Understanding impliclity the toll this has taken on her parents, Qian tries desperately to cheer them up and mediate their increasingly heated arguments, certain that if she is good enough, she can hold the family together. Do as you're told or we could be separated forever. If anyone asks-or even if they don't-you tell them you were born here. There is so much about Qian's new home that doesn't make sense, but the rules of survival are drilled into her head: If you see a policeman, you must run in the other direction. After school she works shifts alongside her mother in Chinatown sweatshops. She encounters racism, and people of other races, for the first time, shocked at where her family fits in comparison to their status as educated elites in China.
Unable to speak English at first, Qian is isolated and disregarded, put into special education classes because she doesn't speak the language and humiliated by teachers and classmates when she struggles to pay attention because of hunger or exhaustion. In Chinese the word for the United States, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country," but when seven-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm and happy childhood surrounded by extended family in China, she finds a world of crushing fear and poverty instead.
An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to New York City in 1994. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."-Gish Jen, author of The Resisters Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours-the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country-we would be okay.
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