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46 pages 1 hour read

Qian Julie Wang

Beautiful Country: A Memoir

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021

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Chapters 4-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Beautiful Country”

In the United States, Qian confronted a world very different from the one she was accustomed to. Her mother seemed paranoid, keeping the lights off whenever Ba Ba was away, and commanding Qian to stay away from the windows. Their apartment was small, and they shared a communal bathroom and kitchen with other immigrant families. When the families gathered at mealtime, Ba Ba told Qian to stay quiet because their landlady hid in the pantry to eavesdrop on the group. The food they ate in America was different too. Qian recalled sharing one slice of pizza with both her parents. It was delicious, but she soon found herself hungry again.

While Qian struggled to make friends, she found solace in TV. She enjoyed The Simpsons, but the show’s portrayal of Asian characters left her feeling uncomfortable about her own appearance in ways she had not experienced before. The shows on PBS Kids brought her the most comfort: Reading Rainbow, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Sesame Street. Her favorite was The Puzzle Place, which featured puppets of different races and felt inclusive and joyful. 

Ma Ma taught Qian not to trust anyone, including other Chinese people and police officers. In China, Qian would greet her neighbors as they passed each other. In Mei Guo, everyone kept their head down and their eyes averted. Qian saw that her parents had changed since moving to the U.S. They always looked exhausted and worried. She also learned that some people she encountered saw her through a racist lens, referring to her with slurs. She soon figured out that she could keep people at bay by putting on a cold expression; but this did not protect her when a dog attacked her as she and Ma Ma walked along the street. The owner of the dog, a white man, only smiled when he saw what his dog had done. 

Chapter 5 Summary: “Silk Summary”

Ma Ma took Qian with her to East Broadway in Chinatown to try to find work. As they walked, Qian tried to ignore her growing hunger. In a dilapidated office, a man told Ma Ma that her experience as a math and computer science professor was useless. He ignored Qian when she tried to inform him that her mother was good at everything. After telling the man that she was good at sewing, Ma Ma received a slip of paper which directed her to a warehouse sweatshop. Qian thought the women working at rows of sewing machines were hunchbacks, and she was surprised to see that her own mother transformed into a hunchback too when she took her seat with a pile of cloth. The way the machine spat out thread reminded Qian of a documentary she had seen about silkworms. 

Qian also had a role at the sweatshop. She trimmed loose strings from the shirts with a pair of heavy scissors. For each piece of clothing dropped into the cart, Ma Ma made three cents and Qian made one. All of the women in the shop worked tirelessly without access to water or a restroom. Each was given one scoop of rice and no chopsticks for lunch. Ma Ma collected stories from the women who worked with her. One woman shared that her son had been badly burned in an accident in China. He needed expensive surgery, so she could not stop working, not even to obtain her scoop of rice.

Ma Ma had been a beautiful woman and very intelligent. Before moving to the United States, she had published two textbooks on mathematics and computer science. She sparked Qian’s creative imagination by turning ordinary tasks into games. Wang has a memory of riding a bike with her mother in China and stopping at a vendor to eat a fried silkworm.

Chapter 6 Summary: “Native Speaker”

When Qian had first started school in China, she hated it and cried to her parents that she wanted to stay home. One day, her father told her that he would let her skip school and take her to the zoo instead. But this was a lie: Rather than take her to the zoo, he dropped her off at school. On her first day of school in the United States, when Qian begged to go to the sweatshop instead, Ba Ba allowed her to wait one more day before starting at her new school.

The principal took her to her teacher, Tang Lao Shi. Most of her classmates were Chinese, but they spoke Cantonese rather than Mandarin. Qian was placed next to a girl named Janie who was to translate the lessons into Mandarin for Qian. Everything was new and different to Qian, and she felt immediately how different she was from her classmates. Janie translated only sporadically; outside of the classroom, Qian’s peers treated her as an outcast. In China, Qian had been the leader of her friend group—her mother had been pleased to find out how popular Qian was with her classmates in China. 

On the second day of school, Qian was taken out of Tang Lao Shi’s class and placed into a “special needs” classroom. In this room, Qian was mostly ignored, left to read picture books to pass the time. Qian kept this to herself because she could see how hard her parents were working and how defeated they were by their new life. Eventually, through those books, Qian learned to speak and write English. She convinced her father to ask the principal to allow her to return to the regular classroom; the principal agreed, so long as Qian understood that she would not get special treatment and would have to pass the same tests as her classmates. 

