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Beautiful country : a memoir / Qian Julie Wang.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Doubleday, [2021]Copyright date: ©2021Edition: First editionDescription: x, 305 pages : illustration ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780385547215
  • 0385547218 :
  • 9780385547215 : HRD
  • 0385547218 : HRD
Subject(s): Genre/Form: DDC classification:
  • 974.7/10049510092 B 23
Contents:
How it began -- Home -- Ascent -- Dances and shadows -- Type B -- The beautiful country -- Silk -- Native speaker -- Dumplings -- Sushi -- Lights -- Chatham Square -- Hair -- Shopping day -- McDonald's -- Sleepover -- Trapdoors -- Solid ground -- Auntie love -- Normalcy -- Marilyn -- Graffiti -- Julie -- Hospital -- Mothers -- Surgery -- Gifted -- Graduation -- Tamagotchi -- Community -- Gone -- Home -- How it begins.
Summary: "Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay. An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to New York City in 1994. In Chinese the word for the United States, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country," but when seven-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm and happy childhood surrounded by extended family in China, she finds a world of crushing fear and poverty instead. Unable to speak English at first, Qian is isolated and disregarded, put into special education classes because she doesn't speak the language and humiliated by teachers and classmates when she struggles to pay attention because of hunger or exhaustion. She encounters racism, and people of other races, for the first time, shocked at where her family fits in comparison to their status as educated elites in China. After school she works shifts alongside her mother in Chinatown sweatshops. There is so much about Qian's new home that doesn't make sense, but the rules of survival are drilled into her head: If you see a policeman, you must run in the other direction. If anyone asks--or even if they don't--you tell them you were born here. Do as you're told or we could be separated forever. Understanding impliclity the toll this has taken on her parents, Qian tries desperately to cheer them up and mediate their increasingly heated arguments, certain that if she is good enough, she can hold the family together. In remarkable, unsentimental prose Wang channels her childhood perspective, illuminating the cruelty and indignity of America's immigration system, while also crafting a narrative of resilience from her family's small moments of joy: their first slice of pizza, "shopping days" when the family would unearth unlikely treasures in Brooklyn's trash, and the necessary escape she found in books at the local library. Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential book about the cost of making a home in a hostile land from an astonishing new talent"--Provided by publisher.
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Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Shelving location Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Phillipsburg Free Public Library Adult Non-Fiction New Books 974.7 WAN Available 36748002502856
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

How it began -- Home -- Ascent -- Dances and shadows -- Type B -- The beautiful country -- Silk -- Native speaker -- Dumplings -- Sushi -- Lights -- Chatham Square -- Hair -- Shopping day -- McDonald's -- Sleepover -- Trapdoors -- Solid ground -- Auntie love -- Normalcy -- Marilyn -- Graffiti -- Julie -- Hospital -- Mothers -- Surgery -- Gifted -- Graduation -- Tamagotchi -- Community -- Gone -- Home -- How it begins.

"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay. An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to New York City in 1994. In Chinese the word for the United States, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country," but when seven-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm and happy childhood surrounded by extended family in China, she finds a world of crushing fear and poverty instead. Unable to speak English at first, Qian is isolated and disregarded, put into special education classes because she doesn't speak the language and humiliated by teachers and classmates when she struggles to pay attention because of hunger or exhaustion. She encounters racism, and people of other races, for the first time, shocked at where her family fits in comparison to their status as educated elites in China. After school she works shifts alongside her mother in Chinatown sweatshops. There is so much about Qian's new home that doesn't make sense, but the rules of survival are drilled into her head: If you see a policeman, you must run in the other direction. If anyone asks--or even if they don't--you tell them you were born here. Do as you're told or we could be separated forever. Understanding impliclity the toll this has taken on her parents, Qian tries desperately to cheer them up and mediate their increasingly heated arguments, certain that if she is good enough, she can hold the family together. In remarkable, unsentimental prose Wang channels her childhood perspective, illuminating the cruelty and indignity of America's immigration system, while also crafting a narrative of resilience from her family's small moments of joy: their first slice of pizza, "shopping days" when the family would unearth unlikely treasures in Brooklyn's trash, and the necessary escape she found in books at the local library. Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential book about the cost of making a home in a hostile land from an astonishing new talent"--Provided by publisher.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • How it Began (p. 1)
  • Chapter 0 Home (p. 5)
  • Chapter 1 Ascent (p. 6)
  • Chapter 2 Dances and Shadows (p. 12)
  • Chapter 3 Type B (p. 24)
  • Chapter 4 The Beautiful Country (p. 33)
  • Chapter 5 Silk (p. 43)
  • Chapter 6 Native Speaker (p. 57)
  • Chapter 7 Dumplings (p. 74)
  • Chapter 8 Sushi (p. 86)
  • Chapter 9 Lights (p. 97)
  • Chapter 10 Chatham Square (p. 108)
  • Chapter 11 Hair (p. 112)
  • Chapter 12 Shopping Day (p. 122)
  • Chapter 13 McDonald's (p. 128)
  • Chapter 14 Sleepover (p. 139)
  • Chapter 15 Trapdoors (p. 147)
  • Chapter 16 Solid Ground (p. 154)
  • Chapter 17 Auntie Love (p. 160)
  • Chapter 18 Normalcy (p. 171)
  • Chapter 19 Marilyn (p. 180)
  • Chapter 20 Graffiti (p. 190)
  • Chapter 21 Julie (p. 196)
  • Chapter 22 Hospital (p. 209)
  • Chapter 23 Mothers (p. 218)
  • Chapter 24 Surgery (p. 231)
  • Chapter 25 Gifted (p. 240)
  • Chapter 26 Graduation (p. 251)
  • Chapter 27 Tamagotchi (p. 257)
  • Chapter 28 Community (p. 269)
  • Chapter 29 Gone (p. 280)
  • Chapter 30 Home (p. 288)
  • How It Begins (p. 292)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

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. Excerpted from Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

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

Publishers Weekly Review

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.)

Booklist Review

This first book from Wang takes readers deep into her childhood experience of undocumented life in the U.S. At age seven, she and her mother join her father in New York City in 1994, seeing him for the first time since he left northern China two years prior. Instantly she understands Ba Ba's directive to tell anyone who asks that she was born in Mei Guo, the Mandarin name for the U.S., meaning beautiful country. In contrast to the warm, family-surrounded life she led in China, Wang's new existence in Brooklyn is startling in every way, governed by unrelenting hunger; the upsetting work her parents, who'd both been professors back in China, are forced to do; the alienation she feels at school when she at first only speaks Mandarin and relies on free meals for survival; and the constant threat of deportation. Now a lawyer, Wang buried herself in books for escape. Powerfully reconstructing, without embellishment, her memories of this shadow existence, Wang reveals truths about living in constant fear and trauma that will undoubtedly move readers.

Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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