'Beautiful Country' looks back on a young Chinese girl's undocumented childhood

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2021

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Living as an undocumented immigrant means living in the shadows, says Qian Julie Wang. Her memoir Beautiful Country tells the story of her family's life in New York after fleeing China in 1994. Her mother worked menial jobs in terrible conditions. Her father struggled with his status as a man in a country that equated being Asian with weakness. They couldn't even seek out regular medical care for fear of being deported. Wang joins NPR's Scott Simon in today's episode to talk about how those experiences shaped and shamed her, even as she became a Yale Law graduate and successful attorney.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh.
0:05.8	Something that I think gets lost in the coverage of undocumented immigrants living in America
0:11.0	is how stressful the day-to-day life is.
0:14.7	Every minute you're worried and nervous about this big secret getting out.
0:19.4	And just that doing something as basic as, I don't know,
0:22.2	going to the doctor could get you deported. That's what it was like for Chan Julie Wong. Her
0:27.7	Nie memoir, Beautiful Country, is all about the undocumented immigrant experience. And in this
0:33.2	interview with NPR Scott Simon, she talks about growing up living in that shadow and what finally
0:38.7	pushed her to share her story. Here's the interview. In the U.S., national security news can feel
0:44.6	far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our
0:51.3	new show, sources and methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of
0:55.5	real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and
1:01.7	methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. The story of Chan Julie Wong,
1:09.3	as she explains, begins before she was born.
1:13.0	Her uncle, a teen at the time, was arrested for criticizing Mao Zedong,
1:16.4	and her father's family lived under a hail of rocks, pebbles, slurs, and worse.
1:23.5	Her family escaped the United States, New York, in 1994, but were undocumented.
1:29.8	And they had to live in the Chinese phrase as people in, hey, the dark, the shadows,
1:35.1	the underground world of undocumented immigrants who work menial jobs off the books,
1:40.7	in fear that their underground existence might be exposed.
1:45.2	John Julie Wong, who is a Yale law graduate, now an attorney,
1:48.5	has written a memoir, Beautiful Country.
	...

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