I’ve read The Joy Luck Club, but all I remember is that when reading it years ago, I felt overwhelmed. Reading about a Chinese-American girl whose family moved overseas years in 1994, 10 to 20 years before mine, opens a new door to fiction demarcating the Asian-American immigrant experience, that for the first time, I actually see myself in. I think this book unlocked something new for me. In that sense, I suppose, “boring” could be praise. It only felt boring because I was living a few split-seconds twice, once in my life, and once in Qian’s life. I find it boring because it loosely resembles some parts of my personal memory, blended up so that only a few fragments are still recognizable, but much of it is unrecognizable, then thrown one or two decades earlier. Qian Julie Wang is an ordinary girl, on a few occasions reminding me, of me.
Beautiful Country tells the tale of an immigrant family seeing a beautiful destination, leaving home in China, to endure a transition into a newer and much harsher world.īeautiful Country is a boring memoir. “mei” means beautiful, in every sense of its definition, ever since this character evolved on tortoiseshell carvings thousands of years ago.
(In Chinese, 美国 is pronounced “mĕi guó” to imitate the phonetic syllables of ah-MEr-ica). The “United States of America”, literally translated into Chinese, is “Beautiful Country”.
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