Jane Kuo’s New Novel Captures What It’s Like to be an Undocumented Child

It can be hard to make your way to a new country, but sometimes even harder to stay in it. Both of these travails are the subject of Chinese and Taiwanese American writer Jane Kuo’s most recent middle grade novels. In 2022 she released In the Beautiful Country, a story of a Taiwanese family who leaves their home country to relocate to the United States — referred to in Chinese as ‘meiguo,’ literally, “the beautiful country.” The story is set in 1980 and told from the first-person perspective of their 10-year-old daughter Zhang Ai Shi as she experiences the highs and lows of forging a new life and identity as Anna Zhang. In a town northeast of Los Angeles, her parents have poured all of their life savings and hope into owning and operating a fast-food restaurant.

Now, Kuo is following up on Anna’s story with Land of Broken Promises, set in 1982, nearly two years after the events of In the Beautiful Country. Land of Broken Promises charts the rich emotional landscape of a now-11-year-old Anna and her parents — whom she refers to only as Ma and Ba. The family thought they had settled into a routine in America only to one day realize that their immigration visas had expired. The news hits like an earthquake, destabilizing the household as they process the guilt of forgetting to renew something so important, and the swamping fear of what it means to live in the country illegally, their young daughter now undocumented.

The story is close to home for Kuo, who lives with her family in the Bay Area but once lived the experience she is writing about. For a period in the 1980s Kuo was an undocumented immigrant. “Anything that’s really significant, any emotional resonance in the book, all of those things are true,” Kuo explains. “I just move dates around.”

But the dates are significant too; Kuo’s writing is informed by both her personal experience and real historical events. In 1986 then-president Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act into law, extending temporary legal status to millions of undocumented people in the country — including Kuo and her family — so long as they had entered the country before 1982.

“In the story it’s really just a year in the girl’s life,” Kuo says of the book’s timeline, “but I’ve condensed down probably five or six years of experience.” Though fictional, Anna’s story grants readers entry into a very real circumstance for undocumented people: living in an indefinitely liminal space while waiting to get their immigration status approved, renewed or denied.

Also helping to tell this condensed story is its stylization. The book is written as a novel-in-verse with short lyrical pages. “I’m interested in just saying what I have to say, and allowing for a lot of white space on the page for that to sit with folks,” says Kuo. Each page packs an emotional punch. Simple sentences encapsulate oceans of meaning: “We try to outdo each other’s worry, as if worrying is just another way to say I love you.”

Realizations like “sadness is a part of love” which may seem axiomatic to adults, feel particularly melancholy when they come from Anna, who is arriving at them after experiencing far too much far too young. “I’m illegal,” Anna says after hearing a lawyer explain their family situation as “fei fa” and translating it. “English words are like riddles in small type.”

The results of Kuo’s verbal economy are remarkable. Place is set swiftly and effectively. Kuo vividly evokes Los Angeles’ sprawl by using the city’s extensive freeway network to tell a short but full story. Anna’s memorization of the route from their home to the lawyer’s office, “210 to 110 then 10 to downtown LA,” is a reminder that belonging is established through repetition, but also of how far her family has to travel daily even now, even after thinking they’ve arrived. Anna and her family will always be travelers.

Though both of her most recent books are middle grade fiction, Kuo doesn’t defer to her audience. The story wasn’t tailored to young people, it’s just being told to them. “To tell you the truth, I just write,” Kuo explains. “I’m not trying to write down or dumb it down at all. A lot of folks in young people’s literature talk about, ‘Hey, if a kid’s experienced it, then you can write about it.’ Actually, kids have experienced a lot of things.”

Though told entirely via Anna’s interior life, the book deals in heavy subject matter that includes the complexities of the naturalization process, navigating cross-cultural friendship, the isolation and fear attached to the ‘undocumented’ label, and even an explanation of how American immigration policy was explicitly Sinophobic in the 1800s.

Still, Kuo distinguishes between what she calls ‘kid voice’ and ‘adult voice’ and explains why she values the approachability of the former. “Because of my immigration background and the people that I associate with, I wanted to make the book as accessible as possible,” she says. “For example, my mom’s read [the first] book, and she’s understood it. She never would’ve been able to if I had written it as a memoir with a lot of musing and a lot of summary and a lot of adult voice looking back on my experience.”

Seeing through the eyes of a child, rather than hampering the book’s lyrical tone, actually magnifies it. There’s a certain kind of accidental poetry children create when they want to express more than their limited vocabularies and understandings of the world will allow. While brushing up on Chinese characters to respond to her father’s fear that her Chinese is fading, Anna notes, incidentally, and beautifully, “Sky is tian, 天 / a line with a big person, 大, / underneath.”

‘Land of Broken Promises’ is out from Harper Collins on June 6. Details here.