Beautiful Country: A Memoir

“Half a century and a migration across the world later, it would take therapy’s slow and arduous unraveling for me to see that the thread of trauma was woven into every fiber of my family, my childhood.”

Generational trauma is an important theme in the book. This section of the book shows where and how that trauma began and the influence it had on Qian’s life.

“Six months later, I awoke to a somber and funereal New York, mourning for a nation that chose to elect a president on a platform of xenophobia and intolerance. It was then that I dug up my voice.”

Throughout the memoir, we see loss of voice as a recurring motif. Qian is silenced often, and she is told repeatedly to avoid talking to people. This memoir is Wang’s journey to rediscovering that voice and putting it to use.

“It was also during those shadow puppet plays that I learned that while Ma Ma’s job was to always be there, Ba Ba was allowed to go away, even if his body stayed.”

Qian inherits her mother’s stability and conscientiousness, while from her father, Qian gets her sense of play and her later desire to invent alternate lives for herself as a kind of escape.

“I told him about the game I played at school, including the mother hen game in which I was invariably the hen who had the job of protecting all of her chicks.”

Throughout the book, Qian takes on role of protector. The game she describes in this passage is just the start. She acts as protector to her mother on the plane ride to the United States, and she carries on this role throughout her life.

“All I remember is getting the blood test results and finding out that my blood was not Type A, but rather what I knew, from the order of the English alphabet, to be the inferior Type B. My face drooped and I shared my dismay with Ma Ma, who laughed and laughed and said not to worry—she was Type B, too. This did not reassure me at all. It told me only that my inferiority was coded into my blood and genes.”

Qian’s fear that she might be genetically inferior due to her blood type foreshadows the fear and doubt she carries in the United States. While her parents teach her that Mandarin is the language of professionals, her classmates ridicule her for it. The characters she sees on TV perpetuate stereotypes and cause her to feel negatively about her own heritage and features.

“Before we approached, Ma Ma turned to me and instructed, “Bie shuo hua.” She would say this more and more to me during our time to come in Mei Guo. Be silent. Say nothing.”

Again, Qian’s voice is suppressed by those around her: Here, she is told by her mother to stay quiet in customs, and she internalizes that silence.

“But Ma Ma and Ba Ba were both replaced by shells. They always seemed to be looking around, scanning our environment for something. I wished that I could help them find whatever they were looking for so they could focus on me again.”

One theme of the memoir is the effects of fear. Here, Qian describes the ways in which fear of deportation consumed her parents, making them paranoid and unable to give her attention. Their fear turned them into different people, “shells” of what they once were.

“Ma Ma liked to say that a woman could be beautiful without being pretty, but that a woman could not be beautiful without having dignity.”

The Wang family is stripped of their dignity in many ways in the United States. Ba Ba and Ma Ma are forced to work in harsh and demeaning conditions, performing menial tasks despite their advanced degrees and former status as knowledge workers, while Qian is made to feel like an outsider at school. Ma Ma holds on to her dignity—and thus beauty—however, in her perseverance to create a better life for Qian and herself.

“And I never again believed Ba Ba—not in the same way; not when he told me told me we were going somewhere fun; not when he told me he’d come back from Mei Guo in a month, then another month, then the month after that; and certainly not when he told me that everything would be okay.”

When Ba Ba takes Qian to school instead of the zoo, a piece of her trust in him falls away. The same happens again when he leaves China for the U.S., promising to return. Although he does what he believes is best for her, Ba Ba’s actions cause Qian to question his reliability.

“On that run, only one thing kept pace with me, and it was not hunger. It was fear. Fear was all I tasted; fear was all I contained; fear was all I was.”

Despite Qian’s overwhelming hunger, fear wins out when she sees a woman in uniform passing out food on the street. Fear consumes the Wang family in the United States, and Qian finds it to be an extremely powerful force throughout her life—even to her physical detriment.

“Only looking back at the scene through an adult lens do I see in the cracks of her face the sweet pain Ma Ma must have felt in those moments. Gratitude for the little she had. Heartbreak in needing it. Confusion over what our lives had become.”

Because Qian’s story is intrinsically linked with the stories of her parents, only by understanding their story can the adult Wang make sense of her own. When she looks back on those early Christmas memories, her childhood mind shows her laughing with her mother as they warmed their hands against the sporadic heat of the radiator. It is only by unraveling those memories that Wang recognizes the pain in them as well.

“From then on, there was no saving me. I lived and breathed books.”

Qian’s love of learning and of reading leads her to major in English in college and then obtain her law degree. The discovery of Chatham Square, a public library in New York City, opens worlds of knowledge and escape for the young girl.

“For the rest of my childhood, I carried in my heart the guilt of forcing Ma Ma into that job—not just through my existence and my need for food, but by simply giving her such bad advice.”

