For the first three-quarters or so of this book, I was absolutely enthralled. Qian Julie Wang tells the story of her relatively prosperous, if politically oppressed life in Northern China before her Ba Ba emigrates to America, followed by herself and her Ma Ma five years later. They overstay their visas, becoming undocumented while Ba Ba and Ma Ma work a series of awful jobs to scrape together a life in Brooklyn, constantly dodging anyone who might seem to want to deport them. Qian struggles in school even after teaching herself how to read English, less due to her innate abilities than to the less than nurturing attitudes of certain teachers.

As the years pass, the corrosive effect of living in the shadows takes its toll on the small family, coming to a head when Ma Ma is hospitalized. Even after her recovery, Ma Ma is further disillusioned by her inability to become documented and thus get a job worthy of the qualifications she’s worked so hard to achieve both pre- and post-immigration. So Ma Ma takes a drastic step, and Qian is finally set on a certain path to freedom from the fear of losing everything she loves because of arbitrary employment and status regulations.

So, as an open borders absolutist, books that expose the completely ridiculous ways in which people contort themselves to justify denying human rights to migrants are totally my jam. Towards this end, Beautiful Country knocks it out of the park. It’s a stain on the moral character of any peoples who allow migrants to work for pennies under inhumane conditions, as the entire Wang family is forced to do. Some of our citizens even have the nerve to decry a shortage of skilled labor while refusing to extend protections to the qualified, further making up arbitrary reasons to harm the vulnerable while still profiting from their exploitation. Jackasses like these don’t see immigrants as people, only tools.

Fortunately, we have books like Ms Wang’s that highlight the humanity of the undocumented by depicting with complete frankness all the trauma that a life of poverty, enforced only by a lack of documentation (which, let’s be honest, is fundamentally due to racism,) inflicts upon her and her parents. She has the self-awareness to show how kindness and understanding require effort that the impoverished and hungry often simply can’t afford, freely admitting to having been kind of a shit herself, while still calling out the people who don’t have this excuse, whose experiences are so limited to their lives of relative privilege that they don’t even ask why a child would behave in seemingly self-sabotaging ways, instead assuming it’s because she’s lazy or indifferent. She catalogs both the people who were kind to her as well as all the ways people were gratuitously unkind, including in this last list her parents and the bizarre pronouncements they would lay on her. It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to follow along with a maturing Qian as she sees her father become exactly the opposite of who he’d wanted to be, why he’d left China in the first place.

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