Beautiful Country: A Memoir

Beautiful Country: A Memoir (2021) by civil rights litigator Qian Julie Wang tells the story of Wang’s experiences immigrating from China to the United States. A New York Times bestselling author and advocate for marginalized communities, Wang writes about the hardships she and her parents faced moving to and living in the United States.

Wang’s father, an English professor, left China when Qian was only six. At the age of seven, Qian and her mother, a math and computer science professor, joined him in the United States. Qian watched as her parents labored at grueling menial jobs for minimal pay and witnessed the toll that their new life in Mei Guo, or “Beautiful Country,” took on her family. Qian also fought many battles of her own, navigating this new world, learning its ways, and facing its racism. She persevered through hunger and poverty, and she emerged from her many challenges with her dreams intact.

Beautiful Country uses the first person perspective of a small girl as a lens on the many challenges an immigrant family faces in the United States. This limited viewpoint allows the reader to make many inferences about the experiences that a child could only partially understand.

Summary

Qian’s father grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966. The violence and ostracism that Ba Ba and his family witnessed and experienced traumatized him.

When Qian was seven years old, she flew across the world with her Ma Ma to meet Ba Ba in the United States. Qian and Ma Ma had a codependent relationship: Qian often felt the need to protect and care for her mother. Qian worked with her mother in a sweatshop, snipping threads off of clothes and waiting anxiously for a meager lunch of one scoop of rice. Meanwhile, her parents criticized her for being too fat, not realizing that she was bloated from malnutrition. Qian’s parents labored in difficult conditions with little pay and no benefits. Qian learned by observing people, reading books, and watching television. She also learned that others did not perceive her the way that she had always perceived herself. In China, she had been outgoing, attractive, and a leader. In the United States, she lost her voice—others saw her differently because of her race.

In school, Qian was placed in a class for students with special needs and was left to her own devices. Even when Qian taught herself how to read and speak English and begged to be allowed back in the regular classroom, most of her teachers saw her only through stereotypes and misguided assumptions about her race. For example, Mr. Kane, her fifth grade teacher, did not believe that Qian was capable of the exemplary work she produced. Qian started insert spelling and grammatical mistakes into her work to convince him she was not cheating. Having read about Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall in the public library, Qian dreamt of becoming a lawyer. However, when she shared this dream with her father and Mr. Kane, both men dismissed this ambition as a fantasy. From then on, Qian kept her dream to herself but continued to pursue it. Without the help of her parents or teachers, Qian applied and was accepted into a prestigious middle school for gifted children in Chelsea.

Meanwhile, Qian’s mother fell ill. Fear of deportation kept her parents from seeking medical attention, but the situation became too dire to hide any longer. Doctors removed her gallbladder and part of her liver. Her road to recovery was long, but, like Qian, Ma Ma was not without her own dreams and grit. After working jobs that left her feeling demeaned and dehumanized, Ma Ma decided to go to graduate school for computer science. She completed her degree while recovering in the hospital. After friend from Long Island told her about special programs in Canada for educated immigrants, she begged Ba Ba to move with her across the border.

However, Ba Ba’s internalized trauma had changed him. He became angrier and meaner and was not interested in moving again. Ba Ba and Ma Ma fought often, and their arguing grew worse when Ba Ba brought home a car he had purchased without discussing it with her. During one argument, Ba Ba reached across the table and struck Qian’s mother. Ma Ma packed her things, picked up Qian from school, and drove her to a new life in Canada. Ba Ba joined them shortly afterward, but their relationship was never the same.

Qian continued to work toward her dream and eventually graduated from Yale Law School and obtained American citizenship. She battled to keep the small, hungry girl inside of her at bay, but that part of her life kept popping up. During her second clerkship, she spilled her story to the judge who listened with compassion. The judge helped her see that holding in those secrets gave them too much power. So, in a country that had stolen her voice, Qian Julie Wang found it again by writing a memoir.