Qian Julie Wang’s memoir of a difficult girlhood as a new immigrant to the U.S. at age 7 would be achingly difficult to read if it were not for the fact that she ultimately landed on her feet and made a satisfying life stateside. While it may be that “all’s well that ends well,” the difficult odds of undocumented immigrants arriving to a hostile country is not necessarily a set-up for a fruitful and fully actualized life, without some skills and luck.
Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood recalls the author’s experiences from age 7 (1994) through the next few years in Brooklyn, NY, when her parents made the move to NY, first Ba Ba (with his background as an English teacher) and then two years later Ma Ma (with her background as a mathematics and computer science teacher) and Qian Qian (the author), all hailing from Hebei Province.
The parents carry with them the traumas of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76), which resulted in the mass persecution of the educated and the deaths of many. They bristle at the government controls placed on them and the prevalence of government surveillance.
The three arrived at the U.S. through the work of “snakeheads” apparently, who for a sizable fee enable people to cross through borders without their own papers but perhaps those of others or perhaps forged ones. Their lack of formal documentation that could stand up to scrutiny stateside mean that the family has to fend for themselves with menial jobs and often manual labor—laundromat work, sewing sweatshops, restaurant work, sushi processing, warehouse labor, and others. The shock of the cultural shift from Chinese culture to American…and the drop in social status…comes close to undoing this young family.
Interspersed with scenes of American life, Wang recalls snippets of childhood memories. One is a euphoric one, with her parents swinging her: it is a moment of “nothing but warmth, safety, love.” It is a moment when her parents were able to be light-hearted, to revel in their being parents, and to have a sense of their place in the world. Her father would sing a made-up gibberish song to his daughter as an expression of love.
As a child, Qian Qian was made aware of her being cute by the adults around her. Both her maternal and paternal grandparents played an important role in her growing up years. She writes of extended family:
There are other members of the family, cousins and uncles and aunts, milling all around, impossible to tell apart because they all look so alike, so much like me and Ba Ba, The generations are always difficult—there are people I call cousins, the children of Ba Ba’s eldest siblings, who look like they should be aunts and uncles, and people I call aunts and uncles, several degrees removed, who look like they should be cousins. But no matter: they are always happy to see us, rushing to us in a clamoring wave, a big, draping, quilt all knit from the same thread.
Even as a child, Qian Qian was her own person. She had a rebellious streak. She would not take well to naptime or to taking direction. As an adult looking back, she observes: “I was not made for Zhong Guo—China, the self-named Central Country, the Middle Kingdom.”
How a child makes sense of the world is evoked powerfully in this work. Qian Qian sees the local Chinese immigrants and the American-born as somehow Chinese/not-Chinese because of their unfamiliarity, their speaking the Cantonese dialect, and other features. There is a Coraline-like moment with a spooky Cantonese landlord, who hid in a closet in the rental unit while the family would eat. Even as a child, Qian Qian struggled to make sense of the world, with a thread of neurotic sensitivity and partially-cultural paranoia. She had a mean streak which would express in anti-social behaviors, such as salting (contaminating) others’ ice cream, in the same way that her mother would spit into people’s food first at a restaurant where she worked and later in the boss’s tea at a warehouse.
The author was aware of social and racial differences from early childhood. She experienced the trauma of seeing her racial identity “through the white gaze.” She writes:
Mei Guo (The United States, known as the “Beautiful Country” in Chinese) was nothing like what everyone promised. Everything smelled strange and looked different. We lived in a place that Ba Ba called Brooklyn. Most of the people around us had brown skin and dark hair. Other than our Cantonese landlady, we rarely ever saw anybody who looked like us, and when we did, they never talked to us in Chinese. I wondered if we had left behind the only place in the world that had our people.
She was competitive with her peers and jealous of their comparative wealth, though all were likely low income.
Some of the remembrances are surprising, such as her first encounter with pizza evoking the memory of dog’s breath, and the taste was described as “terrifying, amazing, delicious.”
Ba Ba and Ma Ma ended up living in subpar rental housing with others also paid under the table. At school, her teachers are not particularly understanding of her, especially in the early years of her adjustment. She is placed into special education because of her lack of English. The girls in the class snub her, and she is treated like an outcast. She learns English by television as a child initially.
