Immigrant Strong: April issue
On borders, leaving New York, mixed-race identities, and girlhood in Iran
I’m sending you this newsletter on great writing, but the reality is, I have barely read over the last month. Normally, I read a few essays a week and a new book every couple of weeks. But since the middle of March, I have yet to open a book—my Kindle sits on my night table uncharged and a pile of new books remains untouched.
But after a few rough weeks, I’m feeling better and trying to find tiny pockets of time in between caring for my daughter, working, trying to score an Instacart delivery slot, and adjusting to life in quarantine.
Our lives have suddenly changed, we are navigating an unfamiliar situation, and many of us feel fear, stress and anxiety. We worry about our loved ones, our neighbors, our jobs, our cities. In other words, we are going through something many immigrants and refugees have faced. And they have often handled such uncertainties amidst war and conflict, without the luxury of a roof above their head, a passport in their hand, a grocery delivery on their doorstep. During these trying times, immigrants, refugees and their children can offer vital lessons, as well as much-needed stories of hope and resilience.
Book
I read E.J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others as soon as it came out earlier this year. It’s a story about multi-generational trauma, a mother-daughter relationship, the power of language and translation, and a family living on opposite ends of the world. Koh is a poet whose mastery of words shines through in this lovely memoir.
Essays
The Bare Life Review, a literary journal devoted to immigrant and refugee authors, is running The Latest, a special series on the coronavirus. Here is the first essay, I Am Chinese: Do You Hate Me? by Jianan Qian.
“Do you hate me, I said to myself. Do you hate me because of my skin? Do you hate me because of my accent? Because my decision to pursue my ambitions in your country?”
Here is a timely Zora magazine piece from Ani Hao, I Left The United States to Reclaim My Chinese Identity.
“We are all negatively impacted by the lasting repercussions of ignorance, colonial mentalities, and “othering.” If there is anything the coronavirus is teaching us, it is that there is no “other.” There is only “us.”
Children of immigrants inherit the trauma and sensations of stolen homes. Uprooted lives, social marginalization, and economic precariousness. We learn more easily, out of necessity, urgency, and comfort, to make new homes and stretch resources.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen is, as usual, spot-on in this New York Times opinion piece, The Ideas That Won’t Survive the Coronavirus.
“The biological virus afflicting individuals is also a social virus. Its symptoms — inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities — were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the ruddiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.”
Cathy Park Hong, author of the recently released Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, penned a really important piece about anti-Asian hate for the New York Times Magazine, The Slur I Never Expected to Hear in 2020.
“Racism never disappears but adapts to new circumstances when old strains rise from the dark vaults of American history. The recent rise carries the stench of late-19th-century xenophobia.”
And now for some wise words from Poland in this New Yorker piece by Olga Tokarczuk, A New World Through My Window.
“The fear of the virus has brought about the atavistic conviction that there must be foreigners to blame, that it is they who introduce the threat. In Europe, the virus is “from elsewhere.” In Poland, everyone returning from abroad is now considered suspicious. The virus reminds us: borders exist, and they’re doing just fine.”
The Egypt-born André Aciman considers our post-coronavirus future in this LitHub essay, Who Will We Be This Time Next Year?
“We will be changed. Kisses to go around at a New Year’s party will probably be considered reckless for years to come, a handshake between people who’ve signed a solid deal will remain a treacherous gesture. Hugs? Risky business. A warm embrace on a first date?—who knows.”
I can’t keep track of how many times I’ve recommended Mira Jacob’s Good Talk graphic memoir. Here is her illustrated New York Times essay about leaving New York due to the outbreak, We Left New York With Clothes, Our Cat and Three Bottles of Disinfectant.
And now for some essays not related to the pandemic…
I appreciate stories that delve into the meaning of borders—not just the physical demarcation between nations, but all kinds of emotional and symbolic divides they create. I enjoyed Victoria Blanco’s Catapult essay, A Family on the Border, of the Border.
“We are a people on the border, of the border, always crossing back and forth. When we meet each other outside the borderlands, we talk about and bond over this propensity for movement. Most of our stories, even the mundane ones about going to get a haircut, involve crossing the border.”
You know I have to include at least one food-related essay, so here is For Me, Capirotada Is the Taste of Dancing and Singing at Home by Roberto Jose Andrade Franco for D Magazine.
“Language and food were the things we most often found first. If we were lucky, we’d find people who came from the same places. People who understood what we meant when words between languages and regions didn’t translate.”
Here is an important Catapult essay by Deborah Germaine Augustin, “What Are You?”: On Mixed-Race Identity and ‘The Buddhist Bug’. (The author is not an immigrant or a refugee, or a child of immigrants or refugees, but I wanted to include this essay because I felt the topic was a good fit.)
“Mixed people possess both the ability to pass and to destabilize categorization. Over the years, I’ve been mistaken for many things I am not: Latina, Middle Eastern, Filipina. There is a privilege in this. People feel more open to me. There’s a possibility of welcome in my ambiguity. Yet, this same racial mutability also poses a threat. How can you identify a them if it can pass for an us?”
Al Jazeera has been posting some lovely essays lately; here is Su-Jit Lin’s My mother the sparrow: Lessons from a humble mother.
“They landed in Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island, New York in the 1970s, and became strange folk in a strange land. They shared a house with several other families, learning English, now with an American accent as opposed to Hong Kong's British, a world away from anyone who looked like them. Her parents worked in a Chinese restaurant typical of that time, with wood-panelled walls and red vinyl booths, serving flaming PuPu Platters with Orientalised gimmicks to customers who did not know, did not care how Americanised and inauthentic their experience was.”
I always enjoy writing by the Iran-born Naz Riahi, who does a beautiful job of transporting me to her childhood home. I’m looking forward to her memoir, but in the meantime, here is a Longreads essay by the Brooklyn-based writer, All That Was Innocent and Violent: Girlhood in Post-Revolution Iran.
“As a child of war, of post-Revolution Iran, I wouldn’t have believed or even been able to imagine the kind of freedom my parents enjoyed, if the pictures didn’t exist. I devoured them, still do, filling in the gaps in narrative with stories I’ve heard about that life.”
I’m sad Roxane Gay’s magazine is ending its run; here is one strong essay Gay mag brought us: Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Mother Land.
“For Koreans of my parents’ generation who grew up with years of unrelenting chaos and destruction, a new word was needed: 이산가족 — “divided and scattered families.”
Virtual Event
April 21: Grace Talusan, the author of The Body Papers (winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the first book featured in this newsletter!) will read from her critically acclaimed memoir.
Podcast
Check out Pen America’s The Pen Pod (hosted by a friend of mine—hi Stephen!) I want to leave you with these words from author Parnaz Foroutan (in episode 12). She grew up in Iran and had a spot-on comment about what we can learn from immigrants:
“As immigrants, we come from a point where all of a sudden our homes, the societies we live in, are turned upside down. So we’ve experienced something similar to what’s happening right now, when the world is suddenly turned upside down. And there is a sort of resilience and hope that we carry because we’ve survived and I think we can share that with the world.”
Thanks for reading. Please stay safe and healthy—and stay home if you can,
Vesna
About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, and children of immigrants and refugees. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.
About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then moved to Canada, and now live in New York, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits focusing on human rights. I have written about my immigrant experience for The New York Times, Catapult, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.
Good stuff!
Really thoughtful piece from Jeremy Lin on the Asian American experience right now:
https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/jeremy-lin-darkness-has-not-overcome-it