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Beautiful Country
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Qian Julie Wang
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
An incandescent memoir from an astonishing new talent, Beautiful Country puts listeners in the shoes of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world.
"Extraordinary.... Consider this remarkable memoir a new classic." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
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 full of curiosity, 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 labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly “shopping days”, when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center - confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all.
But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here.
Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned 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.
Dear Listener,
Critic reviews
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping, She Reads, and more • One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year
“Incredibly important, exquisitely written, harrowing. . . Beautiful Country tells [Wang’s] story, well, quite beautifully. It is not only Wang’s mastery of the language that makes the story so compelling, but also the passionate yearning for empathy and understanding. Beautiful Country is timely, yes, but more importantly it is a near-masterpiece that will make Qian Julie Wang a literary star.”—Shondaland
“A coming-of-age memoir about an undocumented Chinese girl growing up in New York's Chinatown, this lyrical book is full of small moments of joy, heartbreaking pain and the struggles of a family trying to survive in the shadows of society. It's a uniquely American story, and an essential one.”—Good Housekeeping
“A heartbreaking and intimate memoir... the storytelling from a young Qian’s perspective is riveting.”—Politico
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He Came in with It
- A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness
- By: Miriam Feldman
- Narrated by: Ann Richardson
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens off the conventional course. Like the 10 Biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another: violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning - even cancer and a brain tumor - play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal.
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So Beautifully Written
- By Michael on 08-01-22
By: Miriam Feldman
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Scars and Stilettos - 2nd Edition
- By: Harmony Dust
- Narrated by: Harmony Dust
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
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Scars and Stilettos: At 13, after being abandoned by her mother one summer and left to take care of her younger brother, Harmony becomes susceptible to a relationship that turns out to be toxic, abusive, and ultimately exploitative. She eventually finds herself working in a strip club at the age of 19, and her boyfriend becomes her pimp, controlling her every move and taking all of her money. Ultimately, she discovers a path to freedom and a whole new life.
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A religious book
- By Amazonbuyer on 10-12-21
By: Harmony Dust
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Other Words for Home
- By: Jasmine Warga
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Jude never thought she’d be leaving her beloved older brother and father behind, all the way across the ocean in Syria. But when things in her hometown start becoming volatile, Jude and her mother are sent to live in Cincinnati with relatives. At first, everything in America seems too fast and too loud. The American movies that Jude has always loved haven’t quite prepared her for starting school in the US - and her new label of “Middle Eastern”, an identity she’s never known before. But this life also brings unexpected surprises.
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Great story for students!
- By Anonymous User on 12-10-19
By: Jasmine Warga
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Fault Lines
- A Novel
- By: Emily Itami
- Narrated by: Lydia Wilson
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
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Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry.
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Confused by the choice of narrator
- By Bri T. on 02-13-22
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Finding Chika
- A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
- By: Mitch Albom
- Narrated by: Mitch Albom
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
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Overall
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Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince. With no children of their own, the 40-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says "no one in Haiti can help you with."
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BUY READ AND RECOMMEND THIS BOOK
- By Ann Grant on 11-05-19
By: Mitch Albom
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I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying
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- By: Bassey Ikpi
- Narrated by: Bassey Ikpi
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
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In I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying, Bassey Ikpi explores her life - as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist - through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our preconceptions of the mind and normalcy as Bassey bares her own truths and lies for us all to behold with radical honesty and brutal intimacy.
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Full, poignant, purposeful
- By Brée on 08-21-19
By: Bassey Ikpi
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
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Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
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Quadriplegics simply do not walk again - yet millions watched as Chris Norton defied incredible odds and took step by impossible step across his graduation stage. With his fiancée, Emily, by his side, those unbelievable steps became the start of an extraordinary journey for them both. Told from both of their unique perspectives, this moving story invites you to find, as Chris and Emily have, that God can transform our lowest points into life's greatest gifts.
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The family is uncommonly close: Michael's childless Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving, glamorous Hollywood screenwriters, are doubly related— Hankie is his father's sister, and Irving is his mother's brother. The two families live near each other in Laurel Canyon. In this strangely intertwined world, even the author's grandmothers—who dislike each other—share a nearby apartment.
