asianamlitfans | A Review of Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country (Doubleday, 2021) (Reply)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As part of the memoir kick I have been on, I finally finished Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country (Doubleday, 2021). I started this memoir probably over two years ago, but I crashed out of it. I’ve noticed that as I’ve gotten older, I’ll be in the middle of reading like four or five books at the same time. I don’t know when this bad habit started, but it causes me to leave books unfinished for very long periods. In any case, let’s let the marketing description get us started: “In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to ‘beautiful country.’ Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly ‘shopping days,’ when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all. But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.”

I think the most important part of the description occurs at the end, when it states that the author is grounded in “her childhood perspective.” I didn’t realize that about 99% of this memoir would be told in this way. That is, Wang really attempts to resituate herself at the time of her childhood, even though the memoir is clearly being told in past tense. There are only a handful of times where it becomes apparent that the memoir is really being told in retrospect, so I did find this technique a bit jarring. The level of detail that Wang evokes throughout is really incredible, and I did wonder (and was hoping that we might find out) how Wang was able to cobble together the earlier sections. Did she have to outline? Did she have journals that she had kept? Whatever the case, the memoir essentially covers her time from elementary school up until about junior high and early high school. It then fast forwards over one chapter from college all the way to Wang’s contemporary moment, when she becomes a lawyer. The main throughline of this memoir is the unceasing fear that the undocumented migrant feels while being in the United States: they must do everything they can to avoid detection, even to the point of potentially harming themselves. This issue becomes most pressing when Wang’s mother becomes very sick, and there is no option but for her to be taken to the emergency room. Wang’s mother is diagnosed with a mass, and her convalescence is long, but the fact remains that no one is deported. This moment figures prominently in this memoir precisely because it becomes one point in time when the family begins to realize that their categorical self-surveillance may be a little bit too oppressive. The pressures of this kind of life also begin to take a considerable toll on Wang’s parents, who become increasingly distant from each other. A tense encounter involving physical abuse becomes the propelling factor for Wang’s mother to get Wang and herself out of the house and into Canada, there they can be full-fledged citizens, out from the under the weight of their fears. Wang’s father eventually joins them, but what Wang’s memoir ultimately reveals are the painstaking sacrifices that undocumented migrants make in order to find their way to the United States. Of course, it’s never what they hope it will become, and the brutalities of everyday life are made apparent in Wang’s assured narrative voice, however childlike it may be. Through her vision, we understand the godsend that a free meal might be, how much a $50 gift certificate she wins to the bookstore means, and the glory of a radiator’s heat when insulation is faulty. These minor miracles are the ones that move Wang forward through the desperation that clouds over so much of her childhood. Wang’s steadfastness is only paralleled by her forward-thinking mother, who becomes the focal point for a future that is more than just survival.

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