October 2025 - Beautiful Country, a memoir by Qian Julie Wang

^{Post Composed by Ralph Edwards}

Beautiful Country, a memoir by Qian Julie Wang

(October 28 is National Immigrants Day)

 What a country!    What a beautiful country!

With the exception of the original people who settled here a thousand years ago, tilled the land and formed nations whose precepts were incorporated into the founding principles of the United States and the enslaved Africans, stolen, shackled and first brought ashore in 1619, all of the denizens of this great nation are immigrants.  October 28^th is National Immigrants Day.  The S.U.R.E. Book Club curator deftly selected Beautiful Country, a memoir by Qian Julie Wang as the month’s read.  The book informs and refines our appreciation of the immigrant experience by its empathic insightfulness into the lives of a Chinese immigrant family.  Beginning in the 60’s, the SE Asian and Middle Eastern wars projected Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, and Muslim refugees to the immigration forefront supplanted today with migrants from South of the Border.  Chinese immigration has been largely out of the spotlight since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

In today’s heighten emphasis on discovering, capturing, incarceration and “disappearing” Spanish speaking, undocumented immigrants, Qian Julie Wang’s family would likely be under the ICE radar.  But in 1994 when she arrived in Brooklyn at seven years of age, their fear and terror of discovery permeated every aspect of their life.  Her parents, educated professionals in China, worked menial jobs, cleaning, sewing, restaurants in Chinatown.  The hardships, the poverty, the diminutive status took its toll on the family, emotionally and psychologically; creating dysfunctional dynamics.  Her childcare was working alongside her mother in a variety of sweatshops. As a non-English speaker, she was initially put into the Special Education class. The discovery of the library and bookstores became her refuge and books, an alternate family.

Of course, this is an overcoming the obstacles, success story.  Qian Julie Wang eventually graduates from Yale and becomes a successful lawyer; much of her work focusing on immigrants . . . even while she was still undocumented!

It was revealing to me that members of the so-called “perfect minority” also share the degrading, exploitive experience of other minority immigrants.  And that Qian Julie Wang becomes another example of the promise of America.