Throughout the memoir, Qian provides examples of internalized guilt and shame. Because she takes on the role of protector with her mother, she feels personally responsible for her mother’s hardships. After recommending becoming a hair stylist to her mother, Qian feels guilty that the job exposes Ma Ma to creepy men at the hair salon.

“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.”

This passage touches on several themes. Ba Ba’s insistence that Qian and her mother be ready to leave at a moment’s notice is the direct result of his persistent fear of deportation. A byproduct of this, however, is that Qian never feels as though she has a true home, that she belongs to anyone, or that anything belongs to her.

“My memory of him cannot be decoupled with fear, for James was my first reckoning with the fact that as women, and Asian ones at that, Ma Ma’s body and mine would never escape the colonizing stake of white men’s eyes.”

James Lombardo’s predatory treatment of Ma Ma and Qian reveal his perverse sexual desire. His actions are Qian’s first introduction to the ways in which men, and white men in particular, sexualize and fetishize Asian women.

“Spending the night at her place meant that I would not be around to take care of Ma Ma, give her advice, or protect her.”

Qian feels a special need to protect her mother. Whenever she is separated from her, she worries that her mother might need her. Instead of enjoying a typical childhood activity—spending the night at a friend’s house—she is consumed with worry about leaving Ma Ma behind.

“I knew somehow that it had to be my fault. Each time, it was my fault. I should have kept my eyes to myself. I should not have looked up from the two square inches on the ground in front of my feet. I should have known better. I was a bad, shameful girl.”

When Qian starts taking the subway after school, she encounters a number of what she referred to as “trapdoors”—dangerous men who sexualize her and act in predatory ways. Whenever a man exposes himself to her, Qian feels that she is somehow at fault, internalizing guilt just as she has learned to do from her family.

“I found that it took more and more for me to be enough for Ma Ma. She was perpetually anxious now, and I was the little doctor who was on call around the clock, ever ready to jump in and soothe her.”

The reversal of parent/child roles in Qian’s life leads her to feel inadequate because she cannot really care for her mother. With no one else to confide in, Qian becomes Ma Ma’s confidante, confessing to her daughter adult secrets and truths that Qian is too young to understand or process. When Ma Ma tells her that Qian is the reason she decided not to take her own life at the subway platform, Qian still feels like she is not enough—the sense that she is responsible for keeping her mother’s suicidality at bay is simply far too much for a preteen to handle.

“Other times, better times, Ma Ma and Ba Ba got mad at me instead. They spent those meals berating me about having gotten so chubby and having grown messed-up teeth that made my entire face look crooked.”

Qian prefers her parents to be a united front, even if that means that they focus on is her inadequacies. Qian finds these conversations confusing. She is happy that her parents agree with one another, but their judgment of her negatively affects her self-esteem.

“Then Ba Ba pierced the silence. ‘It’s great to have big dreams, Qian Qian, and to work toward them. That’s even more important than accomplishing the dream itself. It doesn’t matter if the dream doesn’t come true, so just don’t be too sad when that happens.’”

Whenever Qian tells the adults in her life of her dream of becoming a lawyer, she is met with laughter or disbelief. When she tells her father, he is almost shockingly discouraging, assuring her that while it is good to have a dream, she should not be sad when it does not happen. Only Qian believes in her abilities and talent. 

“Mr. Kane also believed in limits. That is, we all had our limits and needed to be reminded of them. We also needed to accept them, without asking questions. The limits applied more to some than to others. And we were to be grateful for this white savior who taught us our limits early and often.”

Mr. Kane, Qian’s fifth grade teacher, becomes a measured voice of racism and oppression in Qian’s life. He accuses Qian of cheating when he feels that her essays are too good, and he tells his students that their parents work in sweatshops because they are uneducated.

“The rest of my weekend passed just like that—doing what I wanted, shutting the door to my room when I felt like it, carrying no concerns other than what book I would start next. And though worry about Ma Ma and guilt for being so selfish popped up every now and then, they got buried under the sentences and pages and chapters and the new ease in my body.”

While staying at Lin Ah Yi’s house, Qian feels like a child for the first time since she left China. No longer responsible for protecting or taking care of her parents, she is able to relax and have space and time for herself.

“For the entire song, I kept my blurred vision fixed on the ceiling, by turns thanking God for Ma Ma and begging him not to take her away from me, as he had done with everything else I loved.”

Qian’s life is earmarked by loss. She lost her grandparents when they left China and lost her father when the US changed him. Her pets were taken from her, and her mother was altered by grueling jobs she took. During her graduation, rather than focusing on the pride of her accomplishments, Qian worries about her mother and about the possibility of watching something else slip away from her.