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4.25 AVERAGE
4.25 AVERAGE
Beautifully written. What I find unique about this memoir is how it is solely on her childhood and the experience of being undocumented in the US and does not expand into her adult years.
I’ve been trying to read more memoirs the past couple years, this one was recommended by a colleague. This was an interesting one, because she only gives us a snapshot of the first 2 ish years of her life in America — 2 years that for a long time she was pressured to be silent about. So this memoir reads like she is telling the story of another girl: someone she had to dig deep to find & remember. Really raw writing.
I think that this memoir was well written, but I wish that it hadn't focused so heavily on her childhood in NY. I get that the title, "Beautiful Country," is the translation of the Chinese word for America, but I can only assume the title was decided after the actual writing. The book focuses so heavily on her awful time as an undocumented immigrant in America, that it just felt like trauma porn. For a memoir, I expect more than just a childhood that ends at the author starting middle school and then wraps up with the move to Canada and her current career being very lightly glossed over. The reader feels sadness and sympathy for the author's childhood, but then is given no chance to celebrate her rise and her current life.
Also, I hope Marilyn lived her best damn life out on the streets.
Also, I hope Marilyn lived her best damn life out on the streets.
READ THIS BOOK. This is so wonderful. Qian comes to America when she is seven years old. In China, both of her parents are professors. Her father in particular had to survive some particularly harsh circumstances under the communist regime, but in America, they slave at sweatshops, their bodies contorted in painful configurations for hours on end doing menial tasks, sometimes in cold so bitter their hands turn purple. There is never enough to eat, and what food they do have is full of sodium and lacks nutrition.
Qian is an amazingly gifted writer. At times she tells this story with a journalistic distance of merely reporting what happened when it should be an opinion piece full of anger at all the inequities and horrors her family survived. I personally was furious with the white male teacher who thought there was no way Qian could possibly write such elegant, error-free essays and assumed she cheated. When she gets into a junior high for gifted students, he essentially tells her that she shouldn’t get big dreams that can’t possibly come true.
At other times this reads as lyrically as a fictional novel, or maybe I just wanted it to be fictional because their mistreatment, lack of medical care, and awful living conditions are too harsh for me to want to believe many undocumented immigrants have to survive this way.
This is such a good book. Highly recommend. Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this memoir.
Qian is an amazingly gifted writer. At times she tells this story with a journalistic distance of merely reporting what happened when it should be an opinion piece full of anger at all the inequities and horrors her family survived. I personally was furious with the white male teacher who thought there was no way Qian could possibly write such elegant, error-free essays and assumed she cheated. When she gets into a junior high for gifted students, he essentially tells her that she shouldn’t get big dreams that can’t possibly come true.
At other times this reads as lyrically as a fictional novel, or maybe I just wanted it to be fictional because their mistreatment, lack of medical care, and awful living conditions are too harsh for me to want to believe many undocumented immigrants have to survive this way.
This is such a good book. Highly recommend. Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this memoir.
This memoir details the trauma of an undocumented family, specifically, the young girl who bears the weight of discovery, fear, hunger, racism and truths a child should not have to bear. This is a heart breaking and important read to understand the ugly underbelly and shadow of undocumented children and families in the US.