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Beautiful country : a memoir / Qian Julie Wang.

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 implicitly 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

  • ISBN: 9780385547215
  • ISBN: 0385547218
  • Physical Description: x, 305 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
  • Edition: First edition.
  • Publisher: New York : Doubleday, [2021]

Content descriptions

General Note:
"Read with Jenna"--Cover
Formatted Contents Note:
How it began -- Home -- Ascent -- Dances and shadows -- Type B -- The beautiful country -- Silk -- Native speaker -- Dumplings -- Sushi -- Lights -- Chatham Square -- Hair -- Shopping day -- McDonald's -- Sleepover -- Trapdoors -- Solid ground -- Auntie love -- Normalcy -- Marilyn -- Graffiti -- Julie -- Hospital -- Mothers -- Surgery -- Gifted -- Graduation -- Tamagotchi -- Community -- Gone -- Home -- How it begins.
Subject: Wang, Qian Julie, 1987- > Childhood and youth.
Chinese Americans > New York (State) > New York > Biography.
Wang, Qian Julie, 1987- > Family.
Immigrants > New York (State) > New York > Biography.
Undocumented immigrants > New York (State) > New York > Biography.
Shijiazhuang Shi (China) > Biography.
Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) > Biography.
Genre: Biography.

Available copies

  • 49 of 50 copies available at SPARK Libraries.

Holds

  • 3 current holds with 50 total copies.
Show Only Available Copies
Location Call Number / Copy Notes Barcode Shelving Location Status Due Date
Abington Community Library 92 WANG (Text) 50687011738690 Adult Nonfiction Available -
Albright Memorial Library 92 WANG (Text) 50686016110988 Adult Nonfiction Available -
Alexander Hamilton Memorial Free Library B WAN (Text) 37268003113131 AHMFL Biography Available -
Altoona Area Public Library 974.7 WAN (Text) 33240004939883 Adult Nonfiction Available -
Bangor Public Library B 92 WAN (Text) 75011000361565 Adult Biography Available -
Bethel Tulpehocken Public Library 974.71 WAN (Text) 33249024474482 Non-fiction Available -
Boyertown Community Library WAN (Text) 33249024820254 Biography Available -
Cambria County Library 974.71 W246b (Text) 85131001793018 CACM Non-Fiction Available -
Dalton Community Library 92 WANG (Text) 50689010447208 Adult Nonfiction Available -
Dalton Community Library 92 WANG (Text) 50689090005603 Browsing Available -


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