Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - Beautiful Country

Reviews tagging 'Suicidal thoughts'

Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang

8 reviews

xeniba's review against another edition

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4.5

I felt this was beautifully written, though difficult to read at times because of the trauma the author experienced. I’m grateful to the author for being so transparent and sharing her story.

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shakakan's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

4.0

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newtons's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

5.0

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just_one_more_paige's review against another edition

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5.0

I'd seen a few reviews and/or TBR stacks featuring this memoir, but it shot to the top of my personal TBR when I read a twitter thread about a horrible interaction the author had with an attendee at an event at which she was on a speaker panel. It was infuriating to read about, so I'm sure I cannot imagine the anger living through it caused, and it made me want to pick this book up even faster, in my own small personal show of support (and spite). I don't know what that says about me, but make of it what you will.

Qian Julie Wang spent the first years of her life in China, but at age seven, she and her mother flew to join her father in Brooklyn, NY. For the next five years, the three lived in the "underground" of NYC reserved for undocumented immigrants. In this memoir, Wang recounts these years of her life in detail, from the family work in sweatshops to the poverty (and food insecurity) they faced to the lack of access to medical care to the adjustment to (low) academic expectations from teachers as a (low-income) immigrant to anti-Asian racism and Asian female fetishization to the ever-present threat of deportation (and the way that affects the ability to/comfort in reaching out for assistance in a variety of settings/situations).

As expected, an author-narrator memoir always brings a little something extra to the reading experience, so on top of what would have already been a phenomenal book, listening to the audio for this one made it that much more special of an experience. Because let me just start by very clearly stating that this was a phenomenal memoir. The detail and emotion in Wang's memories, the honesty and vulnerability in the experiences she shares, combined for a profound and visceral work of nonfiction.

The way Wang puts into words the day to day life of a young immigrant child, both in the small details and in the larger vibes, in particular the way they interpret the “shadows” their parents now carry and that fall over everything that was once familiar, is aching. The family's ever present fear (and related anxiety and stress) of being found out, found without papers, that infused every moment and decision, even for Wang as a child - it just puts one's own youthful experiences into such perspective. It was especially affecting to watch innocence in her perspective as it slowly eroded over her years in NYC, in particular as she writes about her role as a therapist and advisor and protector for parents who were equally (if not more) lost and adrift. The matter of factness with which she talked about choices like lying about getting food at school and surviving the resulting hunger pangs, just to help/protect them, is heartbreaking. Just, so much loss of childhood and the carelessness that should come with those years. At the same time, Wang shares the moments of light, the (small, and few-and-far-between) things that provided some much needed counterbalance, like trying pizza for the first time, the lights in the city during Christmas, itemizing the gifts she receives, her time in libraries, to great emotional effect.

Towards the end of this memoir, Wang takes some time to reflect on how it was only later, as an adult, that the full weight of what her childhood looked like, as an undocumented immigrant in NYC, really came into full understanding for her. She speaks to how the heaviness of those years will forever be a part of and shape who she is today in a way that cannot be fully escaped or grown out of, no matter "how far she's come" since then. And she explores the bars of circumstance and documents and fear and trauma, the way that those bars left her (and her parents) not knowing how to fully break free even once the option of safety is there. Readers are left with Wang's reflections on the challenges of acceptance and healing and reclaiming life, the reality of the scars of her childhood experiences making it hard to move forwards into the future with (very much deserved) grace for herself.

Wang brings the voice of her youth to life in these pages for the world to see, with uncompromising and sincere narration. A phenomenal memoir.

“She would say this more and more to me during our time to come in Mei Guo. Be silent. Say nothing. My voice no longer had a place.”

“But in the vacuum of anxiety that was undocumented life, fear was gaseous: it expanded to fill our entire world until it was all we could breathe.”

“I did not understand then that there are few things more activating than the quiet desperation of a dignified woman.”

“Our family was closest when facing pain.”

“How cruel it was that home could be so temporary.”

“…see us living her dream - leaving this awful, beautiful country for a different place, a world where we were just as human as everyone else.”

“…I thought about what happened when people and animals died. Where did this brain go that carried so many fears? Where did this heart go that pulsed with so much pain?”

“It is odd, the images that come to your mind once you know you'll never see any of it again.”

“The sunlight shines too brightly onto the fault lines the preceding five years had carved into our little family. Possibilities open anew before us, but we cannot see past the razor edges we had grown for protection in that beautiful country.”

“You cannot know that some things are not enough until you have them.”

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pollyflorence's review against another edition

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4.75

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the_literarylinguist's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.25

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ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition

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4.0

“Well, isn’t it nice to know, Qian Qian, that we’re not alone?” But I didn’t think it was nice at all. It didn’t seem right that there were many more people out there feeling alone and homesick and hungry in the same moments when we were feeling those things. Hundreds of lonely people, I figured, was far worse than three lonely people.”

TITLE—Beautiful Country

AUTHOR—Qian Julie Wang

PUBLISHED—September 2021

GENRE—memoir, nonfiction

SETTING—the story begins in China and continues in America (in 1994, when the MC moves to the US, she is 7 years old)

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—immigration, undocumented immigrant experience, Chinese-American identity, fear, poverty, oppression, corruption, exploitation, trauma, family, community, coming of age

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️

“I did not need to turn to Ba Ba to know that he would have no questions. He asked fewer and fewer questions in America. Somehow, by leaving China, Ba Ba had grown more Chinese, starting to adopt our government’s silly ideas about how asking questions was bad and disrespectful. He took on the form of what America expected of us: docile, meek. He had even started teaching me the importance of keeping my head down, of not asking any questions or drawing any attention, seemingly forgetting that he had taught me the exact opposite in China.”

