Beautiful Country: A Memoir

Beautiful Country (2021) by Qian Julie Wang is a memoir of a seven-year-old girl from China growing up with her immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York beginning in 1994. Events described in her book provide an opportunity to reflect on what happened in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China from 1966 to 1969. In Brooklyn Qian and her family lived in constant fear of being deported. They lived in unsafe apartments and worked at stifling low-paid jobs under racist and sexist attack. Qian was often hungry. She also felt the sting of racist teachers at the school she attended who felt that she was not capable of writing the papers that she turned in. Her story is full of beautiful heart-wrenching observations of life for a young person growing up in the underbelly of a racist capitalist city. Qian was born in China in 1987. Her parents were professors at a university. The book begins with a reference to her father’s older brother, who as a teenager in 1969, had criticized Chairman Mao Zedong in writing, “for manipulating the innocent people of China by pitting them against one another to centralize his power.” She explains further, “My uncle had naively, heroically, and stupidly distributed the essay to the public.” She tells of how there was no high school graduation for him, only “starvation and torture behind prison walls.” Her father spent his childhood standing in front of the class every day as his teachers and classmates berated him and his treasonous family. But to be “treasonous” during the GPCR was to be for communism without any compromises with capitalism such as wages and inequality. Was Qian’s uncle a Red Guard (young communists who challenged the Chinese Communist Party leaders)? If Qian and her family’s account is to be considered credible, it poses the need for legitimate reflection about the GPCR and the state of working-class power during that period.