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Imagine you are a kid joining your mom for a day at work. This isn’t a corporate sponsored situation where you raid the ration locker and nibble on cookies decorated with the company logo; an ordinary Saturday. Your mother, a professor of mathematics in China, now works at a sushi processing plant near the Netherlands Tunnel. Standing there for eight hours wearing misfitting rubber boots and a plastic hoodie, he’ll dare an endless stream of salmon floating on a metal belt and behead him. Your toes will go numb from standing in the icy mud. Your toes will be pruned. When you try sushi for the first time in years, you will remember the disgusting smell of that warehouse and the tiredness of the people working inside.
This is one of many instinctive memories Qian Julie Wang recounts in her memoirs. BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY (Doubleday, 320 p., $28.95), This describes his family’s move from Zhong Gui in China to Brooklyn in 1994. “My family and I would spend the next five years in the hidden shadows of New York City,” he writes. “The Chinese colloquially refer to being undocumented as ‘hei’: to be in the dark, to be blacked out. And appropriately, because we spent those years in darkness wrestling with hope and honor.”
Chances are, you’ve read an immigration story or two. (If you have an Irish last name like me, “Angela’s Ashes” comes to mind.) What sets Wang’s memoirs apart is its narrow scope: It spans a short time span from second grade to middle school, so you feel like you’re traveling on foot instead of following him. with drone. The humiliating first day of school is when Wang is belittled by a Mandarin-speaking classmate; hunger (“Our kitchen contained more cockroaches than food”); lack of privacy in a building shared with strangers. There are moments of joy, too: Wang sees six coveted candy-colored Polly Pockets inside a translucent garbage bag. A family friend takes her to Macy’s to choose a graduation gown. For a while, he takes care of a skinny cat named Marilyn.
Unlike other memoirists who look longingly at the past, Wang doesn’t romanticize her parents’ ruthless decisions—Marilyn’s fate among them—or the family’s difficult, sometimes hopeless, circumstances. We taste their deportation anxiety and the loneliness of being the only child of parents shattered by fear. “In the vacuum of anxiety, which is an undocumented life, fear was gas,” Wang writes. “It expanded enough to fill our entire world and until it was all we could breathe.”
Fiction is both a guide and a lifeline for this young student who has proven to be the sponge of language. From Clifford the Big Red Dog and Amelia Bedelia”White teeth”, “Alice is Joyful” and “Julie of the Wolves(whose protagonist shares not only Wang’s name but also his world-class talent), we see stories that work their magic, broaden and illuminate their horizons. Wang thanks four teachers (“I have an indelible impression on me every day I dare call myself a writer”), as well as the New York Public Library and subway system (“I am grateful even for delays”). ).
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