Beautiful country A memoir

Review by 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.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's 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.)

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Review by 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

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Review by 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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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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.

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