There are an infinite number of individuals differing perspectives and life experiences and reading is a great way to expose yourself to as many of them as possible and this book certainly did that for me. This book taught me a lot and I’m so glad I got the chance to read it. ❤️

A couple observations:

I couldn’t get over the fact that the author and I are the same age. So while she was describing what her life was like as a seven-year-old, in the same country, at the same time, as I was growing up as a seven-year-old… it was really surreal. Especially when she and I actually had a lot of similar life experiences (due to both of our family’s extreme poverty, obviously not bc I have any idea what it’s like to be an undocumented immigrant) but her story about the hello kitty pencil, the polly pockets, and the tamagotchi, and her experiences at school with lunch vouchers and becoming a bully in order to compensate for her lack of self esteem due to the traumas of poverty in her friend group, and her experience of the public library as a huge sanctuary… There was so much I related to on such a deep level! 😅

I was a little confused about how I was supposed to feel about the fact that the author seemed to feel that NYC was her “real” home, and she ended up falling in love with NYC/America (where she attended college and eventually lived permanently), when she and her family had ended up needing to move to Canada in order to be safe… I wish I could have gotten a bit more clarity on why this was from the book… perhaps it was there and I missed it.

“Ma Ma turned to me and instructed, “Bie shuo hua.” She would say this more and more to me during our time to come in Mei Guo. Be silent. Say nothing. My voice no longer had a place.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TW // trauma, poverty, animal death, suicidal thoughts, sexual harassment, animal cruelty, vomit

Further Reading—

Zami, by Audre Lorde
To Hair and Back, by Rhonda Eason
The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio—TBR

Favorite Quotes…

“The Chinese refer to being undocumented colloquially as “hei”: being in the dark, being blacked out. And aptly so, because we spent those years shrouded in darkness while wrestling with hope and dignity.”

“Ba Ba had left for Mei Guo, America, two years earlier, and Ma Ma had been trying to get a visitor’s visa for almost a year. Four times, Ma Ma left our home and traveled hours away to Beijing, where the embassy for Mei Guo, a name that translated literally into “Beautiful Country,” kept telling her no.”

“All I remember is getting the blood test results and finding out that my blood was not Type A, but rather what I knew, from the order of the English alphabet, to be the inferior Type B. My face drooped and I shared my dismay with Ma Ma, who laughed and laughed and said not to worry—she was Type B, too. This did not reassure me at all. It told me only that my inferiority was coded into my blood and my genes.”

“The white characters had darker yellow skin and the Chinese characters had lighter yellow skin. I knew they were supposed to be Chinese because they had eyes that were thinner, elongated, and slanted. I had no idea before then that Chinese eyes were supposed to look like that, but it quickly became how I saw myself, teaching me then that there was something wrong with my eyes.”

“We didn’t eat much in the kitchen, but I spent a lot of time there anyway. At night, long after all of the tenants had eaten their last meals and had returned to their one-room apartments, I snuck back. I liked to cower under the light switch and listen to the tap-tap-taps against the wood-like walls across the entire kitchen. Counting to an arbitrary number in silence—sometimes ten, sometimes two—I stayed crouched but reached up and flicked the light switch as quickly as I could. I then watched the walls as they receded in color from dark brown to tan as the cockroaches that papered them in darkness retreated to their lairs. As soon as the walls regained their full tan color, I flicked the switch back down again, waiting and listening as a single tap emerged, then another, and then another, a new chorus crescendoing. And then, as with mother hen, the game would start anew.”

This is one of the most morbid things I've ever read :-|

“He would happily eat America’s shit before feasting on China’s fruits.”

“…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.”

“Why should I have to change what I was called just because their tongues were too clumsy?”

“Money, I thought, protected people from everything. In China, we had money and no problems. In America, we had no money and only problems. Money was the cure.”

“I became a habitual liar. Alternate lives spewed out of my mouth before circuiting my brain. I started small but soon advanced to bigger, more extravagant creations.”

“Did you know that there are many sweatshops in Chinatown?” Most of our parents worked in one. “Most of your parents are uneducated. They can only work in sweatshops.” That wasn’t the reason.”

“The problem, Ma Ma explained, was that his childhood left in him a fear so big that it eclipsed everything, even the people he loved most. Especially the people he loved most.”

“Try to understand her instead of judging her, Qian Qian,” Ma Ma had said. “You are luckier than her because you know you are worth more than that.”

“It was then that I realized I could be homesick for a place even though I no longer knew where home was.”

“Wo zai zhe li sheng de. Wo yi zhi jiu zai Mei Guo. I was born here. I’ve always lived in America.”

“Will we be locked up?” “Don’t worry, Qian Qian.” But what do I have but worry, after all this time?”

“…apparently free and safe, but really behind bars wrought from trauma.”

From the Acknowledgements: “It takes a certain level of foolishness to build your first book around your deepest childhood traumas.”

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bookmaddie's review against another edition

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5.0

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