Review of BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
A memoir of coming to America
One of the reasons I love memoirs is to learn about someone’s experience through life, all the nuance and uniqueness each path entails. This is particularly poignant with regard to experiences of immigration and race. Our cultural discourse has become extraordinarily shallow and parochial about race in the last decade. I’ve found that reading about people’s individual experiences through memoirs offers a deeper understanding of different race and class experiences than does reading scholarship on the topic (even as an academic myself).
I hadn’t previously heard of this memoir, but I was gifted it for Christmas and I’m so happy to have received it. Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang is a stunning memoir of a little girl’s experience immigrating from China to the United States offering a moving perspective of one of the varied realities that is living in the US.
Qian tells the story of her immigration experience to the US and the following few years, covering a span of around five years during elementary school. Her parents, accomplished professors in China, were motivated to leave a country that did not allow them to think and speak freely. Her dad traveled to the US first, and after a couple of years of separation, her and her mother finally followed on a travel visa, but with no intention to return to China.
Her parents, stripped of their status in a new country and undocumented, had to shift from working in academic environments to a sweatshop in Chinatown, New York City. Living in single rooms in homes and subject to racism every day. Qian, however, had little concept that they were of such low socioeconomic status; ignorance being a small glimmer of bliss in an otherwise dark childhood.
Her parents were doing the best that is possible of undocumented immigrants in the big city, but her childhood experience is one marked by incredible loneliness. She spent much of her early years being a source of comfort for her mother. Her early school experiences were characterized by ostracization as she struggled to find her social footing and English tongue. In the absence of others for love and support, she internalized her needs and foraged onward, alone.
Qian’s early childhood story is also a great showcase of the nuance and variety of immigrant experiences and becoming racialized upon arrival to America – a country that has made race such a central feature of people’s identity. It’s stories like these that more folks should read to get a deeper and more accurate perspective on the diverse experiences of living in America.
Beautiful Country was a moving book – one I couldn’t put down but couldn’t seem to read fast enough. It’s written in a very narrative style making it easy to consume. It’s one of those memoirs that you read and feel completely engrossed in, feeling all at once right there with Qian yet also so distant in from her experience. This is a fantastic book for those looking for an engrossing read.
Published: September 2021
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Lakshmi (2017) | Read my review
Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams (2019)
Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America by Sharmila Sen (2018)
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Cool 😎