The Leftover Woman

“The Beautiful Country” is a common moniker for the United States within Chinese and Chinese American communities. It encapsulates the dreams and aspirations of would-be immigrants, but often in works of Chinese American literature, it also has an ironic meaning. For immigrants like Jasmine, the United States is a land of opportunity but also a place of struggle. Jobs that pay a living wage or treat her with dignity are hard to come by, and she is viewed through the lens of stereotypes. She experiences discrimination and anti-Asian prejudice in her interactions with white Americans but is also dismissed as “fresh off the boat” by established Chinese Americans. The “Beautiful Country” that she spent so much of her youth in China idealizing is revealed to be a much more fraught, complex space than she imagined. There is a sense that the “Beautiful Country” is a characterization that is expressed by Jasmine and other would-be immigrants with reverence while they are still in China but with bitterness once they arrive in the United States. This motif’s shifting meaning speaks to the complexity of the Chinese American immigrant experience and reveals Jasmine’s changing