Beautiful Country is a memoir of coming to America and living as an undocumented immigrant. On one hand, I identified with Qian as someone who also didn't fit in as a child and found refuge in books. On the other hand, so much more of her experience in America was entirely unfamiliar - and that is the importance of this book. I truly believe that stories have the power to soften hearts and change perspectives, and I'm so thankful that Qian was brave enough to tell hers. It's one that I can't stop thinking and talking about. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this beautiful book!

Qian Julie Wang’s memoir, Beautiful Country released on September 7, recounts her family’s coming to what she calls Mei Guo, beautiful country, when she is seven years old in 1994. The writing is spare and lyrical, in a voice that channels the girl who tries to manage coming of age in a place where she is often reminded that she does not belong.
Her parents leave China as professors and arrive in America as “illegals.” Steady warnings to Qian emphasize keeping a low profile and always saying that she was born in America. Every encounter with any official brings fear that she some word of her family’s status will be revealed. In addition to this lingering cloud, instead of life as professionals, her parents must work low-wage jobs in sweatshops. Life at home changes as well with Qian remembering a laughter filled home in China, now replaced with tension and arguments as her parents bring their tension home.
The resourceful Qian takes matters into her own hands when she is relegated to a class in school for children with “special needs” and left to herself. She teaches herself English beginning with Clifford, the giant red dog, and moving on to the Cat in the Hat, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Shel Silverstein. Then she talks her father into intervening and getting her back into regular classes. This first effort foreshadows her independence and coping mechanisms she will use for herself and sometimes for her parents. She will continue using books to educate herself as she finds the library. As part of her fitting in, she chooses to call herself “Julie” from Julie of the Wolves since her name emphasizes another way she is different.
Life takes an even worse turn when her mother hides an illness until it worsens to the point that she spends a length of time in the hospital without a full recovery, amassing debts they cannot afford to pay. Ambivalent feelings about both her parents and her new “beautiful” country pervade this memoir and point up her own resilience as she copes with her challenges.
The book forms a window into the immigrant experience and is well worth the read.

As indicated in the preface by the editor, Beautiful Country joins a long line of standout memoirs about trauma and childhood. Wang demonstrates an incredibly vivid memory of her childhood immigrating to New York City from China at the age of 6. I was struck by the amount of humor and sassiness that permeated her early years. In spite of all of the trials, I regularly found myself laughing at the gumption of this confident kid. I wish that I had received more information about her life in Middle School and beyond. Beautiful Country is definitively a memoir about childhood, but Wang's adulthood seemed just as, if not more, interesting to me.

What a beautiful, moving memoir! I really enjoyed the voice behind this story. She was easy to connect with, and I loved hearing about her life. This is a wonderful book, and I would recommend it for everyone!

This stunning memoir describes Qian Julie Wang’s experience of being an undocumented immigrant child living in poverty in the US. Despite being professors in China, Wang’s parents struggle to find a job and get by. This memoir is eye-opening and heartbreaking. It is incredibly personal and beautifully written. Her descriptions of her traumatic childhood are raw and you can tell she really put her whole heart into writing her story. This isn’t an easy read by any means, but so very important. This is a memoir I’ll be recommending to everyone I can.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the advanced copy in exchange for on honest review.

Qian Julie Wang’s memoir about her life growing up as an undocumented child in New York in the 1990s is humbling, eye-opening, and beautifully rendered. Experiencing the confusion, hardships, and racism through the eyes of a child is especially heart-breaking. Beautiful Country (which translates to Mei Guo, America in Chinese) perfectly captures the enduring hope and courage of an immigrant’s struggle to obtain the very basic needs every human deserves.

“Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo. She came second only to loneliness."

Beautiful Country is also the perfect memoir for book lovers. Qian’s love of books and the world they opened for her illustrates the importance of stories, how they can rescue and heal the loneliest child. When Qian is placed in a “special needs” classroom because she can’t speak English, she uses books like The Berenstain Bears and Clifford to teach herself to read. It’s inspiring, but also devastating.

So much of her story is devastating. The racism her and her parents endure simply because they wanted a better life, something everyone has a right to. And in a country that was built on the foundation of welcoming the persecuted. They’re forced to live in poverty, always hungry, in a country with enough wealth to share.

“You cannot know that some things are not enough until you have them.”

Her story may be heart-wrenching, but it’s also witty and sweet, hopeful and engrossing. I was lead through a range of emotions, from smiling to crying. She has recalled her tumultuous childhood—the only buffer between her warring parents, her desperation for friends—with honesty. And her love of reading shines through her lyrical words.

I feel like saying too much about this memoir will only lead to unnecessary spoilers. I’m so very happy to see this one is receiving the attention it deserves, with awards and landing on so many must-read lists. Read this one to be reminded of the power of books. To be inspired, to be more knowledgeable, and to be more empathetic.

