Beautiful Country: A Memoir

Qian Julie Wang shares her father’s earliest memory as a four-year-old in China during China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966. As he played with a toy gun outside, he noticed something hanging from a tree. When he came closer he saw that it was two men with “wrongly accused” written in the dirt below them (1). At the age of seven, Wang’s Ba Ba watched as his teenage brother was arrested for criticizing Mao Zedong. Afterward, Ba Ba’s family was abused and ostracized within the community. His parents were publicly beaten, while he was forced to stand in front of his classmates at school for public embarrassment.

A generation later, when Qian was seven, she arrived with her mother at JFK Airport, ready to join Qian’s father and start a new life in America. Yet, they were met with years of struggle, hunger, and hard labor—a time of darkness for the  undocumented family. Despite adversity, Wang focused on her education and eventually graduated from Yale Law School. While the Obama administration supported the so-called Dreamers while deporting an unprecedented number of undocumented immigrants, Wang clerked for federal appellate judge. In May 2016, Wang became a US citizen.