03764cam a2200421 i 4500 518362034 TxGeo 20210908120000.0 210426s2021||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2020053188 9780385547215 hardcover 0385547218 hardcover (OCoLC)1229028601 TxGeo rda Wang, Qian Julie, 1987- Beautiful country : a memoir / Qian Julie Wang. First edition. New York [New York : Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, [2021] x, 305 pages : illustration ; 25 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier sti rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier 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. "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"-- Provided by publisher. 20211029. Wang, Qian Julie 1987- Childhood and youth. Wang, Qian Julie 1987- Family. Chinese Americans New York (State) New York Biography. 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. Autobiographies. QS5