L IFESTYLE /C ULTURE
Books: ‘Beautiful Country’ Dissects American Dream
B OOKS
SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
“Beautiful Country”
Qian Julie Wang
Doubleday Books
DURING QIAN Julie Wang’s
flights from Shijiazhuang,
China, to Beijing to New York
City, her mother was hellishly
motion sick.

Th e tumultuous journey of
the two of them — undocu-
mented Chinese immigrants
joining Wang’s father who had
lived in New York for two years
— foreshadows the next fi ve
years of Wang’s life, from age
7 to 12.

During those fi ve years
living in Brooklyn, Wang’s
family lived in hei, in the dark,
navigating undocumented life
through blue-collar jobs with
poor wages, subjection to racist
stereotypes and a profound
paranoia of their undocu-
mented status being discovered.

Wang’s memoir “Beautiful
Country,” published on Sept. 7,
captures her fi rst fi ve years in
the United States and presents
it generously through the naive,
yet poignant, lens of her child-
hood eyes.

Wang received her bache-
lor’s degree from Swarthmore
College and graduated from
Yale Law School, and she is
now an attorney, actualizing
her childhood aspiration.

She is also the founder of the
New York Reform synagogue
Central Synagogue’s Jews of
Color group and member of
their Racial Justice Task Force.

Though Wang’s memoir
does not explicitly address her
Jewishness, her story is synony-
mous with the Jewish narrative
of being a stranger in a strange
land, marked by her resil-
ience and strength, choosing
to address trauma, rather than
turning away from it.

But Wang’s story living in
America strays far from the
American dream. Though
the literal translation of the
Chinese word for America is
Mei Guo, “beautiful country,”
America’s promise of being the
Wangs’ land of milk and honey
evades them, along with many
of the immigrant families they
encounter. Wang’s father’s loyalty to the
U.S., forged by his childhood
turmoil in the midst of China’s
Cultural Revolution, became
at odds with the experiences
of Wang’s mother’s version of
the U.S. Once a professor, she
was relegated here to tediously
sewing garments for 3 cents
apiece in a sweatshop and
wading in fi sh innards while
wearing a thin, blue plastic
poncho and soggy boots in a
sushi-processing plant.

As her parents are aged
exponentially by the challenges
of poverty and the strain it has
on their marriage, Wang is
tasked with the impossible —
keeping her family together.

Once the precocious leader
of her friend group in China,
Wang was accustomed to giving
advice to her peers. In the U.S.,
Wang had only her mother to
confi de in her. She, at times,
parented her mother, who fell
ill, precipitated by the stress of
going back to school to receive
a degree in computer science.

When she and her father
would travel across the city
together, Wang would feel her
hand squeezed a little fi rmer
as they walked past police
offi cers, deemed dangerous by
her father, who repeatedly told
her to trust no one in the U.S.

for fear of deportation.

Wang, as a child, is super-
stitious, a means of making
sense of and regaining control
over the whirlwind of racism,
fetishization, othering, fear and
paranoia she encountered daily.

From the ages of 7 to 12,
Wang employs a keen sense of
empathy and understanding
of her circumstances. She had
an intuition to protect herself,
knowing when to slip out of a
train car if she saw someone
staring at or following her.

But Wang is still unworldly
at times, unable to fully under-
stand the complexities of her
parents’ strained relationship or
why she must lie that she was
born in America.

Yet joy mingles with Wang’s
troubles, as the reader is able
to witness Wang’s fl ourishing
love for reading, reminiscing
with her about the glossy covers
of new “Baby Sitters Club”
books at a Barnes & Noble, the
satisfaction that comes with
spending hours in the public
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215-832-0749 “Beautiful Country”
Courtesy of Doubleday Books
library, pouring over words
from cover to cover.

Other victories are bitter-
sweet: the feeling of a full
belly aft er months of persistent
hunger; making new friends,
only to be unable to say goodbye
to them.

Despite the visceral pictures
Wang paints, her story is not a
tragedy, nor is she the victim of
her past. Th ough her memoir
eff ectively ends during Wang’s
early adolescence, her decision
to write and publish her memoir
is the book’s own epilogue.

Wang is diligent about
describing her parent’s faces
throughout scenes of the book:
the blank stares into nowhere
during stressful and dangerous
moments; sallow, tired eyes aft er
long days of work or bouts of
sickness. Wang’s parents carry
their baggage silently, holding
their trauma in for fear of it
consuming them whole. Th is
was their means of survival.

But Wang, though with
deep reverence for her parents,
deviates from their path. Aft er
years of her childhood self living
in hei, both undocumented and
in the shadows of her mind,
Wang commits not to leaving
her young self in the dark, but to
bringing her into the light. ●
srogelberg@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0741
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