Qian Julia Wang, wearing a black leather jacket and a black-and-yellow blouse, looking off in the distance as she pushes her hair behind her ear
© Ryan Muir
Cover of “Beautiful Country”
Penguin Random House
Old snapshot of Qian Julie Wang and two family members
courtesy of qian julie wang ’09
© Ryan Muir
courtesy of qian julie wang ’09
“Daily, I fought the urge to rescue perfectly edible meals from the garbage,” recalls Qian Julie Wang ’09. Her new memoir, Beautiful Country, surveys the impact of hunger in undocumented children in the United States.

The Shadow of Hunger

personal reflection by Qian Julie Wang ’09

My first year at Swarthmore in 2005, I gained 20 pounds.

This is certainly not unusual for freshmen, but in my case, it was for atypical reasons.

During my undocumented childhood, a period of extreme poverty that I never dared speak of during my time on campus, I arrived at elementary school every day starving, stomach churning toward the free meal that would be slopped onto my tray at lunchtime. For decades thereafter, the shadow of hunger lived in my stomach.

It was the thing that commanded me to binge whenever I came upon a buffet, that whispered that the only way to stave off the hunger of my past was to eat all of the free food that ever came before me.

The first time I entered Sharples, I wandered from food station to food station with suspended breath. I could hardly believe the range of options, and made my way from the salad bar to the pasta assortment, the entrée section and the ice cream spread.

My only concern was the size of the trays, so I left my first visit to the serving section with a sampling on small plates and plans to return for seconds. And during every Sharples outing that first year, I always returned for seconds. And thirds. And sometimes even fourths. I never left behind a single crumb, stuffing everything into my stomach before smuggling some more out the back door and across the field to Mertz.

The only thing that astounded me more than Sharples’s offerings was the sheer amount of food my fellow students dumped into nearby trash cans.

Daily, I fought the urge to rescue perfectly edible meals from the garbage. The waste I witnessed at Sharples threw into relief the hunger painted on the faces of the homeless lining the streets of Philadelphia, where I worked several part-time jobs. That contrast weighed on me far more than my newfound pounds.

It was clear early that my appreciation of Sharples was not widely shared, but I would not realize just how rare it was until one specific incident.

“During my undocumented childhood … I arrived at elementary school every day starving.”
— Qian Julie Wang ’09

After loading a plate with a vegetable I’d never heard of, with a name I could not pronounce (arugula), I approached a table in the side room with my new friends — all of us still in that precarious need-to-impress stage — and marveled in awe: “Can you guys believe the spread today?!” I met silence, followed by a chuckle and then another, before laughter crested down the table.

I bit the insides of my cheeks, my appetite gone, while the friend closest to me explained that they had all just been complaining about how horrible the food was. I stayed quiet for the rest of the meal, but cleared my plates nevertheless. It marked the one time I did not dare return for seconds.

From then on, I experienced a different Sharples. I observed the disdain with which my classmates surveyed the offerings. The meals that were poked before being tossed. The flippancy with which my peers regarded the many culinary options before them. Something was wrong with my relationship to the food, I figured. I was damaged in some way; I was not normal. And slowly, over the course of my years at Swarthmore, I learned to paint that nonchalance onto myself, to hide my enthusiasm for the feast at every meal, to prod at my tray with indifference, and later, to even — much as it pained me — leave food still sitting on my tray as I walked toward the trash bins.

As this mimicry went on, the pounds fell off, but the weight of shame on my shoulders grew. I went on to graduate still pretending that food did not matter as much as it did to me — as my childhood prescribed it always would.

It was not until after years of therapy — of struggling to make peace with my past while etching a balanced, ethical relationship with food — that I realized my response to Sharples had been far from abnormal. Nor, alas, were the circumstances of my childhood.

It was, indeed, the atmosphere at the Sharples dining room that had been abnormal, problematic. For despite all the campus discourse about anti-racism and wealth equality, there had been so much waste. I’m sure that things have changed — and are changing still — since I left campus some 12 years ago. But it bears stating that one cannot in good conscience stand for everything Swarthmore does while generating the waste I watched its student body, myself included, create in abundance.

One cannot be passionate about demolishing systemic barriers of racism and wealth inequality while remaining apathetic to food sustainability and climate change. The brunt of our changing ecosystems falls first upon people of color and the poor, long before it will ever threaten to touch the perimeter of our lush campus.

As such, one could argue, perhaps, that it is none of our business, our responsibility. But that has never been the stance of the Swarthmore I know. Nor would it be true to the beating heart of the Swarthmore we love.

Editor’s note: Swarthmore has committed to becoming a Zero Waste campus in efforts to reduce environmental harm and promote just and sustainable systems. Since 2016, the College has undertaken a substantial effort to reduce the waste that we generate and to divert waste away from incineration in Chester, Pa., and into compost or recycling. The College has also built a fully campuswide “postconsumer” compost system that offers compost bins in every campus building, managed by our Environmental Services team and the student Green Advisors.