NCB Adult Book Discussion In-Person
Beautiful Country: a memoir by Qian Julie Wang
Wang's 5 years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to NYC in 1994. In Chinese the word for the United States, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country," but when 7-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm, 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 put into special education and humiliated by teachers. 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.