During her five years in the States-“shrouded in darkness while wrestling with hope and dignity”-Wang managed to become a star student. “Pushing past hunger pains,” they took menial jobs to support Wang, who worked alongside her mother in a sweatshop before starting school at age seven. This fueled her father’s desire to find a better life in America, the “Beautiful Country.” In China, Wang’s parents were professors, but upon arriving in New York City in 1994, their credentials were meaningless. During China’s Cultural Revolution, her uncle was thrown in prison for criticizing Mao Zedong, leaving his parents and younger brother, Wang’s father, to pay for his “treasonous” ways in the form of public beatings and humiliation. In this extraordinary debut, civil rights lawyer Wang recounts her years growing up as an undocumented immigrant living in “the furtive shadows” of America.
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