"Only two people on the continent could know my secret"

What is it like to grow up undocumented in America?

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When she was 7, Qian Julie Wang – just Qian Wang then – landed at JFK airport in New York City. Her airsick mother leaned on her for support. Her father, whom she hadn't seen in two years, had skimped on food to afford the cab driving them from the airport. And just like that, her life as an undocumented child in America began. In Beautiful Country , and in our conversation, she shares the fear, the hunger and the love of books that got her through these years. Read excerpts below and listen to our full conversation on the Borderline podcast .

Isabelle Roughol: You're a successful lawyer now and an American citizen. Why share now the story of the little girl from China you once were?

Qian Julie Wang: When I first got to America, I taught myself English on library books. I lived and breathed those books, but in so many of those volumes, I never saw people who looked like me or lived the lives that my parents and I lived. It gave me this profound sense of shame over who I was. So I always dreamed – what if one day I could put my story out in the world so that that little girl who's still looking around in the library finds it and realises there's nothing inherently wrong with her?

But of course I kept this past a secret for many decades. I never felt safe enough to come forward. It wasn't until I became a naturalised citizen in 2016, almost 22 years after I first stepped foot in JFK airport, that I realised I had a new privilege, power and responsibility to share my secret.

It's my dream to connect everyone around with the fact that we are all at some point immigrants. I've even had people say "I've never moved, I've lived in the same house, in the same state, and yet there are moments in your story that I relate to." That has just been so magical and beautiful to me because I wrote this book on the belief that at bottom we're all not that very different.?

There's something universal about seeing the world as a 7-year-old. Tell me about that little girl you were.

The book opens with me being on the plane from North China to New York City. My dad had left China for New York two years prior, and my mother and I are following him. I chose to open with that scene because it was really the before and after of my childhood. Before that point, I was just normal. I fit in. I never thought about having enough to eat. Once I got on that plane, I was the only person with my mother. She had really bad motion sickness. And normally when it would have been my father or my grandmother or my aunt taking care of my mom, it was me. But I was seven years old and up until then, I thought my mom was all-powerful. I thought, as long as she was there, I didn't need to worry about anything. She was godlike in that way that so many kids think of their parents. And as I started to take care of her on the plane, that dynamic fundamentally shifted when I realised, "Oh, my mother is fallible.?She is human. She needs my help sometimes." And then in our early years of immigration, as I learned English better and picked up social mores faster, it became abundantly clear to me that there were ways in which I could protect my mother, that she could not protect me.

So this book centres on the examination of how my life profoundly shifted by such abrupt immigration.?My parents were very playful in China. And as soon as we got here, that changed. Those playful people were gone. And instead there were these two adults who were always looking over their shoulders, waiting for something. One thing I heard them say early on in our time here was "we don't have the documents." And I had no idea what that meant. What are these documents that we're missing? Should I look around for them??

But very quickly it dawned on me that we were just not allowed here. And so when I saw anyone in uniform, whether it was a sanitation worker or a police officer, I would just turn and run the other way, because it was as much my job as it was my parents' to keep us from being noticed.

You weren't just scared; you were hungry...

It was only recently that I realised that the 1990s were boom time for the United States financially. When I look back on the nineties, I just see Depression-era images. That's how I experienced it. I went to school hungry every day. We had a $20 budget for food every week for all three of us. I learned that money and food was a point of stress for my mother and I could make that easier by saying that I was getting free meals at school – which I was, but they were very small and not very nutritious. I almost never got there in time for breakfast because I lived in a different borough. We worked in the sweatshop until late. I didn't get that much sleep. So the free school lunch would be my very first meal of the day. And just as quickly as I ate it, I would feel like it was gone. It just was not nearly enough to satiate my empty stomach and my growing body.

When did that cloud lift for you?

I don't think that it will ever leave me. I would say that it shifted from a cloud to a scar that acts up every now and then. The act of writing this book was really transformative and healing. Here for the first time in the open is everything I didn't dare to share and say about myself because I thought that it would tell everyone that there was something wrong with me. And to be received so differently tells me that everything that I thought was particularly wrong with me was simply a part of being human.

There is so much more to my conversation with Qian Julie Wang. She talks about being assigned to a special needs classroom because she didn't speak English and teaching herself the language through books; about how immigration changed her parents ; about how she mothered her mother; about moving to Canada, going to college, becoming a lawyer, becoming American...

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