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It’s the summer of 1959 in the seemingly tranquil suburbs of Washington, DC. But our young narrator, John, and his best friends, Ivan and Max, know the truth: Every door on their street could be hiding an escaped Nazi or a spy. The entire city is being plagued by an inexplicable spider infestation - surely evidence of "insect warfare" by the Russians! So when a rare vinegaroon - a whip scorpion - is discovered and sequestered for museum study, the boys, along with their tomboy accomplice, Beatriz, hatch a risky midnight plan to steal the poisonous creature.
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Wonderfully sweet and nostalgic tale of adolescence.
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From the author of The Water Dancers and Good Family, an exquisitely crafted novel, set in Ohio in the decades leading to the Civil War, that illuminates the immigrant experience, the injustice of slavery, and the debts human beings owe to one another, witnessed through the endeavors of one Irish-American family.
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Cassandra Campbell brought this book alive.
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What listeners say about Beautiful Country
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ione Harrington
- 11-03-21
America NOT SO beautiful
I thought we had come so far as Americans but reading this makes me wonder what really goes on that we close our eyes to as people enter this country looking for a better life!!
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- barbara
- 10-12-22
A long childhood
This book made me realize that I don’t love memoirs based almost solely on one’s early childhood. I love children but their blow by blow childhood memories are not the stuff of books I enjoy. Some of the cultural aspects of this childhood were interesting but overall the book is sad.
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- Darlene Bennett
- 09-15-21
Makes Me Sad
Sorry to think your experience here was so painful. My parents were immigrants from Germany in the early 1900s. There’s was a wonderful experience. The difference was they had someone here who cared about them and help them get started. That’s what every newcomer needs I’m happy to say my experience here as a first generation American has been profound and beautiful.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Jayep99
- 10-31-21
Great story!
What a very interesting book but it’s also very sad most of the time. You can’t believe that a little 6 year old girl hast to go through so much !!! Certain parts are absolutely going to break your heart so be prepared!!!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Thomas A. Siewert
- 12-16-21
Beautiful Country, Beautiful Memoir!
What amazes me most about this book is the detail she uses in her descriptions of the life they forged in their new country, but it's detail from a little girl perspective. It makes me wonder if she was writing a journal or diary at the time, because as an adult many people lose that childhood perspective, but she wrote in such viscerally childlike language at times that it really puts you in her shoes in a way few adult books can. Even though the subject matter is often difficult to hear, her perspective is still in a way refreshing, interesting. It's a beautifully written account of the difficulties of the immigrant experience in the US, and in an age of so much anti-immigrant sentiment, it's an important reminder of just how hard it is to come to a new country with basically nothing and begin a new life. Also for me personally, I'm a white American married to a Chinese woman and living in China, and there was so much I could relate to from a cultural perspective as well. All around, a highly recommended book with great narration by the author.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-18-22
Incredible Story
I love how the gifted author could describe her experiences through a child’s eyes. Profoundly meaningful story that addresses so many issues undocumented people face.
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- Loree Foreman
- 09-28-21
Awesome Book
The author describes what it was like for her coming to the US from China at seven years old. She was terrified of being deported everyday. There were some teachers who didn’t believe she was smart because she was Chinese and poor. Her parents were professors in China, but couldn’t get equivalent work in the US. America misses out on great contributions by immigrants because of the way immigration is handled here.
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- Deby Brown
- 10-25-21
Awesome
I loved this audible! I didn't want her to stop. I loved everything about this book.
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- Yamato Akimoto
- 11-13-21
Loved it
So relatable. Great story telling. Felt like I was reliving my own childhood. We are not alone.
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- Nina D.
- 01-30-22
Insightful, moving memoir
Would recommend this memoir to all HS and college students in social studies or American history. Story of a Chinese child who is an undocumented immigrant in NY. Told from the perspective of the author as a young person, the book captures the range of experiences, fears and emotions of someone who is undocumented and living in poverty. I couldn’t put it down.
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