Thank you to the author, publisher & NetGalley for gifting me an e-copy of this powerful memoir!
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I requested this book thinking it was a fiction immigrant story. I generally don’t request memoirs to publishers because who am I to rate someone else’s life story? So it automatically gets 5 stars from me.

That being said, this is the perfect memoir for people to realize that sometimes people immigrate from their homeland where they had everything but still sacrifice it all because an oppressive government got in their way. As an immigrant myself, I have heard the stereotype countless times that people move to a developed nation for better prospects and to send money back to their families. This book perfectly shuts down that argument. The author’s parents had highly respectable jobs in China and lost it all when they moved to The States. In many ways, their fear, trauma and oppression continued in their adopted country, albeit for different reasons.

The book is narrated from the perspective of the author and you learn how she navigates from childhood, a tremendously complex system of trying to please her parents and their set ways, trying to fit in her new home all while trying to find an identity for herself.

If you’re an immigrant, this book will speak volumes to you no matter your trajectory. Even though I did not have to go through a lot of the things that the author did, I feel heard from some of the tiniest things that she experienced. If you’re not an immigrant, I absolutely recommend this book to you so you can understand the privileges that immigrants don’t have, even before they reach the United States (in this case, from the moment the author and her mother set foot in the consulate and got declined many times and had to prove each time that they’re worthy of their visa).

Beautiful Country
author: Quin Julie Wang
Doubleday Books, Doubleday

Quin Julie Wang's story is destined to be a classic. Her flawless writing and emotional writing will leave readers with a better sense of world understanding. It takes courage to share such a personal story with the world. This novel by a most talented author is sure to be one of the best memoirs of 2021.
Thank you to Net Galley and Doubleday Books, Doubleday for the advance reader's copy and opportunity to provide my unbiased review.
#BeautifulCountry #NetGalley

Beautiful Country already has been hailed as a “new classic” memoir. The author, Qian Julie Wang, said that she drew a lot of inspiration from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Wang uses a quote by Angelou as her epigraph) and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. I would add that Beautiful Country harkens to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior with its “autobiographical accuracy, cultural authenticity, and ethnic representation.” *Yuan Shu, Director of Asian Studies, Texas Tech University. Both Kingston’s and Wang’s are memoirs of a Chinese girlhood. All four are memoirs of childhood trauma.


On July 29, 1994, Qian Qian (as she was known as a girl) was seven years, five days old when she and her mother (Ma Ma) arrived from China to join her father (Ba Ba) in Brooklyn, New York. Ba Ba had left on a visitor’s visa two years earlier for the United States or “Mei Gou, a name that translated literally into ‘Beautiful Country…’”


Qian Julie Wang was born and raised in Shijiazhuang, China. Both her parents were successful, and Qian Qian, an only child, had a relatively happy early childhood. Her father was an English professor, and her mother was a math professor who had published two textbooks on computer science in 1993 at the age of thirty-one. Yet China has a long memory, and because her father’s elder teenage brother had signed his name to an essay criticizing Mao Zedong in 1966, the Wang’s never managed to regain their family name’s honor or status.


For the next five years Qian Julie and her parents lived with abject poverty, in actual rat trap, roach-infested housing. They were not “food challenged,” they were hungry every day. Depending on the season, their home was either too hot or too cold. They had few clothes, and they furnished their home with items they scavenged from garbage on the street. They did not have money for medical care and dental visits.


Ba Ba initially worked as an unskilled laborer. Ma Ma’s first job was at a sweatshop, sewing labels on the seam of shirts for twelve-hour shifts for three cents a piece. Qian Qian worked alongside her mother that summer, holding scissors which were much too large and heavy for her child’s hand “to cut all the loose strings dangling off the seams.”


Her parents inoculated Qian Qian with the profound importance of keeping their truth a secret. No one could know they were undocumented. People of other races, especially white people, were not to be trusted. “Just remember this, Qian Qian: we are safe only with our own kind.” People in authority, especially police officers, were the people to be most distrusted. Qian Qian began second grade that September without knowing English, and with the constant presence of fear, shame, humiliation, and worry. Her parents were so caught up in their own trauma that they did not and could not protect Qian Qian in ways a parent should. Although they loved their daughter, they traumatized her too. She felt responsible for their safety and happiness.


