Beautiful Country. A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood by Qian Julie Wang

´Our kitchen had more coackroaches than food´.

Qian Julie Wang´s parents were professors in China. They left for a country which translates as ´beautiful country´ - which reminded me automatically of the ´goldene medina´ of the Jewish immigrants leaving Europe for a better future - to experience sheer poverty and hunger for at least five years. Living as undocumented immigrants, they were constantly living in fear from being caught by the authorities and eventually deported. 

Beautiful Country. A Memoir of Undocumented Childhood is Wang´s testimony, as experienced through the eyes of a young girl, of a struggle that seemed without end. From the language to the simple visual perception of the other, to being dismissed in school by the white teacher simply because they could not believe that she can write that essay. 

Everything in the new country was dangerous. When there were not the cops, there were the white men obsessed by Asian women or the predator following her in the subway. There were the children in the classroom or the risk of being caught doing something that may get them out of the country. Like getting sick. 

What is exceptional in this memoir - written by Wang, since 2016, an US naturalized citizen and a successful litigation lawyer, while commutting on her iPhone - is the lack of anger while looking back to those times. Yes, it was a lot of hunger, and her parents went estranged and they were leaving in peculiar conditions, but she got used with it. She did not know how other people, white people, are living. What she is actually missing from her childhood. She had books and the public libraries were her salvation. Withough books, maybe, her life account would have been much bitter. In addition to being an immigrant story, Beautiful Country is implicitly a praise to how important public libraries and their books in the small lives of children from immigrant, undocumented children, hungry for learning and hunting for new worlds. 

But in the end, it is not the ´beautiful country´ that offered a permanent shelter. Her mother, in my opinion, the strongest and inspiring character in her life story, dared to find a legal solution to resettle to Canada in order to start a much more decent professional life.  

Wang´s story - which I had access to as audiobook format read by the author herself - ends when she and her mother are arriving to Canada, being welcomed by smiling cops that are welcoming them in the country. I would be curious to read the rest of her story, which led her to being founder of the group Jews of Color and her Jewish journey which are not mentioned in this part of her life account, although the book was actually launched the last Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year).

I am not sure if all the hungry undocumented children in America will have the chance of sharing their story or will end up as partner in a law firm. Such testimonies though do teach us, those going to sleep with a full belly to be not only grateful for our hot meals and full fridge, but to learn to be humble and maybe try doing something to make those lives a bit better.

Rating: 4 stars