Qian Julie Wang decided that she would become a lawyer.
An avid reader, Wang explains, “I had come upon and gulped down condensed biographies of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Thurgood Marshall. Ruth and Thurgood showed me that lawyers didn’t have to be men, and they didn’t have to be white.”
Wang, author of Beautiful Country, came to the United States in 1994 when she was 7 years old. She often went to school hungry and was put in special education classes because she didn’t speak English. Eventually, she graduated from Yale Law School.