When a person experiences trauma, particularly multiple and/or extended, ongoing trauma,and specifically childhood trauma, they have trauma responses, “fight, flight or freeze.” “Fight” means becoming aggressive (or fighting back). “Flight” means fleeing the situation. And “freeze” means the person is unable to do anything at all. There is a fourth response which childhood trauma creates: the fawn response. In order to avoid more trauma, children learn to please their abuser. “In other words, they preemptively attempt to appease the abuser by agreeing, answering what they know the parent wants to hear, or by ignoring their personal feelings and desires and by doing anything and everything to prevent the abuse. Over time, this fawn response becomes a pattern.” Elizabeth Mahaney, LMHC, MFT, Ph.D


Qian Julie Wang employed all four trauma responses to survive her childhood. She also used her incredible intellect, her strong will, her passion for books and language, her love and loyalty to her parents, her imagination, her sense of humor and her ambition as the tools to rise above her childhood circumstances. As an adult, Qian has achieved the “American dream.” I think she wrote this book and revealed her “secrets” so that we could see the cost of all that pain and suffering. One of the gifts which trauma robs from people is a voice. Qian Julia Wang has an extremely powerful voice. Such is her gift for storytelling and her ability to share her childhood mind with intricate detail, that Qian allows the reader to accompany her through her childhood. I read this book twice in two days: the first time to find out what happens to Qian Julie, and the second just to read her exquisite prose.



I give Beautiful Country my highest recommendation.



Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for allowing me to read an advance ebook reader’s copy.




“I document these stories for myself and my family, and not the least my uncle, our innominate hero. I write this also for Americans and immigrants everywhere. The heartbreak of one immigrant is never that far from that of another. Most of all, though, I put these stories down for this country’s forgotten children, past and present, who grow up cloaked in fear, desolation, and the belief that their very existence is wrong, their very being illegal. I have been unfathomably lucky. But I dream of a day when being recognized as human requires no luck--when it is a right, not a privilege. And I dream of a day when each and every one of us will have no reason to fear stepping out of the shadows.” --Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

Qian tells first of her life in China – or, what little she remembers of it, since she was fairly young. But overall, her life there was pretty good. Like most kids, she didn’t really think about it or worry too much – it just was what it was.

And then, her dad left to come to America. She began to fear that he wouldn’t come back. A year later, she and her mom joined him in New York City.

She had previously only known of America through TV and movies, and she had heard that everyone there was rich. So it boggled her mind that her family had to live the way they did while there.

They often shared one room, in houses where other rooms were rented to other families, and they all shared one bathroom and kitchen. There were sometimes rats. Her parents worked long hours in miserable conditions, in places like sweatshops and fish factories. They garbage-picked their furniture.

Qian herself was first put into special education classes, because she couldn’t speak English. It seemed no one at her school was entirely prepared to help her with that. But, with a library card and a love of reading, she soon taught herself. Kids are both smart and resilient.

Even when she started doing better in school, though, she couldn’t quite shake her “outsider” status. Mostly because her parents couldn’t afford the clothes, shoes, and toys that the other kids thought were cool year after year.

Her parents had both been professors in China. Her dad seemed resigned to his fate – that they’d just have to be poor in America. He was probably depressed. Her mom was not ready to give up so easily. She put herself through some additional schooling, with the hopes of getting better jobs someday. Her mom also got very ill for a while, however. After her recovery, she was determined to get herself and Qian out of their miserable conditions – even if Qian’s dad didn’t want to come along.

Everyone should read this book. Beautiful Country recalls the author’s experience growing up undocumented in New York City’s Chinatown with her parents. The trauma, risks, indignities, and hardships that they experienced ring through the narrative with honesty and bravery, but the love, support, and sacrifice of Wang’s Ma Ma and Ba Ba are also threaded throughout the story. Rather than fearing immigrants, Americans would do well to listen to immigrant stories, consider the strength these people display, and find ways of easing their burdens.

The writing style and audiobook narration did not appeal to me. I wish the book discussed Qian's adult life more and how Canada differed from the United States.

This book reads like a fiction book; it is made all the more sad when you keep reminding yourself it is a memoir, a true story, the trauma really happened.

Qian and her parents are undocumented immigrants from China. Most of the book describes the years she was in second grade to the middle of sixth in New York City. Very few people, including her parents, speak to her in positive words. Verbal abuse, insults, name-calling.

I wondered if any of her elementary teachers will read this book and recognize themselves.

The family lived in fear they would be deported back to China. They lived with secrets. “Secrets have so much power.”

I admire the author Qian Julie for her overcoming the years of trauma. I’d love to read more about her teenage and young adult years.

Many thanks to Netgalley.

I received this an ARC through Netgalley. Beautiful Country is a heartbreaking memoir of Qian Julie Wang's journey from China to New York. When I saw someone compare it to Angel's Ashes, I thought those are pretty big boots to fill, and Qian has filled those boots. I was on the brink of tears numerous times reading about her families struggles and their constant worry of being deported. As someone who has grown up with financial security, I forget that many others have a much different experience in their lives. Thank you Beautiful Country for reminding me that I am blessed and to look out to help those I can when they cross my path.

