Beautiful Country

If you ever want to feel EXTRA grateful for what you have, this book might be perfect for you.

Imagine a seven-year-old girl in China who’s living a happy, simple life with friends and family who look and live like her. Now two years after her father fled China for America, or ‘Mei Guo’ - ‘the beautiful country’, she and her mother are leaving the only home they’ve ever known to join him there.  Imagine the culture shock: people of all different colors, your senses overwhelmed by the new and unknown, and embedded into this bewildering experience is FEAR.  You live with constant, daily fear of being discovered and sent back if someone doesn’t believe the cover story that your father has drilled into you that you were born in America and have always lived here.

Qian Julie Wang has written an eye-opening debut memoir told through the lens of her youth,  that is an incredible and often heartbreaking view of her life growing up as an illegal immigrant in New York City.  Her proud parents were reduced from educated, capable professionals in China, to people living in NYC’s shadows - her mother finding work in a sweatshop, among other menial jobs, and her father doing laundry work for barely livable wages. They had to rely on others in their situation or those willing to turn a blind eye, but they could never truly live openly and freely.

Wang’s account of her formative years is straight-up traumatic - punctuated by racist treatment from adults and peers alike, an initial complete lack of English skills, daily unrelenting hunger and the stigma of suffocating poverty, life in a tiny share house apartment with no privacy, and her parents’ increasingly contentious marriage.  As an only child with few opportunities for real friendship, her relationship with her parents, Baba and Mama, is especially difficult to read about since they were often in an emotional fog or occasionally turned their frustrations on her. You feel her loneliness and the struggle with how to perceive these people who simultaneously love her and hurt her.

It’s not an easy read and my only downside is just the gloom inherent in a story like this, but the sun did emerge from the clouds, so to speak.  It was uplifting to watch Qian teach herself English through watching PBS shows and reading library books, and to see her use her education to eventually overcome her dismal circumstances. I had a whole new appreciation for the book’s title by the end.

A beautiful debut!

★★★★ ½ (rounded to 4)

Thanks to Doubleday Books, Netgalley and author Qian Julie Wang for this ARC in exchange for my honest opinions. It will be published Sept. 7, 2021.