Immigrant Strong: December 2022 Issue

A memoir on friendship and tragedy; craft and conscience; and immigrant fashion

Hua Hsu’s Stay True is subtle, yet powerful. It has one major event, but is otherwise mostly about the day-to-day life of a group of college friends. It’s about friendship and tragedy, and the author’s search for self and his place in the world. It contains a senseless murder and its resulting grief, but also seamlessly incorporates humor.

Hsu, the son of Taiwanese Americans, is a staff writer at The New Yorker and teaches literature at Bard College. He spent two decades working on this gripping memoir, which has rightfully made many of 2022’s best-of lists. Hsu’s prose is sharp and thoughtful and filled with many paragraphs that left me filled with emotion and nostalgia, prompting me to reflect about my own youth and college days.

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Essays and Interviews

I’ll start with Pragya Agarwal’s beautiful essay about the weather, multiple homes, nostalgia, and more. Here is Let’s Talk About the Weather for the Willowherb Review.

“Maybe I am looking for a map of the seasons to understand what kind of world I am going to be leaving behind for my children. Will this world hold still, or will it be submerged in the deluge of my anger at the way we are destroying this planet. I want to leave a compass for my children to orient their seasons with. But we seem to have lost our way somewhere along the way.” 

Iris Kim penned this great piece for Harper’s BAZAAR about her surgery, beauty standards, colonial influences, and more in I Had Korean Double Eyelid Surgery at 18. I Look Back Now with Regret.

“I was shipped across the Pacific Ocean by my parents every summer with the intention of making me more Koreanized, and instead, I internalized the need to physically enhance my features by undergoing an operation that a Western doctor had imported to the Korean people.”

I loved Anjali Enjeti’s Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Kavita Das, author of Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues. My day job is in human rights—often focusing on immigrants’ rights, voting rights, and racial justice—so I deeply related to Das’s comments about writers’ responsibilities “to view conscience as not separate from craft but integral to it.”

“While societal change usually only comes after much time and struggle, you have to believe in your vision of justice. Similarly, in writing, you have to believe in your artistic vision even as you struggle through rejection and revision.”

Mary-Alice Daniel reflects on her multicultural upbringing and examines the role of narrative in this LitHub excerpt from A Coastline is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents.

“Answering the question “Where are you from?” has never been easy. My history straddles dueling cultural systems: I am a dual citizen of Nigeria and the United States. I’ve been told by paternalistic Nigerians that I am not “really Nigerian”; xenophobic Americans imply I’m not a “real American.”

For her Catapult column, Ucheoma Onwutuebe writes about the importance of fashion in A Migrant’s Fashion Manifesto.

“My Nigerian wardrobe was all right, a few people already knew me as fashionable, but I knew I could do more, especially when far from home and possible judgment from puritanical family and church members. I thought of the new self I would invent once I migrated to America. A more fashion-forward self.”

I enjoyed Lena Mubsutina’s interview with Zein Al-Amine for The Rumpus.

“Stories like “Sharife vs the Party of God” and “The Sayed and the Snow Woman” are based on lived experiences that relate to my ancestral home, Deir Keifa in south Lebanon. That place is such a fertile ground for stories that I will be writing about it for a long time. Part of the reason is that it represents a time and a place that does not exist anymore. The way of life that existed in that setting has completely evaporated with time, and to write about those times and traditions is my way of preserving them.”

Granta magazine has several articles by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the German author, poet, editor, and translator who died last month. Here is a piece from 1992, The Great Migration, translated by Martin Chalmers.

“Every migration, irrespective of its cause, nature and scale, leads to conflicts. Self-interest and xenophobia are anthropological constants: they are older than all known societies.

To avoid blood-baths and to make possible even a minimum of exchange between different clans, tribes and ethnic groups, ancient societies invented the rituals of hospitality. These provisions, however, do not abrogate the status of the stranger. Quite the reverse: they fix it. The guest is sacred, but he must not stay.”

I don’t usually post funding and workshop calls here, but wanted to share two great opportunities for writers as they both include a focus on immigration:

• Queens, N.Y.-based writers writing about race and immigration should check out this fantastic opportunity to apply for a memoir and autobiographical workshop with Abeer Hoque (whose memoir Olive Witch was featured in this newsletter a year ago) through the Lewis Latimer House Museum. I went to the program reading a few years ago and it was truly inspiring and moving. (Jan. 22 deadline).

• de Groot Foundation is offering grants for writers, including several specifically for immigrants. (Feb. 15 deadline).

Thanks for reading—and have a happy, healthy, and peaceful holiday season,

Vesna

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About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant and refugee life—the struggles, triumphs, and quirks—by immigrants and refugees, and children of immigrants and refugees. For more info, here is a Q&A I did with Longreads about the newsletter. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.

About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia, then immigrated to Canada, and now live in the United States, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits focusing on human rights and social justice. I have written about my immigrant experience for The New York Times, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. Last year, I attended Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing conference as a parent-fellow, and participated in the Tin House Summer Workshop. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic; Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe; or my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.