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theresaalan41 's review for:
Beautiful Country
by Qian Julie Wang
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.