Beautiful Country

How It Began

My story starts decades before my birth.

In my father s earliest memory, he is four years old, shooting a toy gun at nearby birds as he skips to the town square. There he halts, arrested by curious, swaying shapes that he is slow to recognize: two men dangling from a muscular tree.

He approaches slowly, pushing past the knees of adults encircling the tree. In the muggy late-summer air, mosquitoes and flies swarm the hanging corpses. The stench of decomposing flesh floods his nose.

He sees on the dirt ground a single character written in blood:



Wrongly accused.

It is 1966 and China s Cultural Revolution has just begun. Even for a country marked by storied upheaval, the next decade would bring unparalleled turmoil. To this date, the actual death toll from the purges remains unspoken and, worse, unknown.

* * *

Three years later, my seven-year-old father watched as his eldest brother was placed under arrest. Weeks prior, my teenage uncle had criticized Mao Zedong in writing for manipulating the innocent people of China by pitting them against one another, just to centralize his power. My uncle had naïvely, heroically, stupidly signed his name to the essay and distributed it.

So there would be no high school graduation for him, only starvation and torture behind prison walls.

From then on, my father would spend his childhood bearing witness to his parents public beatings, all while enduring his own humiliation at school, where he was forced to stand in the front of the classroom every morning as his teachers and classmates berated him and his treasonous family. Outside of school, adults and children alike pelted him with rocks, pebbles, shit. Gone was the honor of his grandfather, whose deft brokering had managed to shield their village from the rape and pillage of the Japanese occupation. Gone were the visitors to the Wang family courtyard who sought his father s calligraphy. From then on, it would just be his

Qian Julie Wang

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping, She Reads, and more One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year

Incredibly important, exquisitely written, harrowing. . . Beautiful Country tells [Wang s] story, well, quite beautifully. It is not only Wang s mastery of the language that makes the story so compelling, but also the passionate yearning for empathy and understanding. Beautiful Country is timely, yes, but more importantly it is a near-masterpiece that will make Qian Julie Wang a literary star. Shondaland

For fans of Angela's Ashes and The Glass Castle. Newsday

[An] exquisitely crafted memoir. Oprah Daily

A heartbreaking and intimate memoir... the storytelling from a young Qian s perspective is riveting. Politico

This unforgettable memoir is eye-opening to the nth degree. Real Simple

Elegantly affecting. The Guardian

A coming-of-age memoir about an undocumented Chinese girl growing up in New York's Chinatown, this lyrical book is full of small moments of joy, heartbreaking pain and the struggles of a family trying to survive in the shadows of society. It's a uniquely American story, and an essential one. Good Housekeeping

An astounding memoir from a debut author that you re not going to want to miss. PopSugar

[Qian Julie Wang] is remarkable, and her story is a must-read. Alma

An amazing story of the emotional and physical toll of lives lived in the enforced shadows of anti-immigrant America. Daily Kos

Wang s voice is powerful and the writing is absolutely gorgeous. Emma Straub, author of This Time Tomorrow

Beautiful Country rings with power and authenticity. Wang's searing exploration reveals how she and her family were forced to navigate the