Beautiful Country Quotes

“Why were we expected to speak English perfectly while praising Americans for even the clumsiest dribble of Chinese?”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“I put these stories to paper for this country's forgotten children, past and present, who grow up cloaked in fear, desolation, and the belief that their very existence is wrong, their very being illegal. I have been unfathomably lucky. But 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.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Ma Ma liked to say that a woman could be beautiful without being pretty, but that a woman could not be beautiful without having dignity. It would take me decades to unravel what that meant.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“The heartbreak of one immigrant is never far from that of another.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country: A Memoir

“He took on the form of what American expected of us: docile, meek. He had even started teaching me the importance of keeping my head down, of not asking any questions or drawing any attention, seemingly forgetting that he had taught me the exact opposite in China.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“It was then that I realized I could be homesick for a place even though I no longer knew where home was.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Ma Ma like to say that a woman could be beautiful without being pretty, but that a woman could not be beautiful without having dignity.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“No one heard me. This was my new reality. There was a lot of noise in Mei Guo, and my voice was no longer loud enough.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Mama liked to say that a woman could be beautiful without being pretty, but that a woman could not be beautiful without having dignity. It would take me decades to unravel what that meant.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Secrets. They have so much power, don’t they?”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country: A Memoir

“It won’t work, I thought. I was his child and if there ever was someone more stubborn than him, it was me. There was a Chinese idiom I came to know later because Ma Ma and Ba Ba would repeat it to me in those moments: “Purple comes from blue but is superior to blue.” It was inevitable, they seemed to believe, that I would one day outshine them in the best and worst ways.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country: A Memoir

“Why should I have to change what I was called just because their tongues were too clumsy?”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“But even though libraries were homes, bookstores were dangerous. I rarely left myself go in. I was afraid that they would show me that there were worlds beyond what was already freely available to me, and make me want more than I could afford.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“The whole world was dancing and so were we. We exchanged another smile and I marvelled how, 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.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“ren”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country: A Memoir

“The Brooklyn summer was the tiger mother I never had. She was in every sidewalk crack, on every black plastic bag, and in every pungent smell. It did not matter where I went. She was forever in my face, telling me to sift faster, to ignore my discomfort, all the while squeezing thick, salty sweat out of every pore.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo. She came second only to loneliness.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Our family was closest in the face of pain.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country: A Memoir

“He would happily eat America's shit before feasting on China's fruits.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“I began to talk a lot about pets. I wondered often about what it would be like to have someone always on my side. Someone who saw me and noticed me and got excited when I came home. Someone who didn't need me for advice, someone who was just there for me.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“[Ba Ba] asked fewer and fewer questions in America. Somehow, by leaving China, Ba Ba had grown more Chinese, starting to adopt our government's silly ideas about how asking questions was bad and disrespectful.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Words rolled out of my mouth one after another and I do not dare to interrupt them with a breath. They are new words, foreign words but familiar all the same because they have been sitting at my throat for over two decades waiting their turn.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“The chortles and chuckles followed me, but I didn't mind. They reminded me I had an audience to prove wrong.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Ma Ma explained everything to me—how she had learned from her new friend who lived on Long Island that Canada was looking for educated immigrants; how that friend had introduced her to a lawyer, and how Ma Ma had worked with that lawyer for many months to get us permission to move to Canada; how we would not just have visas but full green cards once we got there, except it was not called a green card, but a “maple leaf card”; how I would be able to go to any college I wanted and she could work at a real job; how there was free healthcare; and how Ba Ba had refused to leave, how he was scared, how he loved America too much, maybe more than he loved us. It was a lot and I didn’t understand it all, not all at once. All I took from it was that Ma Ma had been working on this for a while, without telling me.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“I am at long last free to admit: I am tired. I am so very tired of running and hiding, but I have done it for so long, I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to do anything else. It is all I am: defining myself against illegality while stitching it into my veins.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Chances were that nothing would change. I didn’t understand what he meant about feeling embarrassed and disappointed. I had never understood it, the big deal about saving face. I figured being rejected was just the same as not trying—worse probably, because I would always wonder. Perhaps that was Ma Ma’s voice within me, telling me that I could do everything she hadn’t done but wished she had, promising me that whatever I saw out there, whatever I envied, could be mine as long as I chose to make it so.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“I did not understand then that there are few things more activating than the quiet desperation of a dignified woman.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“Fear was all I tasted; fear was all I contained; fear was all I was.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country

“I was smarter than Christine. But she was happier because she celebrated all victories, real or false.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country: A Memoir

“I was a wanderer, who upon stumbling on the desert's edge, could finally afford to recognize my monthslong thirst.”
― Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country