Organised by Penguin Random House UK
Join writer Qian Julie Wang for a virtual event to celebrate the release of her remarkable and unforgettable memoir, Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood.
In China she was the daughter of professors. In Brooklyn her family is 'illegal.'
Qian Julie is just seven when she moves to America, the 'Beautiful Country', where she and her parents find that the roads of New York City are not paved with gold, but crushing fear and scarcity. Unable to speak English at first, Qian Julie and her parents must work wherever they can to survive, all while she battles hunger and loneliness at school. Thus begins an extraordinary story that describes, in vivid colours, days labouring in sweatshops and sushi factories, nights scavenging the streets for furniture, and the terrifying moment when the family emerges from the shadows to seek emergency medical treatment for Qian Julie's mother.
Beautiful Country is the story of a girl who learns first to live – and then escape – an invisible life. Don’t miss the chance to hear from Qian Julie about the truth of what it means to grow up as an undocumented immigrant, under the perpetual threat of deportation – and the small joys and sheer determination that kept her family afloat in a new land, and to ask your own questions in the audience Q&A.