Beautiful Country : : a Memoir
Book - 2021 Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Wang, Qian Julie, 921 Wang, Qian 3 On Shelf No requests on this item
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Call Number: Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Wang, Qian Julie, 921 Wang, Qian
On Shelf At: Pittsfield Branch, Traverwood Branch, Westgate Branch
Location & Checkout Length | Call Number | Checkout Length | Item Status |
---|---|---|---|
Pittsfield Adult Books 2-week checkout |
Express Shelf Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Wang, Qian Julie | 2-week checkout | On Shelf |
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Wang, Qian Julie | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Wang, Qian Julie | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout |
921 Wang, Qian | 4-week checkout | Due 04-19-2024 |
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout |
921 Wang, Qian | 4-week checkout | Due 05-21-2024 |
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Wang, Qian Julie | 4-week checkout | Due 05-02-2024 |
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Wang, Qian Julie | 4-week checkout | Due 05-02-2024 |
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / General / Wang, Qian Julie | 4-week checkout | Due 05-02-2024 |
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.
"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"-- Provided by publisher.
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COMMUNITY REVIEWS
A must-read book submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on June 15, 2022, 10:39pm What a necessary, beautiful, and painful book. This memoir of immigration, poverty, fear, and survival is a must-read to open Americans’ eyes to our neighbors’ lives.
Heartbreaking submitted by bjkoch on July 11, 2022, 8:41am Raw account of life as an immigrant
PUBLISHED
New York : Doubleday, [2021]
Year Published: 2021
Description: 305 pages ; 25cm
Language: English
Format: Book
ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
9780385547215
0385547218
SUBJECTS
Wang, Qian Julie, -- 1987- -- Childhood and youth.
Wang, Qian Julie, -- 1987- -- Family.
Chinese Americans -- New York -- Biography.
Immigrants -- New York -- Biography.
Undocumented immigrants -- New York -- Biography.
Shijiazhuang Shi (China) -- Biography.
Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Biography.