I was like, nothing anybody told me to expect is actually happening. And they were, to my mind, equally possible worlds.īut because what we had been told to expect on both ends was very different from what we faced, and because my parents changed almost overnight, I could not trust anything. Qian Julie Wang: Before we left, there were two different Americas painted for me, one paved with gold-and I remember hearing that and thinking, does everyone wear, like, shades and sunglasses everywhere? Because that’s going to be really bright!–and then there’s this other image of everyone just starving and lining the streets, begging for money and fighting over food. Can you talk to me about how the shock of that contrast-what you imagined versus what was real-shaped you into the person you are now, and how it’s shaped your parents, too? But actually, in reality, neither of those things are quite true. And as a hungry child, all you can think about is all of the food you ate till you were full in China. Jill Damatac: In your book, you often contrast how the American Dream-or what I like to call the American Imagination-actually compares to reality, and that there’s that dissonance: when you were a little girl in China, you heard from family members that America was this land with gold-paved streets. In a wide-ranging conversation over Zoom, Qian Julie and I talked about the dangers and blessings of imagination while growing up undocumented, and the emerging canon of undocumented immigrant literatures. Reading Beautiful Country as a former undocumented immigrant, I cried and laughed alongside the familiarly deep, endless valleys and small, triumphant peaks of Wang’s years of fear and hiding in New York. The fear in her stomach as she navigates the terrifying new world of New York City: constantly afraid of arrest and deportation, she dodges police officers and city workers bearing free food that her empty belly yearns for. We sit with her and her mother in a Manhattan sweatshop, where little Qian snips threads from clothing her mother has sewn we smell the stench of rotting fish as we enter a wet and freezing sushi-processing basement, where they sort through fish by hand we feel the cold squelch of dirty water in Qian’s too-big boots.

With seven-year-old Qian, we discover the cold and hungry realities of being hei, the Chinese term for being undocumented, living fearfully in the shadows of invisibility and poverty. We meet her father and mother, two struggling academics longing to raise their young daughter in a place like America, which they imagine to be a place of opportunity, streets paved in gold. With clarity and honest intimacy, Wang’s writing allows us to experience her childhood, taking us to the warm, familial, but constricted confines of her early years in North China, where she was born.

Beautiful country wang