In Puzzle Place, there is a puppet character named “Julie” who was Chinese / Chinese-American and would share aspects of culture that Qian would “recognize through the thick fog of English.” Qian Qian was babysat with the television. Her experiences highlight the importance of even fictional characters that represent difference and diversity in children’s television. Her saving grace seems to be her love of reading and the discovery of the haven of a library.
The social isolation of this new family to the U.S. comes from the larger publics, who are not particularly welcoming. They experience daily racist harassment and expressions of race-based hatred, by the words and deeds of those around them.
The social isolation also comes from her parents, who communicate: “We’re not allowed here.” Her parents also communicate mistrust of the police since they may be the mechanism through which the family may be deported.
The family lives through years of serious hunger and privation. At one point, one of the adults in Qian’s orbit observes that everyone around them are low-income, while Qian’s family is “no-income.” What she apparently means is that the parents are working in the gray economy, under the table. They are not paying payroll taxes or contributions into Social Security, but they are also not eligible for unemployment benefits, retirement contributions, healthcare, vacation, or other benefits. They are earning a cent or two for piecework. The shock is especially harsh for young parents transitioning from a system of Communist guaranteed livelihoods and work units to one in which people fend for themselves.
Qian is necessarily wary of da ren (adults). She travels on the subway by herself and sees horny men using various lures to get close to young and naïve women. Many flash other subway riders for cheap thrills. By 8, she was out trawling the streets for valuables in the garbage, such as old furniture and discarded toys and discarded cans.
Along the way, Qian is acquiring life lessons. She learns that parents will lie to their children for convenience, for the child’s compliance. She learns that friends of the family are there to perhaps fulfill their own lusts. She realizes Chinese immigrants are low on the social totem pole and so are picked on by everyone. She is savvy to the fact that she has no true friends or allies in school…of any race, not just the whites. She learns that beauty is more than skin deep.
Ma Ma liked to say that a woman could be beautiful without being pretty, but that a woman could not be beautiful without having dignity.
The author evokes an ever-present hunger through the years of her childhood. While she was well fed in China, including various delicacies like quail on a stick, silkworm snacks, and others, there is almost never enough for many of her childhood years stateside. The family has effectively fallen through the cracks.
Qian Julie Wang, as a child, read meaning into everything and perhaps saw the world through a melodramatic lens. When she is called “Qian” instead of “Wang Qian,” she concludes the following:
I had never had anyone call me ‘Qian’ without a ‘Wang’ before it or another ‘Qian’ after it, but for the rest of the day, it was all Tang Lao Shi and Janie called me. Just like that, I had been reborn as a girl divorced from her family name, orphaned from her Chinese past.
She and her mother seem especially attuned to how they were viewed socially, keeping face even in the context of severe need. They would tell fanciful stories of plenty back to their relations back on the mainland. Once, when a schoolmate saw her and her mother collecting cans and used furniture down the street, the trauma of being seen and recognized left a powerful mark: “It took ten years for my face to stop burning.”
Her parents did not seem to teach her much in the way of English or survival skills, only telling her to lie about being American-born to any authority figures. Through the various family dramas, the parents act with conviction, but they are not sufficiently developed for readers to understand their inner motivations. They send their daughter out into the world as a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 9-year-old, without real skills for her self-protection. Their only child, Qian, goes without dental care, vision care, and health care. The parents themselves do not avail themselves of healthcare except for when an emergency arises.
In the memoir, Qian herself is not particularly likeable, with her “sneakiness” and vengefulness. In the 4th grade, precocious, she concludes that she is smarter than some adults including her teacher, which leaves her with poor learning habits and bad attitudes.
Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood showcases the U.S. as a cold place with little in the way of human support for each other, even in cases of dire need. Struggling to survive exacerbates tensions in people’s relationships, even in a family that once had closeness and perhaps love.
The family escapes to a third country near the end of this narrative to look for a better life. The author did return to the U.S. to attend Swarthmore College and then Yale Law School. She is a managing partner of Gottlieb & Wang LLP. She is a U.S. citizen, no longer a hei (“black” or “secret”) ren.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
