Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang

I read this book in two days. Qian Julie Wang captured my heart with her beautifully written memoir of growing up as an undocumented immigrant. I was heartbroken by the racism and disconcern that left her family in dire poverty.

Her parents were educated professionals in China, her mother a math professor and her father an English literature professor. In America, they worked as menial laborers. In China, Qian was a fearless, intelligent, tomboy. In America, her teacher accused her of plagiarism, unable to accept her gift with words.

Qian's father had believed in the myth of American freedom. In China, he was punished for independent thinking. He left his wife and child for America, and it was years before they could join him. 

Fear of being discovered kept them caged in poverty. When Qian's mother gains a degree, she can\'t work without proper paperwork. 

Qian did not see the 'beautiful' country for a long time. The trauma of her childhood haunted her. When her family relocates to Canada, their lives improve. They were welcome. They had free health care and found appropriate work. Qian received a good education that prepared her for Swarthmore College and Yale Law School.

As a girl, Qian found solace in books. "I read until my loneliness dulled, and I felt myself to be in the good company of all my vibrantly colored, two-dimensional friends. I read until excitement replaced hopelessness," she writes. She bristled when a teacher pushed her to read 'boy' books as more 'worthwhile' than the stories of girl's lives. She found role models such as Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg who taught her that you did not have to be a white male to succeed.

Their family trauma began in China during the Cultural Revolution when her father was a small child who observed his brother arrested, his parents beaten. At school, he was berated and tormented.

"Half a century and a migration across the world later, it would take therapy's slow and arduous unraveling for me to see that the thread of trauma was woven into every fiber of my family, my childhood," Qian writes.

Qian dreams of a day when all people are treated humanely. She writes so others know they are not alone and they can also survive and even flourish. I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased. 

Beautiful Country 

by Qian Julie Wang
Doubleday Books

Pub Date September 7, 2021
ISBN: 9780385547215
hard cover $28.95 (USD)

from the publisher

An incandescent and heartrending memoir from an astonishing new talent, Beautiful Country puts readers in the shoes of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world.

In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive.

In Chinatown, Qian’s parents work in sweatshops and sushi factories. Instead of laughing at her jokes or watching her sing and dance, they fight constantly. Qian goes to school hungry, where she teaches herself English through library books, her only source of comfort. At home, Qian's headstrong and resilient Ma Ma ignores her own pain until she's unable to stand, too afraid of the cost and attention a hospital visit might bring. And yet, young Qian, now acting as her mother's nurse, her family's translator, a student and a worker, cannot ask for help. The number-one rule in America still stands: To be noticed is to risk losing everything.

Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light

Afterlife by Julia Alvarez

"You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you...his influence has not vanished from your existence..."~from The Dark Interval by Rainer Maria Rilke

Reading about the death of a loved one during the time of Coronavirus is difficult. I feel the cold blade of fear which I daily push back down into my subconscious, then "tie my hat and crease my shawl" to perform my tasks and obligations.

Afterlife is the story of Hispanic retired literature teacher Antonia who mourns the loss of her husband Sam. She struggles to understand how to now live. Her sisters are calling her to join them in confronting their sibling's bipolar illness. An illegal immigrant employed by her Vermont farmer neighbor implores her to help him bring his girl to join him.

All these demands! Antonia just wants to tend her own garden and live with her sorrow. But knowing Sam has changed her. His compassion remains an example of how to live in this world. Sam"seems to be resurrecting inside her," and she wonders, "is this all his afterlife will amount to? Saminspired deeds from the people who love him?"

Antonia's mind is filled with the books she loved and taught, including Rainer Maria Rilke. Last year I had read The Dark Interval which shares Rilke's letters of condolences. Alvarez's novel embodies Rilke's philosophy.

Against her nature and inclination, Sam leads Antonia to risk becoming involved in the lives and problems of other people. "Living your life is a full-time job," a sister justifies. Isn't that the truth? Then, a therapist reads Rilke to the sisters: "Death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."

Antonia's students always responded to Rilke's poem 'Archaic Torso of Apollo" which ends, "you must change your life." It is a line that has haunted ever me since I first read it. The question, Antonia wonders, is how and when do we change it?

