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The Resource Beautiful country : a memoir, by Qian Julie Wang

Beautiful country : a memoir, by Qian Julie Wang

Creator
Author
Summary
"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay. An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to New York City in 1994. In Chinese the word for the United States, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country," but when seven-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm and happy childhood surrounded by extended family in China, she finds a world of crushing fear and poverty instead. Unable to speak English at first, Qian is isolated and disregarded, put into special education classes because she doesn't speak the language and humiliated by teachers and classmates when she struggles to pay attention because of hunger or exhaustion. She encounters racism, and people of other races, for the first time, shocked at where her family fits in comparison to their status as educated elites in China. After school she works shifts alongside her mother in Chinatown sweatshops. There is so much about Qian's new home that doesn't make sense, but the rules of survival are drilled into her head: If you see a policeman, you must run in the other direction. If anyone asks--or even if they don't--you tell them you were born here. Do as you're told or we could be separated forever. Understanding impliclity the toll this has taken on her parents, Qian tries desperately to cheer them up and mediate their increasingly heated arguments, certain that if she is good enough, she can hold the family together. In remarkable, unsentimental prose Wang channels her childhood perspective, illuminating the cruelty and indignity of America's immigration system, while also crafting a narrative of resilience from her family's small moments of joy: their first slice of pizza, "shopping days" when the family would unearth unlikely treasures in Brooklyn's trash, and the necessary escape she found in books at the local library. Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential book about the cost of making a home in a hostile land from an astonishing new talent"--
Language
eng
Work
Publication
Edition
First edition.
Extent
x, 305 pages
Isbn
9780385547215
Instance
Label
Beautiful country : a memoir
Title
Beautiful country
Title remainder
a memoir
Statement of responsibility
by Qian Julie Wang
Creator
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay. An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to New York City in 1994. In Chinese the word for the United States, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country," but when seven-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm and happy childhood surrounded by extended family in China, she finds a world of crushing fear and poverty instead. Unable to speak English at first, Qian is isolated and disregarded, put into special education classes because she doesn't speak the language and humiliated by teachers and classmates when she struggles to pay attention because of hunger or exhaustion. She encounters racism, and people of other races, for the first time, shocked at where her family fits in comparison to their status as educated elites in China. After school she works shifts alongside her mother in Chinatown sweatshops. There is so much about Qian's new home that doesn't make sense, but the rules of survival are drilled into her head: If you see a policeman, you must run in the other direction. If anyone asks--or even if they don't--you tell them you were born here. Do as you're told or we could be separated forever. Understanding impliclity the toll this has taken on her parents, Qian tries desperately to cheer them up and mediate their increasingly heated arguments, certain that if she is good enough, she can hold the family together. In remarkable, unsentimental prose Wang channels her childhood perspective, illuminating the cruelty and indignity of America's immigration system, while also crafting a narrative of resilience from her family's small moments of joy: their first slice of pizza, "shopping days" when the family would unearth unlikely treasures in Brooklyn's trash, and the necessary escape she found in books at the local library. Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential book about the cost of making a home in a hostile land from an astonishing new talent"--
Assigning source
Provided by publisher
Biography type
autobiography
Cataloging source
DLC
http://library.link/vocab/creatorDate
1987-
http://library.link/vocab/creatorName
Wang, Qian Julie
Dewey number
  • 974.7/10049510092
  • B
Illustrations
illustrations
Index
no index present
LC call number
F128.9.C5
LC item number
W35 2021
Literary form
non fiction
http://library.link/vocab/subjectName
  • Wang, Qian Julie
  • Chinese Americans
  • Wang, Qian Julie
  • Immigrants
  • Illegal aliens
  • Shijiazhuang Shi (China)
  • Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)
Label
Beautiful country : a memoir, by Qian Julie Wang
Instantiates
Publication
Carrier category
volume
Carrier category code
  • nc
Carrier MARC source
rdacarrier
Content category
text
Content type code
  • txt
Content type MARC source
rdacontent
Control code
on1265725569
Dimensions
25 cm
Edition
First edition.
Extent
x, 305 pages
Isbn
9780385547215
Lccn
2020053188
Media category
unmediated
Media MARC source
rdamedia
Media type code
  • n
Other physical details
illustration
System control number
(OCoLC)1265725569
Label
Beautiful country : a memoir, by Qian Julie Wang
Publication
Carrier category
volume
Carrier category code
  • nc
Carrier MARC source
rdacarrier
Content category
text
Content type code
  • txt
Content type MARC source
rdacontent
Control code
on1265725569
Dimensions
25 cm
Edition
First edition.
Extent
x, 305 pages
Isbn
9780385547215
Lccn
2020053188
Media category
unmediated
Media MARC source
rdamedia
Media type code
  • n
Other physical details
illustration
System control number
(OCoLC)1265725569

Subject

Genre

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    • T.O.H.P. Burnham Free Library (Essex)Borrow it
      30 Martin Street, Essex, MA, 01929, US
      42.62254 -70.817971

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