“I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. As saturated in cultural specificity as classics like Angela's Ashes and Persepolis, the narrative conveys the unique flavor and underlying beliefs of the author's Chinese heritage-and how they played out as both gifts and obstacles in the chaotic, dirty maelstrom of poverty.Ī potent testament to the love, curiosity, grit, and hope of a courageous and resourceful immigrant child.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. Engaging readers through all five senses and the heart, Wang's debut memoir is a critical addition to the literature on immigration as well as the timeless category of childhood memoir. When she left this life behind, she spoke not a word of it until the xenophobia that crescendoed during the 2016 election cycle made her break her silence. Her only friend at times was a kitten she fed off her own tiny plate until her father blamed it for their bad luck and drove it away.
She lied and blustered her way through the humiliating social network of elementary school, often with poor results.
She taught herself English in a public school that sent her to a special needs classroom and forgot about her. As a child, Wang snipped threads and shivered in a huge plastic bodysuit right alongside them. The family lived off trash-picking and working in sweatshops and frigid sushi processing plants, even though both parents had been professors in China. in 1994, perhaps it is no surprise that Wang, a graduate of Yale Law School on her way up as a litigator, had deeply buried the memories of the 7-year-old girl who came with her Ma Ma to Mei Guo-America, or “beautiful country.” There they joined her father, whose life had been brutalized by the Cultural Revolution (“he would happily eat America's shit before feasting on China's fruits"). Since the absolute necessity of going through the world unnoticed was drummed into her from the moment she arrived in the U.S. How one little girl found her way through the terror, hunger, exhaustion, and cruelty of an undocumented childhood in New York's Chinatown.
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