It is a question to be asked over and over. There is no end to such a consideration. We read a book and what we learn reminds us that we must change our life. We see a work of art, Rilke his Greek torso, Antonia Landscape with The Fall of Icarus, or when hear a symphony, or observe a beautiful spring flower or a deep woods filled with birdsong--

All the world is life-changing if we allow ourselves to truly live and open our senses and hearts and minds. To be alive is life-changing. To die is life-changing.

Antonia accepts the challenge to be Saminspired.

Alvarez is a brilliant writer who has combined a deep reflection on existence with timely questions. There is no better time for this message.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The publisher blurb offered,

Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including—maybe especially—members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?

Read an excerpt from Afterlife
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781643750255_be.pdf?1584638362

Read Alvarez's essay Living the Afterlife
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781643750255_ae.pdf?1584637610

Afterlife
by Julia Alvarez
Algonquin Books
Pub Date April 7,  2020
ISBN: 9781643750255
hardcover $25.95 (USD)

Books on Women Searching for Healing and Justice

Sometimes I find myself reading books simultaneously with themes that reinforce each other. These past weeks I read The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story by Aaron Bobrow-Strain and Legacy: Trauma, Story and Indigenous Healing by Suzanne Methot. Both books feature the stories of women who experienced trauma and struggled with CPTSD. 

Aida's story illuminates the immigrant experience at our Southern borders and the vulnerability of women who seek permanent and legal immigrant status in the United States. Suzanne tells her story in the context of generations of First People whose social, cultural, and religious traditions were broken under colonization and the removal of children to residential schools where they underwent abuse. 

Both books touched me in many ways. I empathized with the women. They endured the unimaginable and survived. I was educated in the history and ongoing policies that destroy traditional native cultures and leads to generations of damaged individuals. Most of all I was angered by ongoing racism and misogyny and the withholding of justice.

The House on Mango Street changed Aida Hernandez's life. In her darkest hours, she remembered the words of hope: "I have gone a long way to come back."

Aida wanted to dance. She wanted to finish high school and go to college. She wanted to become a therapist. She wanted to give her son a good home. She wanted to love and be loved. Her hopes were just like yours and mine.

But Aida's life held more horrors than any one body should be able to endure. She had survived even death but suffered from crippling CPTSD--Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She came from a legacy of abuse but a knife attack tipped her over the edge. It only took one mistake, a $6 mistake, to remove Aida from her son and family, locked up for months in a women's prison. They were not given tampons, or enough toilet paper, or adequate wholesome food. There were not enough beds or blankets to keep warm. 

And that is when Aida saw The House on Mango Street on the prison library shelf and it started her reclamation and a life of helping the other women with her.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain's book The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez brings to life unforgettable women, and through their stories, explores the failure of Prevention Through Deterrence which posits that if the journey is horrific enough people will not come. Women suffer the most in this system. 

He shows how American economic and political policies and the desire for cheap labor created the influx of illegal immigrants. 

Immigrants in detention centers are treated like hardened criminals with shackles, solitary confinement, lack of medical care, meager inedible food, and a scarcity of hygiene supplies. They have no legal rights. They are provided no legal counsel. Border Patrol and detention centers have created jobs and business--paid for by the government. 

Who are the people seeking refuge in America? What drives them from their homeland? What options are available for legal immigration? What happens to those who are apprehended? This book will answer all your questions. But you may not like the answers.

Justice. How many times have we forgotten this value? 

The proceeds from this book will be shared between Aida Hernandez, the Chiricahua Community Health Centers to support emergency services for people dealing with domestic violence or sexual assault, and the author to offset costs of writing the book. Which for me means an instant add to my "to buy" list.

Click here to read an interview with the author at Borderlands-Works in Progress. 

I thank the publisher who provided a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pub Date 16 Apr 2019

ISBN 9780374191979

PRICE $28.00 (USD)

Suzanne Methot's Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing combines her personal story with history and psychology to create an understanding of the consequences of colonization. She demonstrates how abuse and CPTSD creates a cycle that impacts generations. On the personal level, she documents her own legacy of abuse and dysfunction and how a return to traditional ways brought healing. On the universal, she explains the psychological damage of trauma through story, with summary charts at chapter ends.

