That mystery never materialized, but it really helped me as an adult to look back and try to place myself in that little kid’s shoes. I looked through my old diary entries I was very inspired by Harriet the Spy, and I wrote down a lot of mundane details of my worlds in hopes that I might be able to solve some sort of mystery.

That required a lot of intensive therapy, unearthing traumas and memories that I had shoved into the basement of my mind and of my heart. After that, I thrust myself into writing.

Then, going into the election and hearing all the discourse, I felt something fundamentally change within me, where I recognized for the first time that I had a profound privilege to be on the other side of the experience and that I was choosing not to think about it and not to speak about it.įor me, that was very much a choice, whereas for the millions of people who are still undocumented today, that is not a choice. During the naturalization ceremony, a videotaped President Obama said, “Greetings, fellow Americans.” It clicked for me then how much I had needed to hear the word American ascribed to me, and how it never had been until that point. I decided to embark on writing this when I became a citizen in May 2016, six months before the election. QIAN JULIE WANG: It was very difficult at first because these years were years that I never allowed myself to think about or talk about for decades, because my parents and society told me that it had been bad and I would have gotten in trouble if I ever talked about it. SARAH NEILSON: How did you access and embody your childhood voice in the book? Shondaland spoke with Wang over Zoom about education, equity, and her relationship to work, play, and joy. During that time, she and her parents navigated school, sweatshop work, poverty, and a lack of access to basic needs like medical care - the trauma inflicted by a country bent on dehumanizing people it deems “illegal.” But Wang’s world was also filled with imagination, love, and discovery, and Beautiful Country vibrates on every level of nuance and storytelling. At age 7, Wang moved with her academic parents from China to Brooklyn, where they lived undocumented for five years.

A graduate of Yale Law School and currently a litigator and managing partner of Gottlieb & Wang LLP, Wang is also a skilled writer, rendering her childhood in rhapsodic sentences that immerse the reader in her experience. Reading Qian Julie Wang’s debut memoir, Beautiful Country, you wouldn’t know it’s her first book.

Beautiful country qian wang