of deportation. Wang tells her family's story from her then-perspective as a child who was attempting to understand her new life. She makes frequent comparisons to her life in China and the United States as she learns to navigate a new culture and language and finds solace in her small but powerful collection of books. Wang's relationship with her parents becomes complicated when their mental health becomes more fragile, and her mother's health declines. Finally, Wang's mother feels compelled to make a change that will alter the family forever. Wang doesn't gloss over the hardship and trauma she experienced as an undocumented immigrant in the United States. She movingly tells how undocumented families like hers are often overlooked and their experiences ignored. VERDICT A haunting memoir of people and places that will stay with readers long after the last page.—Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

★ 2021-07-06
How one little girl found her way through the terror, hunger, exhaustion, and cruelty of an undocumented childhood in New York's Chinatown.

Since the absolute necessity of going through the world unnoticed was drummed into her from the moment she arrived in the U.S. in 1994, perhaps it is no surprise that Wang, a graduate of Yale Law School on her way up as a litigator, had deeply buried the memories of the 7-year-old girl who came with her Ma Ma to Mei Guo—America, or “beautiful country.” There they joined her father, whose life had been brutalized by the Cultural Revolution (“he would happily eat America's shit before feasting on China's fruits"). The family lived off trash-picking and working in sweatshops and frigid sushi processing plants, even though both parents had been professors in China. As a child, Wang snipped threads and shivered in a huge plastic bodysuit right alongside them. She taught herself English in a public school that sent her to a special needs classroom and forgot about her. She lied and blustered her way through the humiliating social network of elementary school, often with poor results. Her only friend at times was a kitten she fed off her own tiny plate until her father blamed it for their bad luck and drove it away. When she left this life behind, she spoke not a word of it until the xenophobia that crescendoed during the 2016 election cycle made her break her silence. Engaging readers through all five senses and the heart, Wang's debut memoir is a critical addition to the literature on immigration as well as the timeless category of childhood memoir. As saturated in cultural specificity as classics like Angela's Ashes and Persepolis, the narrative conveys the unique flavor and underlying beliefs of the author's Chinese heritage—and how they played out as both gifts and obstacles in the chaotic, dirty maelstrom of poverty.

A potent testament to the love, curiosity, grit, and hope of a courageous and resourceful immigrant child.

Kirkus Reviews

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping, She Reads, and more • One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year

“Incredibly important, exquisitely written, harrowing. . . Beautiful Country tells [Wang’s] story, well, quite beautifully. It is not only Wang’s mastery of the language that makes the story so compelling, but also the passionate yearning for empathy and understanding. Beautiful Country is timely, yes, but more importantly it is a near-masterpiece that will make Qian Julie Wang a literary star.”—Shondaland

“For fans of Angela's Ashes and The Glass Castle.”—Newsday

“[An] exquisitely crafted memoir.”—Oprah Daily

“A heartbreaking and intimate memoir... the storytelling from a young Qian’s perspective is riveting.”—Politico

“This unforgettable memoir is eye-opening to the nth degree.”—Real Simple

“Elegantly affecting.”—The Guardian

“A coming-of-age memoir about an undocumented Chinese girl growing up in New York's Chinatown, this lyrical book is full of small moments of joy, heartbreaking pain and the struggles of a family trying to survive in the shadows of society. It's a uniquely American story, and an essential one.”—Good Housekeeping

“An astounding memoir from a debut author that you’re not going to want to miss.”—PopSugar

“[Qian Julie Wang] is remarkable, and her story is a must-read.”—Alma

“An amazing story of the emotional and physical toll of lives lived in the enforced shadows of anti-immigrant America.”—Daily Kos

“Beautiful Country rings with power and authenticity. Wang's searing exploration reveals how she and her family were forced to navigate the yawning cracks in the American Dream. An eloquent, thought-provoking and touching memoir.”—Jean Kwok, author of Girl in Translation and Searching for Sylvie Lee

“Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you.”—Gish Jen, author of The Resisters

“Deeply compelling…I was moved by the love and resilience of this family thrust into darkness…that casts an urgent light on a reality that extends way beyond America’s borders.”—Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return

“A potent testament to the love, curiosity, grit, and hope of a courageous and resourceful immigrant child. Engaging readers through all five senses and the heart, Wang's debut memoir is a critical addition to the literature on immigration as well as the timeless category of childhood memoir.”—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review*

“Extraordinary… With immense skill, Wang parses how her family’s illegal status blighted nearly every aspect of their life . . .While Wang’s story of pursuing the American dream is undoubtedly timeless, it’s her family’s triumph in the face of “xenophobia and intolerance” that makes it feel especially relevant today. Consider this remarkable memoir a new classic.”—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review*

“The writing is sparse, stylish, sometimes harrowing and sometimes humorous as she narrates experiences that are incredibly common but rarely captured with this level of artful control. It’s shaping up to be one of the best memoirs of the year.”—Bookpage, *Starred Review*

“[A] powerful debut. . . [Wang] movingly tells how undocumented families like hers are often overlooked and their experiences ignored. A haunting memoir of people and places that will stay with readers long after the last page.”—Library Journal

From the Publisher