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A review by liralen
Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang
4.0
Wang moved to New York as a young child, too young to understand the full background of her parents' decisions but old enough to understand the consequences. Hers was a shadow life: constantly alert for the dangers of authorities who might deport them; slipping between school and sweatshop and increasingly unhappy home. Her parents moved for a better life, but they knew that 'better' was in the far-off future, perhaps not until Wang herself was an adult.
Beautiful Country hews closely to those early childhood years in New York, when Wang was scouring the sidewalks with her parents for cast-offs they could use at home (must be light enough to carry home, must be useful, must not be so precious that it could not be left behind); when she was placed in a Special Ed class because her teacher didn't want to deal with her lack of English; when illness wiped out her family's savings and her parents' marriage floundered and her mother—who had advanced degrees—worked in sweatshop after sweatshop to try to keep a roof over their head. The book ends fairly abruptly, just as Wang's transition to the next stage of her life (no spoilers here) must have gone, and I wonder whether at some point down the line we'll see a follow-up.
Our new home was a little bigger, a little brighter, a little safer. It was on the first floor of a two-story house that was laid out as if on a railroad track, one long skinny line, with windows on one side only. Our landlords, a gentle couple with two sons around my age, lived on the entire second floor. They could afford the home because, as Ma Ma leaned over to whisper to me after our first meeting, they were among the workers in the sweatshops who sewed buttons, and they had been in America so long that both their sons had been born here. This gave me hope. Perhaps by the time I had my own children—who would be real, true Americans—I might be able to afford to live on an entire floor of a house. (114)That's what poverty and disenfranchisement does to a child: makes her dream of a better position in a sweatshop someday. It's impossible not to see the sacrifice in Wang's parents decisions, not just on their part but on Wang's.
Beautiful Country hews closely to those early childhood years in New York, when Wang was scouring the sidewalks with her parents for cast-offs they could use at home (must be light enough to carry home, must be useful, must not be so precious that it could not be left behind); when she was placed in a Special Ed class because her teacher didn't want to deal with her lack of English; when illness wiped out her family's savings and her parents' marriage floundered and her mother—who had advanced degrees—worked in sweatshop after sweatshop to try to keep a roof over their head. The book ends fairly abruptly, just as Wang's transition to the next stage of her life (no spoilers here) must have gone, and I wonder whether at some point down the line we'll see a follow-up.