Beautiful Country

by Qian Julie Wang

it was impossible to find perspective on a still-festering wound.

But in the vacuum of anxiety that was undocumented life, fear was gaseous: it expanded to fill our entire world until it was all we could breathe.

in all the stories of the gold-paved Mei Guo and the dangerous Mei Guo, no one in China knew about the lights of America, about how they were so delightful that they could stop us in the middle of the street, in the middle of our lives and our worries, in the middle of strangers living stranger lives, all just to fill us with music and hope.

It was the ritual dance Ba Ba was forced to do with every white person he met.

Why were we expected to speak English perfectly while praising Americans for even the clumsiest dribble of Chinese?

So many words from that book were talismanic refrains that, for the the first time, brought to life for me the very depths of my hurts, my joys, my loneliness.

“Secrets. They have so much power, don’t they?”

You cannot know that some things are not enough until you have them.