Life, Liberty, and Being Pursued by Trauma

Qian Julie Wang’s memoir ‘Beautiful Country’ is all that a girl’s childhood should not be

There exists a rare breed of people who were sent to this earth to write. They send you a work email, and it reads like a love letter. They copy edit an advertisement, and tears wander down your cheeks. And when they write a book… when they write a book, it is an unforgettable memoir like Qian Julie Wang’s ‘Beautiful Country.’ Even her preface is gorgeous:

“I dream of a day when being recognized as human requires no luck — when it is a right, not a privilege. And I dream of a day when each and every one of us will have no reason to fear stepping out of the shadows.”

And yet, gorgeous is a word I would hesitate to use for her memoir. It is inordinately beautiful, yes, but it is a beauty born out of a fellow human being’s deepest trauma. There is so much trauma within these pages that each one needs a trigger warning: racism, xenophobia, violence, sexual harassment, gaslighting, microaggression, poverty, hunger, mental illness, fear, culture shock, parental neglect, animal abuse…

Qian’s life did not begin this way. She talks of a relatively happy childhood, a single child of Professor parents, cocooned in the love of her grandparents. There are…