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
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



L ifestyle /C ulture
Central Program Helps Students Get Into College
LOCAL JARRAD SAFFREN | JE STAFF
IN 2012, BOB COHEN started
an SAT prep program for
students in-need at his alma
mater, Central High School.

Almost a decade later,
the program has grown into
something much bigger and
more important: a full-scale
college prep program.

According to a descrip-
tion of the course from the
Philadelphia school’s PR firm,
it includes help with SAT prep,
college admissions and finan-
cial aid.

Cohen’s class, called the
Dorothy M. Cohen College
Prep Program, began with
about 20 students but grew to
30 after adding more services.

Since Central is both a magnet
and university preparatory
school, it attracts high-per-
forming students from across
Philadelphia. But since many
students are also from low-in-
come/at-risk backgrounds, they
are often unfamiliar with the
college admissions process,
according to Sue Bilsky, the
JEVS Human Services education
consultant who runs the course.

Cohen, who is Jewish, grew
up in the West Oak Lane neigh-
borhood, graduated from Penn
State University and then took
over his father’s business, the
Acme Corrugated Box Co. The
company is in a 250,000-square-
foot complex in Hatboro
and delivers “throughout
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New
York, Delaware and Maryland,”
according to its website.

The businessman funds
Central’s college prep program,
Bilsky said.

Central’s PR firm, Aloysius
Butler & Clark, described
Cohen as someone who wanted
to be a teacher but joined the
family business after his father,
Edward J. Cohen, died early.

Edward Cohen, who only had
an eighth-grade education,
encouraged his son’s interest
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM in school by insisting that he
attend college.

Bilsky said that Cohen
helps students not just with the
program, but by visiting the
school, forming bonds with
students and helping them find
connections in the outside world.

“You cannot find a finer
man,” she added. “People give
money for lots of reasons. He
doesn’t give for glory or to have
his name on something.”
The program has a 100%
success rate, according to
Bilsky. Students who join end
up putting as much effort into
the college admissions process
as they put into their advanced
placement courses.

During the pandemic,
they have come back onto the
computer at 6:30 p.m. to work
on their essays and applications
with Bilsky over Zoom, often on
shared Google docs.

Over the past decade, prep
students have ended up at the
University of Pennsylvania,
Temple University and Penn
State, among other local schools.

They have also attended colleges
outside the state, including
Columbia University, New
York University and Howard
University. For most of the Central
students, clearing the higher
education hurdle is really about
clearing a mental hurdle. As
Bilsky explained it, a student
will say she wants to go to Penn,
but can’t because it’s $80,000
a year.

But the reality is, she can.

“It’s about getting them
to understand how financial
aid policies work, filling out
FAFSA, finding scholarships,”
Bilsky said.

In 2020, one prep student
wanted to go to a top school in
an expensive market. But her
dad thought it would be too
expensive for her to live there.

Bilsky helped him learn that,
with financial aid, it would only
cost her $1,500 a year.

“This is a girl who wouldn’t
have gone,” she said.

According to Bilsky, many of
her pupils are first-generation
immigrants, so their parents are
also unfamiliar with the college
application process. On top of
that, school counselors have too
many students to give them all
detailed individual attention.

That’s where she comes in.

There’s often a moment at
the end of the Zoom where a
student takes a deep breath,
thanks her and says he feels
much better.

“They say, ‘I feel so stressed.

All this college stuff, I can’t
handle it,’” Bilsky said. “I say,
‘My job is to relieve your stress.’”
It wasn’t until the pandemic
broke out last year that Central
developed the program into
college counseling, not just SAT
and college essay prep, which
had been added in recent years.

After the virus forced
students online, Bilsky started
Bob Cohen, center, jacket open, meets with Central students in the
Dorothy M. Cohen College Prep Program. Courtesy of Aloysius Butler & Clark
holding her SAT class over
Zoom. But she realized, in
talking to kids, that they needed
more help. She also recognized
that, all of a sudden, it wasn’t
so hard to meet with people
anymore. Before the Zoom age, Bilsky
would meet with students at
lunch or after school. Since the
Zoom age began, she has been
meeting with them at all hours,
including as late as 10 p.m.

The consultant met with one
girl for 20-30 hours, working
through her college essay.

“These are kids who deserve
to be in the top schools,” Bilsky
said. l
jsaffren@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
INDIANA UNIVERSITY
JEWISH EXPONENT
OCTOBER 21, 2021
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