“It expanded to fill our entire world until it was all we could breathe.”įiction serves as both guidebook and lifeline for this young student, who proves to be a sponge for language. “In the vacuum of anxiety that was undocumented life, fear was gaseous,” Wang writes. We taste their worry about deportation and the loneliness of being an only child of parents torn apart by dread. Unlike other memoirists looking back through a scrim of nostalgia, Wang doesn’t romanticize her parents’ hard-knock decisions - Marilyn’s fate is among them - or the family’s difficult, sometimes desperate circumstances. For a time, she painstakingly cares for a skinny cat named Marilyn. A family friend takes her to Macy’s to pick out a graduation dress. There are also moments of joy: Wang spots six coveted candy-colored Polly Pockets inside a translucent trash bag. There’s the humiliating first day of school, when Wang gets snubbed by a classmate who speaks Mandarin the hunger (“Our kitchen contained more cockroaches than food”) the lack of privacy in a building shared with strangers. (If you have an Irish last name like I do, “ Angela’s Ashes” might come to mind.) What sets Wang’s memoir apart is the narrowness of its scope: She covers a short period of time, from second grade through middle school, so you feel as if you’re traveling with her on foot instead of observing by drone. And aptly so, because we spent those years shrouded in darkness while wrestling with hope and dignity.”Ĭhances are, you’ve read an immigration story or two. “The Chinese refer to being undocumented colloquially as ‘hei’: being in the dark, being blacked out. “My parents and I would spend the next five years in the furtive shadows of New York City,” she writes. This is one of many visceral memories Qian Julie Wang describes in her memoir, BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY (Doubleday, 320 pp., $28.95), which chronicles her family’s 1994 move from Zhong Gui, China, to Brooklyn. Years later, when you try sushi for the first time, you’ll recall the putrid smell of that warehouse and the exhaustion of the people toiling inside. Your toes will go numb from standing in icy sludge. There you will stand for eight hours, clad in ill-fitting rubber boots and a hooded plastic onesie, while she guts and beheads an endless stream of salmon floating by on a metal belt. Your mother, who was a math professor back in China, is now employed by a sushi processing plant near the Holland Tunnel. This is no corporate-sponsored occasion where you’ll raid the supply closet and nibble cookies frosted with the company logo it’s just a regular Saturday. Imagine you’re a kid, joining your mom for a day at work.

Beautiful country wang