China: Beautiful Country

This week I read Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang. Qian was born in China, but her family left for the United States when she was seven years old in 1994. Wang and her mom followed her father to New York City. The title of the novel comes from the Chinese name for the United States, Mei Guo, or “beautiful country”. Zhong Guo, the Chinese word for China, means “central state”. China covers a major part of East Asia and shares borders with 14 countries: Mongolia, Russia, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. With a population of 1.4 billion it is the most populous country in the world.

The first few chapters of the novel describe Wang’s early childhood in China. While her family’s motivations for leaving China were due to the conservative political state of the country, Wang has wonderful memories of China.

She remembers the family and the love that she was constantly surrounded by, how popular she was at school, and how she never went hungry.

Things start to crack a little when her father leaves for the U.S. before her and her mother, fleeing his dangerous job as a professor.

The Chinese word for being undocumented is “hei”, which translates to “being in the dark”. On top of the overwhelming journey of being an immigrant Wang and her parents are undocumented in the bustling, confusing city of New York, this leaves Wang feeling like she is in the dark. While her and her family speak Mandarin, everyone they meet in Chinatown speaks Cantonese and even among the community that should feel familiar, they are isolated. Wang is also cloaked in literal darkness, as her mother drapes cloth over their windows and turns off the lights, terrified of the American streets and the city.

While in China, both of her parents were professors, but as undocumented immigrants they are unable apply for the jobs they once could. Wang accompanies her mother on her various jobs, some months working alongside her in a sweatshop, earning three cents for each shirt sewn, or at a fish processing plant where the cold temperature made their skin blue.

The five years that Wang and her parents spend undocumented in New York are filled with struggle, confusion, and the weight of perception. Wang lives through the struggles of poverty and hunger, while at the same time she is beginning to understand who she is. Her perception of herself rewrites itself as she begins to gain an understanding of how she is viewed in the U.S. not only by white Americans, but by Chinese Americans as well.

She documents the first time she watched The Simpsons and saw their portrayal of Asian characters, she had no idea “before then that Chinese eyes were supposed to look like that, but it quickly became how [she] saw herself, teaching [her] that there was something wrong”.

Books and media had a large impact on Wang and how she saw herself. The portrayals weren’t all bad, her favorite, and part of her later inspiration for a change to her name, was Julie on The Puzzle Palace. The show had racially diverse characters, and Wang liked it because even though they were different, they all did the same things. She was also a voracious reader, teaching herself English through picture books, when she was moved into the Special Education class in elementary school due to her language difference.

Wang’s childhood was colored by the fears of her parents. The fear that they would be discovered and sent back to China, as well as the fear that they would never fit into this new life they sacrificed everything to get. She was instructed not to open up to anyone and in the months before she started school her father had her repeat the phrases, “I was born here. I have always lived in America”. Even at a school located in Chinatown she was ostracized by her classmates, separated by language, but also by secrets.

Wang says that in hindsight some of the things her parents made her do were exaggerated, but their “fear was gaseous: it expanded to fill [their] entire world”. They are literally living in survival mode, subjecting themselves to situations that range from uncomfortable to dangerous in order to make enough money to eat, or to gain connections that may help them obtain green cards in the future. Wang is also taught to live as if everything is ephemeral, that their lives could be taken away at any moment. This teaches her to distance herself from peers in the name of survival. Her parents emphasized to her that “so long as [they] didn’t stake claim to what wasn’t [theirs]- the things, [their] rooms, America, this beautiful country- [they] would be okay”.

In school Wang was instructed to not make a fuss and to not attract any unnecessary attention. Though her father had left China to escape the limitations on free speech, his personality changed among Americans, “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 had 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”. Wang adopts this sense of shame and silence, but also a distinct isolation that prioritizes herself over others.

In her new middle school, a gifted school that was more diverse than anywhere Wang had previously been, she adopts the personality of a bully. She will do or say anything, throw anyone, even her friends, under the bus in order to assert herself as normal, and as American.

Living in America changed her parents as well and Wang lives through the breakdown of their marriage. Their relationship cracks under the pressure of medical issues, poverty, and the daily struggles of undocumented life. Wang describes the change in relationship between her and her parents, where what was once encouraging and outwardly loving, became something darker. She remembers relishing the dinners where her parents would criticize and demean her intellect, her body, and anything else about her they found subpar, simply for the fact that her parents agreed about something.

At some point it all comes to a head. Her mother picks her up from school one day, the back seat filled with their belongings, and the two of them run away to Canada, where her Mother had secretly secured them papers, though her Father does end up joining them. With these papers secured they were now free to travel back to China and see the family they had left behind. On their first visit since they fled five years ago, Wang describes her two selves, English and Chinese, she found that “where in English she was logical, distant, hardened, in Chinese she was excitable, warm, still tender.”

Even with the security of Canadian papers and a new life spread out before them, Wang is still encouraged to keep her past a secret. She changes her name from Qian to Julie and attempts to live out a normal life, like her time in New York never happened. Still feeling like she left New York with something unfinished she moves back for higher education and begins working for a law firm there. It is with her boss that she first shares her undocumented past and where she breaks the silence on the shame that had been weighing her down since childhood.

Qian’s story is one of a struggle to survive, but also a story of self acceptance. Her final chapter “How It Begins” closes out the story with the meeting of Qian Qian and Julie, the melding of her two selves. She is Chinese, she is American, she is Canadian.

She was undocumented. In her author's note she says that it takes a certain level of foolishness to write your first novel about your deepest childhood trauma, but she possessed the foolishness, the support, and the luck to make it happen. It is a cathartic unearthing of every secret she was made to keep and as the reader you feel every moment of it.