Immigrant Strong: February 2022 Issue
Reflections on Pakistan, becoming a mother-writer, and the Burbank mall
It’s been a very difficult month, with two close relatives facing major health crises—one here in the United States and the other across the ocean in Croatia. Sometimes I turn to writing to help me cope and reflect, but then there are times when your whole world stops, you shut down, and even reading becomes too difficult. I don’t have it in me to handle something long and heavy right now, so I was glad to come across World of Wonders—it’s short and sweet, and written in digestable chapters that beautifully blend memoir and nature writing. The book is written by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, an award-winning poet who was born in Chicago to a Filipina mother and a father from South India. Her use of prose is as magnificent as some of the plants, animals and other wonders she explores in this delightful book.
Essays and Interviews
Farah Ali penned this beautiful essay, Coming of Age Amidst Chaos: Reflections on My Native Pakistan, for Shondaland.
“Going back to Karachi, where I was born and grew up, is like visiting memories that, upon my entering the city, take tangible form: roads, buildings, smells. For some time, the mind gets tricked into feeling as though nothing has changed, not even me, and that if I were to enter that office plaza where I interned or the bookstore where I often went, I would feel exactly as I had on some long afternoon back then. After a while, the self catches up to the present.”
I loved this piece for The New York Review by Anjan Sundaram, No Direction Home (it may be behind a paywall for some).
“To be on the move is to be willing to leave behind what we have built and to start over again. In the places I have lived I have felt like no one in particular, just someone from far away.”
I enjoyed Ben Purkert’s Guernica interview with Hala Alyan, who discusses why she decided not to italicize or translate some Arabic words in her latest novel, her dislike of editing, and why she prefers tackling large time spans when writing a book.
“I got sick of translating myself to people. I got impatient, which happens with age. You know what I mean? There’s something about the first book where you’re like “Oh my gosh, I just want it to be readable!” But then you grow hardened a bit, and you’ve been at this longer, and you realize that you translate other people’s work all the time. I’ve engaged with and read and taught work by white American or European authors since the beginning of my reading history.”
For Pigeon Pages, Chris/tine Deng wrote about Grieving in Translation. It’s her first essay, and it’s a powerful one.
“Here, she was three times married and one time widowed. I was fresh out of preschool. She was a teacher and a poet and a dancer. I had just lost my first baby tooth. She had authored two books of prose and poetry. I had no language for immigration or borders or survival.”
Here is An Uong’s Becoming No One and Everyone at the Burbank Mall, part of her Catapult column San Fernando Valley, about growing up there as an immigrant.
“My parents hid from me the loss they carried with them every day, from country to country, apartment to apartment, the ghost of their firstborn son haunting them as we moved. I only felt their sadness seeping out as an anger I couldn’t understand. But at the mall, I could forget that. I was just another teen with a hot dog pretzel.”
Namrata Poddar reflects on writing as a woman of color, an immigrant, and a new mother in this fantastic piece for Poets & Writers, Becoming a Mother-Writer: Notes on Reconciling the Personal, the Professional, and the Political.
“Moreover, immigrant mothers of color understood my petty quips like the longing for homemade food in difficult life moments as unconditional care extended by one’s family, or later, the fear of losing loved ones in a global pandemic when India hit the highest infection rates in the world, or later, the actual loss of loved ones whom we grieved as migrants, away from our families in a pandemic and without a sense of closure to our relationships.”
I’ll read anything involving the great Min Jin Lee, so of course I enjoyed Michael Luo’s interview with the author for the New Yorker.
“The real disconnect is between the first and second or third generation, especially if the second or third generation has done sufficiently well. We’re not interested in just survival anymore. We’re interested in meaning, and that quest for meaning has just as many difficulties, if not more intangible difficulties, than just survival.”
Sharmila Mukherjee wrote this informative review of Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“Sen shows again and again the pressure on immigrant food writers and chefs to genuflect to the market-led food establishment, to America’s dominant palate, to the affluent white consumers around whom the food world is ultimately organized. The American food world, in Sen’s analysis, caters to the taste, lifestyle, and fantasies of white Americans, and its toxic effect is the destruction of ethnic cuisine. But the book’s worst news, really, is American xenophobia — the tendency of white Americans to view outsiders as fearful strangers.”
This is one of those essays that struck a chord with me, even though I come from a very different place than the writer. Here is Lillian Tsay’s They Say in the Atticus Review. It’s her first published creative nonfiction essay in English.
“Many online forms will only provide the option “Taiwan (Province of China)” when you scroll down the bar of nationality. Sometimes they just show “Taiwan (China)” to remind you that only less than twenty countries in the world have diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Sometimes you just leave the form blank.”
Thanks for reading,
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. 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, 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, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.