According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as 'a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages ofmore poetry.' Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and. Consider this remarkable memoir a new classic. The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life. While Wang’s story of pursuing the American dream is undoubtedly timeless, it’s her family’s triumph in the face of “xenophobia and intolerance” that makes it feel especially relevant today. With immense skill, she parses how her family’s illegal status blighted nearly every aspect of their life, from pushing her parents’ marriage to the brink to compromising their health. During her five years in the States-“shrouded in darkness while wrestling with hope and dignity”-Wang managed to become a star student. “Pushing past hunger pains,” they took menial jobs to support Wang, who worked alongside her mother in a sweatshop before starting school at age seven. This fueled her father’s desire to find a better life in America, the “Beautiful Country.” In China, Wang’s parents were professors, but upon arriving in New York City in 1994, their credentials were meaningless. Buy Beautiful Country: A Memoir of An Undocumented Childhood by Wang, Qian Julie (ISBN: 9780241514696) from Amazons Book Store. During China’s Cultural Revolution, her uncle was thrown in prison for criticizing Mao Zedong, leaving his parents and younger brother, Wang’s father, to pay for his “treasonous” ways in the form of public beatings and humiliation. In this extraordinary debut, civil rights lawyer Wang recounts her years growing up as an undocumented immigrant living in “the furtive shadows” of America.
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