Methot's book is perhaps more suited for the indigenous population or educators those in the helping professions who work with indigenous people. But I also found her insights applicable in many ways. I found myself thinking about women I have known who demonstrated the characteristics she describes. And I even found myself applying her insights to characters in novels I have read! 

from the publisher:

Five hundred years of colonization have taken an incalculable toll on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: substance use disorders and shockingly high rates of depression, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions brought on by genocide and colonial control. With passionate logic and chillingly clear prose, author and educator Suzanne Methot uses history, human development, and her own and others’ stories to trace the roots of Indigenous cultural dislocation and community breakdown in an original and provocative examination of the long-term effects of colonization. But all is not lost. Methot also shows how we can come back from this with Indigenous ways of knowing lighting the way.

I thank ECW for providing a free ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing

Methot, Suzanne

ECW Press

$24.95 CAD

DESCRIPTION

Published: March 2019

ISBN: 9781770414259

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

Our son grew up with a boy born in Asia who, as an infant, was adopted by an American, middle class family. He had perfectly nice parents and a biracial adopted sister. Our son told us the boy felt sad, wondering why his mother gave him up, and about how he was conflicted by being different as the only Asian in school. There was always an air of sadness about the boy.

I thought of that boy, now a man, while reading Lisa Ko's debut novel The Leavers. The book is a moving journey into the lives of Deming/Daniel, a Chinese American child adopted by an American family, and his birth mother Pelian/Polly, bold and strong but whose fierce love of her child cannot save them from the forces--poverty and the law-- that inevitably separate her from her child.

Pelian/Polly Gao is an unforgettable character, born in rural China, daughter of a fisherman. She imagines possibilities of another life and will do anything to achieve her dreams. She could have settled for marrying the village boy who loved her, remained in China, taking care of her aging fisherman father. She could have had an abortion and stayed in the Chinese factory dormitory, working long hours. Instead, she takes out a loan to go to America.

Her son Deming was born in New York City. But Polly's debt meant long hours working for low wages. She sends her son to live with her father in China. After the death of his grandfather, Deming rejoins his mother, who is living with her boyfriend and his sister and nephew. Those years are Deming's happiest. He adores his mother and has a 'brother' for best friend.

One day Deming's mother disappears. He is placed in a foster home and is adopted by an educated and well-off family. Now called Daniel, the boy never feels at home in his new world, any more than his mother had felt at home in her rural village.

Daniel flounders in life. Then he is brought into contact with people from his past who led him on a quest to find his mother. And finally learns the harrowing events that led to their separation.

Illegal immigration, the immigrant experience, the love between a mother and a child, and the search for authenticity and a place to belong are all themes in the novel.

The novel has garnered much well deserved praise and I purchased it to read. The beauty of Ko's writing and the memorable characters made this an outstanding read.

In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

In the middle of a blizzard, Richard is moved to shed his twenty-five year long isolation and dares to love again, guided by Lucia, who has lost everything several times but still takes a chance on love.

What brings them together is Evelyn, an undocumented alien, the loving caretaker of a boy with Cerebral Palsy whose parents' toxic relationship and troubled lives has left her knowing more than is safe for her to know.

The trio resolve to undertake a dangerous mission to protect Evelyn, a journey into a silent landscape of deep snow and journeys to their pasts.

Isabel Allende's In the Midst of Winter is a story of rebirth, forgiveness, and love. The character's back stories take up the most space, told piecemeal in long chapters between the action.

Lucia is an immigrant, a professor, who escaped Chile when her brother's involvement with a gang led to his death and made her life unsafe. Lucia is a character women will love. Evelyn is an illegal alien from Guatemala who also took the dangerous journey to America to save her life. Both women understand what it is like for a loved one to simply disappear.

Richard is Lucia's boss at New York University and had invited her to be a visiting professor. He rents Lucia a basement room. He has lived in a winter world ever since the loss of his baby to SIDS left his wife severely depressed. Richard drank and partied his sorrows away. A tragic accident took their remaining child's life, and later he lost his wife.