A couple of weeks ago I sat down to start reading Beautiful Country by Quian Julie Wang. Intending to read about one hour with my morning coffee, I found that I could not stop reading. I finished this “beautiful” book about dinner time. Wang tells her story with the voice of a child. Her parents were college professors in China. Her dad came first and stayed and her mom and Quian obtained tourist visas about two years later and stayed. This is the story of the journey of many illegal immigrants across generations and country origin who have come to the United States. As a retired high school English teacher, I met many “Julies,” and I know in my family, it could have been the story of my great, great grandparents. What struck me and made me devour this book was the voice of her childhood. Learning English from library books, being made fun of and ostracized in school. After reading this beautiful haunting story, I found that she is a graduate of Swathmore College and Yale Law School. Beautiful Country will make an excellent choice for book clubs especially teacher book clubs. My thanks to Doubleday Books and NetGalley for an ARC of this book. The opinions in this review are my own.

Thank You to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for gifting me with an ARC of Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang. In exchange I offer my unbiased review.

What does it mean to be seven, hungry, scared, and an illegal undocumented Chinese immigrant? Qian Wang & her parents arrive in America, without any English and no money hoping to better their lives but instead they face racism, poverty and abject fear of discovery. In China Qian’s parents were professors, in America her father works menial jobs and her mother sews labels in a sweatshop for three cents a garment. Their only meal a day is a bowl of rice provided by the sweatshop.

Qian shares her families early years with vivid detail and unflinching honesty. It’s harrowing to read their daily ordeals knowing they lived this way while I and many others lived parallel lives never experiencing or imagining the struggles that so many around us were undergoing.

It is testament to Qian’s spirit, resilience and determination to overcome so much adversity to reach her level of academic achievements and success.
A book that will make you think twice about immigrants and what it means to belong.

I have nothing but deep respect for Qian Julie Wang for having the courage to open up and put into words the major hardships that immigrating to America put her family through. Abject poverty, unrelenting fear, never feeling comfortable or part of society, every emotion and obstacle that her family faced is presented as she remembers experiencing it as a child.
She's honest and forthright in her recollections, not parsing words to sugarcoat or simplify a situation. It's a look at a very grim reality where educated professionals are relegated to doing abusive manual labor for pennies simply because they tried to do what's best for their family with the knowledge and resources available to them.
This is not a book that you can just read and walk away from. It digs into your psyche and makes you question your beliefs and, most importantly, be grateful for everything that you have in your life.

Many happy thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the read!

I received a free electronic ARC of this excellent memoir from Netgalley, Qian Julie Wang, and Doubleday, publisher. Thank you all for sharing this fine work with me. I have read Beautiful Country of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work.

We are living in an age of massive immigration. Half the world seems to be out there looking for a home. Many have found respite in the USA, people we are glad to welcome to our world. Many we have turned away, if only temporarily. I cannot imagine the stress involved in country shopping, most with small children. Beautiful Country takes us through the process with young Qian Julie Wang. It makes it so much easier to sympathize and offer an extended hand when you understand the almost impossible process of getting here legally and to see the pain involved in being here illegally. We are a land of immigrants with room and hope to spare. We need to improve the process of validation, speed up the waiting time and make provision for families with young children to stay together throughout the whole process. We should continue to be a nation of immigrants. New ones, too. It is, after all, who we are

If you want a memoir that reads like a book. It’s so hard to understand the difficulty of coming to a new place where you have to watch everything you say and do, especially when you don't understand the language.
Qian comes to the US, at age 7 and is thrown into school without understanding any language. She has been told to be careful what she says to anyone because they could be sent back to China. What a life to read and even try to understand the fear, knowing you are smart but believing what others say when the teachers are saying when the teachers are being bigoted believing all Chinese were ignorant.
Qian wants so bad to be called pretty and smart but culture and bigotry don’t allow it. She loves her mother and Qian believes it’s her job to protect her ma ma. Ba Ba, Qian’s father’ is not the kind loving father any kid wants, so her positive reinforcement comes from her ma ma.
Amazing book. Great read for a true understanding of the immigrant life and feelings. Thank you NetGalley and Doubleday books for the ARC of an amazing book.
#Netgalley #Doubleday

Beautiful Country is the translation of Mei Guo, Chinese for America. This is a memoir of a girl, Qian, who loves her childhood in China. Her parents are professors and there is food and love and family. Her father flees to America. When Qian is 7 years old, she flies with her mother to join her father in America. The author does such a great job of telling the story through the eyes of a child. What it feels like to be illegal, afraid and hungry. The sweatshops. The stress on the family. It made my heart ache. This book primarily covers age 7 into 6th grade set in Brooklyn. The author has written this coming of age story with such honesty, courage, charm and resilience. I will remember this family for a long time.
Thank you to #NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy. I noticed that the author has recorded the audiobook and it will be beautiful with the Mandarin phrases throughout the book.
#BeautifulCountry