Though Wang interviewed her parents for the book and fact-checked portions of it with them for accuracy, she has not shown them the finished product. Nonetheless, her education culminated with a degree from Yale Law School, and she continues to work as a civil rights litigator in a firm she founded with her husband. Starting school in second grade, she was shunted into a special ed classroom where she had to teach herself to read on her own. From the age of 7, she worked alongside her mother in a garment-industry sweatshop and in a freezing sushi factory. Nonetheless, after his traumatic experiences as a child during the Cultural Revolution, her father remained fiercely loyal to the “beautiful country,” which is the literal translation of Mei Guo, the Chinese word for America.īut beautiful is not the word for most of the experiences Wang describes. While both were professors in China, in the United States they did backbreaking menial labor and lived in constant terror and privation well below the poverty line. 7), tells the story of “how one little girl found her way through the terror, hunger, exhaustion, and cruelty of an undocumented childhood in New York’s Chinatown…engaging readers through all five senses and the heart.” It is also Wang’s parents’ story. According to our reviewer, Qian Julie Wang’s debut memoir, Beautiful Country (Doubleday, Sept.
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