I felt sympathy for the characters and appreciated Allende addressing the violence that causes most of today's immigration to America. She demonstrates the horrors that force people to leave their homeland and family and give a face to illegal immigrants. Allende's passion for the plight of women and children is evident throughout the novel.

The novel shows that in the midst of great disappointment and pain people can find new life, that the possibility of love can come unexpectedly. The love story between Richard and Lucia is very beautiful.

I was not a fan of how the story was presented. The characters tell their stories to each other, but the authorial voice is telling the reader, not the characters.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

In the Midst of Winter
Isabel Allende
Atria Books
ISBN 9781501178139


Read an excerpt of the novel at
https://www.isabelallende.com/en/book/winter/excerpt

Read about The Isabelle Allende Foundation which supports MILES Chile’s efforts in human rights,  promoting respect for people independent of race, creed, ethnicity, political ideology, gender, ability, sexual orientation and age:
https://isabelallende.org

The Far Away Brothers: The Journey of Twin Teenage Migrants

To solve a problem one must understand what caused it and address its root causes. That is a hard thing, requiring work and effort and creative thinking. Why not just make the problem illegal?

We have been trying that and it does not seem to work. "Just say no" to sex or drugs, prison sentences for drug possession, throwing a pregnant teenage daughter out of the house--none of these ever solved anything.

Illegal immigration has become the issue of the day under the present administration. Migrants have been arrested, abused, sent back, and yet more come. Build a wall, we are told, that will keep them out. I doubt it. There is a reason why people leave their homeland and family, and the reasons are rarely trite.

In her timely book The Far Away Brothers , Lauren Markham tells the story of  the twin Flores brothers who flee El Salvador to join their undocumented migrant brother in America. We learn about their lives in El Salvador, about their families, the challenges they faced on their journey north, and the multiple difficulties of their lives in the United States.

Markham, who has reported on undocumented immigration for a decade, spent two years researching for this book, plus she draws from her experience working with immigrant students at Oakland International High School. She chose to write about twins to illustrate how each immigrant has their own motivation and individual response to the experience.

In the past the draw to the United States was for economic opportunity and security. Today migrants leave their homes to escape the domination and violence of the gangs who have taken over power. Last year 60,000 unaccompanied minors entered the United States, most from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador--the 'murder capital of the world'.

When one of the Flores twins is targeted by their uncle's gang he decides he must leave to survive, and his twin brother joins him. The boys' family puts their livelihood at risk by offering the their land as security to raise money for transport to the border. They falsely assume the debt can be paid off quickly once the boys get jobs, but the interest blows their debt up to $20,000.

The journey leaves its psychic scars; one twin has nightmares and cannot talk about what he had seen.

To stay in America the boys must be in school, under their older brother's authority. Somehow they must also earn money to start paying off their debt to the coyotes. They are teenagers, too, who are finally 'free' and they don't always handle that freedom well. Readers may not always like the boys, but hopefully they will understand their fears, confusion, and motivations.

The author is not afraid to offer a paragraph on American policies that have contributed to the Central American 'catastrophe', by supplying weapons and by creating free-trade deals that hurt small farmers. Then there is the legacy of large corporations that bought up land for farming, controlling resources and the economic benefits.

As Markham writes, "People migrate now for the same reason they always have: survival." Investment in improving educational and economic opportunities, addressing the root causes of migration, would be a better use of federal funds than building a wall.

I read Enique's Journey by Sonia Nazario about ten years ago. Here is what she had to say about The Far Away Brothers:

“Powerful…Focusing primarily on one family’s struggle to survive in violence-riddled El Salvador by sending some of its members illegally to the U.S.,…[this] compellingly intimate narrative…keenly examines the plights of juveniles sent to America without adult supervision….One of the most searing books on illegal immigration since Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey.” —Kirkus

I received a free ebook through First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Far Away Brothers
Lauren Markham
Crown
Publication Date: Sept 12, 2017
Hardcover $27.00
ISBN 9781101906187