Immigrant Strong: February 2023 Issue
On stories about Chinese food; a mother's shelf; and saying your vows in Bangla
Through a collection of connected stories, Jonathan Escoffery explores what it means to have an identity split between Jamaica and the United States, and a racial appearance that leads others to put him in categories to which he doesn’t belong. If I Survive You is a critically acclaimed debut collection by the son of Jamaican immigrants; many of us who have felt like perpetual foreigners and outsiders will find a lot to relate to. Escoffery’s skillful writing and humor kept me engaged throughout stories about everything from bizarre jobs and financial struggles to frayed family dynamics and an ongoing exploration of identity.
Essays and Interviews
I was so sad to hear Catapult was shutting down its classes and online magazine. The class I took there a few years ago was the beginning of my journey into creative nonfiction. It’s also where I met four amazing women writers, and we formed a monthly writing group that kept going until Covid-19 and various moves split us apart. Catapult was also my first literary magazine byline, thanks to the generous editor Matt Ortile, who let me use “octopus” in a headline. The website has been a treasure for stories by immigrants and children of immigrants—I have probably cited more essays from Catapult in this newsletter than anywhere else. I’m crushed to see it come to an end, but until then, here are two more of their lovely pieces:
Angie Kang’s graphic essay When Food is the Only Narrative We Consume talks about tropes in writing about immigrants, how the media often reduce Chinese culture to only food, and the harms of assimilation.
“Without varied stories of injustice and joy, the “lunchbox moment” and similar food narratives simplify what shouldn’t be simplified.
Witholding rude comments about someone else’s lunch doesn’t make a person a hero.”
Tauheed Zaman does a beautiful job exploring what it means to be a queer immigrant in love in How to Say I Love You in Bangla.
“I’d learned to excuse the absence of the phrase in daily life, and even at weddings, using the context of our diaspora. The Bangladeshi immigrants I knew valued hard work and quiet humility with good reason: These virtues allowed them to survive the heartache of leaving their homeland and settling in the West. Most of us are various shades of brown and ochre and therefore visibly different from the white majority around us. Keeping our heads down kept us from standing out any further, reducing the omnipresent threat of violence faced by immigrant communities.”
Jenise Miller wrote about her grandmother, the family’s migration from Panama, and a shelf in her mother’s home for High Country News. Here is Tending a remnant of home.
“If work took her time, home was where she reclaimed it. When not submitting to the demands of children or lover or job, she curated for herself parts of life that pleased only her. A small recreation gave re-creation; a glass shelf, an altar and blessing.”
Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel, The World And All That It Holds, is out now; here is an interview with the acclaimed Bosnian American author in Jewish Currents.
“My earlier novels were in some sense stories about ways to participate in a new language, a new culture, a new place—successfully or not. With this book, I wanted a multilingual consciousness that does not need to convert in any way to something else. Where there are no functioning societies or schools where one can learn a language, you pick it up as you go along—and this is the kind of world through which this novel’s protagonists move.”
In light of the horrific shooting in Monterey Park, Yvonne Liu penned this piece for Salon, For my Chinese parents, ballroom dancing brought fun, comfort and a sense of belonging.
“As a child, I'd sit on the steps of our Detroit suburban home and watch my parents and their friends, fellow members of the Chinese diaspora, waltz, rumba and foxtrot the night away. For my research scientist father, dancing was a release from the frustration of hitting the bamboo ceiling at his automotive supplier position. It was a time to speak Chinese, exercise and have fun.”
Here is Sahar Delijani’s powerful Lithub piece on following the protests in Iran from her home in New York, “No Veils, No Oppression!” Watching From a Distance As Women Fight for Freedom in Iran. It conveys so many feelings—guilt, frustration, and empathy among them—that many of us living thousands of miles away from our homelands grapple with.
“A distance of a thousand miles separates you from those streets, from the struggle, the one that reeks of blood and bullets and torture and solitary confinement. It is not a symbolic distance. It is a real one. It’s what’s keeping you safe. It’s what’s keeping you alive. And you end up living with the shame of it, with the guilt. It’s your destiny of an outsider.”
I loved learning about Sorayya Khan’s craft decisions behind her memoir We Take Our Cities with Us, such as why she decided to structure it around cities instead of countries. Here is her interview with Hasanthika Sirisena for The Rumpus.
“I never considered countries as an organizing principle or a lens through which to tell the story. As a concept and as a geographic area, countries would have been too large a setting for what I was attempting, which is, in essence, a story of particular places and people. Also, the term is unforgiving, and by definition laden with nationalism, citizenship, and a jingoism that I didn’t want to engage with.”
I encourage you to also check out Khan’s list of 8 Memoirs by Women About Multicultural Identity and Belonging for Electric Literature.
It’s always great to come across a byline by Matthew Salesses; his writing on grief is always so honest and profound. Here is his latest piece for TIME, How I Found My Desire to Live After My Wife Died.
“Conversion is always conversion to a life in which the things we are missing out on (everything else) are things we want to miss out on. This is how I was supposed to feel about adoption. In fact, “Go back to your country,” something Asian Americans often hear, is another way of saying, your country is a place no one wants to go. We are supposed to feel glad that we are missing out on what other people assume is ours.”
Here is Ilan Stavans’s interesting New York Times Opinion piece about how other languages enrich the English language, ‘Don’t Lose Your Accent!’
“A Mexican immigrant myself, I am constantly amazed at how, in its 450-year history, American English has become stunningly elastic. It has recalibrated itself by learning from the past. It is essential that it continues to do so. Don’t give up your accent! Don’t lose your immigrant verbal heritage! As an immigrant myself, I find joy in hearing accents, particularly those by people who have mastered American English yet retain a beautiful trace of their native tongue.”
I’ll end with this beautiful Split Lip magazine piece by Ajay Makan, Two Immigrants.
“You also realize that, while you are safe here and lucky to be so, your parents do not feel at home. You see it in the accent your mother adopts when she answers the phone or the way your father drinks tea from a cup, rather than slurping it from a saucer, when in public.
Finally, you learn not to ask questions about the past. An ambient anxiety swathes your childhood, but it is an anxiety that cannot be spoken.”
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, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. In 2021, 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.