But, lo and behold, at the end of 2019 I opened the folder where I was backing up those notes and had 300 pages. I didn’t really think I was writing a book, but I thought maybe my future children and grandchildren would want to know where they came from. It took a lot of therapy, a lot of crying, a lot of pulling out old diaries and photos. There was so much that had been buried for so long. Yes, so I started writing using the Notes app on the subway on my way to work. You were working as a lawyer at that time, right? I had the choice to speak up while others still do not.
Later that year, watching the presidential debates and hearing the national discourse on immigration, I no longer thought, “Oh my God, I’m part of this group I have to keep lying and pretending that it didn’t happen.” Suddenly, I was privileged and had a responsibility to live up to that. But when I became a naturalized citizen in 2016, actually at the moment President Barack Obama opened his video message with, “Greetings, fellow Americans,” everything changed for me. You explain in Beautiful Country that the stories it recounts were kept secret for decades.īoth my parents and I felt so much shame about our past that we never spoke about it, and I never even thought about it to myself. She told us why in a Zoom conversation, edited here for length and clarity. For that, she is waiting until publication day. Though Wang interviewed her parents for the book and fact-checked portions of it with them for accuracy, she has not shown them the finished product. Nonetheless, her education culminated with a degree from Yale Law School, and she continues to work as a civil rights litigator in a firm she founded with her husband. Starting school in second grade, she was shunted into a special ed classroom where she had to teach herself to read on her own. From the age of 7, she worked alongside her mother in a garment-industry sweatshop and in a freezing sushi factory. Nonetheless, after his traumatic experiences as a child during the Cultural Revolution, her father remained fiercely loyal to the “beautiful country,” which is the literal translation of Mei Guo, the Chinese word for America.īut beautiful is not the word for most of the experiences Wang describes. While both were professors in China, in the United States they did backbreaking menial labor and lived in constant terror and privation well below the poverty line. 7), tells the story of “how one little girl found her way through the terror, hunger, exhaustion, and cruelty of an undocumented childhood in New York’s Chinatown…engaging readers through all five senses and the heart.” It is also Wang’s parents’ story. According to our reviewer, Qian Julie Wang’s debut memoir, Beautiful Country (Doubleday, Sept.
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