“Beautiful Country” is the literal translation of the Chinese characters for “America.” When Wang was a little girl, her parents flew to the US to escape persecution in China (they were college professors who criticized the government). The family became undocumented immigrants in Brooklyn after their temporary visas expired, working in sweatshops and sifting through garbage for food and supplies. Her father enrolled her in a public school but her teachers and peers spoke English and Cantonese, not Mandarin, and she ended up in a special-needs classroom where she taught herself to read through picture books. Eventually she managed to get back into a normal classroom, but had to purposefully dumb down her writing when teachers accused her of plagiarism; she also had to hide their illegal status and learned to swallow insults as she tried to fit in with her American classmates. Her family was eventually able to emigrate to Canada and then legally return to the US, where she graduated from Swarthmore and Yale; it’s easy to point to hers as a success story, but her account highlights all the gaps through which children can fall, and all the ways in which talented professionals are wasted (between sweatshop jobs, her mother taught herself English and got a degree in computer science, yet was frustratingly unable to use it due to her illegal status). Wang does not provide answers, only wishing to shine a light on her traumatic upbringing.