Chapter 7 Summary: “Dumplings”

Hunger was a persistent problem for Qian in the United States. She found ways to steal small amounts of food from her family’s roommates, such as licking the top and bottom of the boxed ice cream in the freezer. Qian’s mother, unable to provide food to quell Qian’s hunger, tried to tell her that hunger was good for her—that it made her stronger. As Qian’s English grew, her relationship with her mother changed. Her mother began to rely on her and to confide in her.

Qian told her mother that she could now eat a free breakfast, as well as a free lunch, at school; however, she did not tell her mother that she was never at school early enough to eat the breakfast. Qian’s reality was dismal; she spent her days at school fighting the hunger that would only be temporarily satiated by meager school lunches. Often, she ate too fast, causing herself to be sick. While she and other low income students stood in line, waiting for food, those with packed lunches had already eaten and were off to recess. Half days at school always came as a surprise, leaving Qian without anything to eat. On one half day, Qian wandered around town, looking for free samples. She found a line of people being fed by uniformed men and women. She joined the line but panicked at the last minute, worried that the uniformed woman who smiled at her might ask her questions that would lead to her deportation. Yet, there were a few bright moments. On Sundays, Qian’s mother was able to scrape together enough ingredients to make a few dumplings, reminiscent of a family ritual from when they lived in China.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Sushi”

Ma Ma struggled to find sustainable work. After being mistreated by Cantonese customers at a restaurant, Ma Ma spat in their food and was fired. The employment agency sent Qian’s mother to a sushi factory, a job she would later categorize as the worst in her life. Ma Ma’s first day at the sushi factory was hard; her job was to butcher fish in an ice cold room where water dripped onto her clothes. Ma Ma finished her day cold and wet. The conditions of the factory would take its toll on Ma Ma’s health. 

Ba Ba also struggled with work. Eventually, he became a clerk for a shady lawyer in an office with no air conditioning or heating. He and the other clerks did most of the lawyer’s work for other Chinese immigrants. Qian was deeply affected by their stories of separation and sadness. The lawyer did not care that there was nothing he could do for most of these clients and gladly took their money. Qian met the lawyer once; he gifted her with a tiny toy ladybug which she cherished.

Chapters 4-8 Analysis

Fear stained Qian’s early experiences in the United States. Worried about deportation, her mother kept the lights off in the house, forced Qian to stay away from windows, and insisted that Qian be wary of anyone outside the family. Qian was taught not to trust anyone, not even other Chinese immigrants—every person was a possible villain, ready to turn them in. This fear infects Qian as well; despite her hunger, she fled from the offer of free food scared that she would somehow be outed as undocumented.

Qian also learned that how she perceived herself in China—outgoing, lively, and smart—was not how Americans saw her. The Simpsons portrayal of Asian characters caused her to feel self-conscious of her own appearance. On the street, strangers used racial slurs and treated her poorly, and, like her mother. 

The theme of forced silence continues in these chapters. In their new home, Qian had to limit what she said during dinner because the landlady hid in the pantry to eavesdrop on conversations. At the employment agency, Qian tried to say that her mother was “good at everything” but went unnoticed: “No one heard me. This was my new reality” (44). At school, Qian had no way to communicate with the teacher and had to rely on a resentful student to interpret for her. Because Qian was unable to advocate for herself or understand what was happening in class, she was placed in a different room for students with “special needs” (68). Shut out from the outside world, Qian discovered that the only person she could rely on was herself, teaching herself how to read and speak English. 

In Chapter 5, Wang interweaves the silk-making process with her experiences working with her mother in a sweatshop in a powerful metaphor. Like Ma Ma, the silkworm is beautiful and full of pride. The cocoon of the silkworm is boiled in the same way that the sweatshop placed Ma Ma in harsh and intolerable conditions. The silk is harvested, and the silkworm itself is sold to be eaten. Similarly, Ma Ma produced the clothes in the sweatshop while the job and the country consumed her, leaving her for dead. While the US consumed the Wang family, they were ravaged by hunger. Qian’s hunger punctuated her childhood, forcing her to resourcefully find food. Free school lunches provided her with calories and depleted her of dignity.

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