000			04108cam a2200433 i 4500
001			22941322
003			phtghnu
005			20250410165948.0
008			230126t20222021nyua 000 0aeng
010			_a 2022435298
020			_a9780593313008 _q(trade paperback)
020			_a0593313003 _q(trade paperback)
040			_aDLC _beng _erda _cHNU
042			_apcc
043			_an-us-ny _aa-cc---
050	0	0	_aF128.9.C5 _bW35 2022
082	0	0	_223 _3GC _a974.7 W18 _b2021
100	1		_aWang, Qian Julie, _d1987- _eauthor.
245	1	0	_aBeautiful country : _ba memoir of an undocumented childhood / _cQian Julie Wang.
250			_aFirst Anchor Books edition.
264		1	_aNew York : _bAnchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, _c2021.
300			_ax, 305 pages : _billustrations ; _c21 cm
336			_atext _btxt _2rdacontent
337			_aunmediated _bn _2rdamedia
338			_avolume _bnc _2rdacarrier
520			_a"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay. An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to New York City in 1994. In Chinese the word for the United States, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country," but when seven-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm and happy childhood surrounded by extended family in China, she finds a world of crushing fear and poverty instead. Unable to speak English at first, Qian is isolated and disregarded, put into special education classes because she doesn't speak the language and humiliated by teachers and classmates when she struggles to pay attention because of hunger or exhaustion. She encounters racism, and people of other races, for the first time, shocked at where her family fits in comparison to their status as educated elites in China. After school she works shifts alongside her mother in Chinatown sweatshops. There is so much about Qian's new home that doesn't make sense, but the rules of survival are drilled into her head: If you see a policeman, you must run in the other direction. If anyone asks--or even if they don't--you tell them you were born here. Do as you're told or we could be separated forever. Understanding impliclity the toll this has taken on her parents, Qian tries desperately to cheer them up and mediate their increasingly heated arguments, certain that if she is good enough, she can hold the family together. In remarkable, unsentimental prose Wang channels her childhood perspective, illuminating the cruelty and indignity of America's immigration system, while also crafting a narrative of resilience from her family's small moments of joy: their first slice of pizza, "shopping days" when the family would unearth unlikely treasures in Brooklyn's trash, and the necessary escape she found in books at the local library. Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential book about the cost of making a home in a hostile land from an astonishing new talent"-- _cProvided by publisher.
521			_aGS _bAll programs
600	1	0	_aWang, Qian Julie, _d1987- _xChildhood and youth.
600	1	0	_aWang, Qian Julie, _d1987- _xFamily.
650		0	_aChinese Americans _zNew York (State) _zNew York _vBiography.
650		0	_aImmigrants _zNew York (State) _zNew York _vBiography.
650		0	_aNoncitizens _zNew York (State) _zNew York _vBiography.
651		0	_aShijiazhuang Shi (China) _vBiography.
651		0	_aBrooklyn (New York, N.Y.) _vBiography.
906			_a7 _bcbc _corignew _d2 _encip _f20 _gy-gencatlg
942			_2ddc _cBK _e23 _h900-999
999			_c138511 _d138511