Immigrant Strong - First Issue!
A fierce memoir from a Filipino-American, Min Jin Lee on finding power to speak, and a visual essay on the meaning of home
Welcome to Immigrant Strong’s debut! In each issue, I’ll include links to writing by immigrants and children of immigrants, or others who write about immigrant and multicultural life—the struggles, the triumphs, the quirks. When possible, I will link to their websites and twitter handles to help you follow them. I strongly believe we need to support and elevate immigrants, people of color, and other marginalized groups. Since May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, almost all writing in this issue is by writers hailing from that region. Occasionally, I may send updates about my work. Thanks for subscribing—and happy reading!
Book Recommendation
I’ve read several memoirs this year and my favorite so far is Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers. Talusan was born in the Philippines before settling in New England with her family as a young child. Like many immigrant narratives, her book discusses identity struggles, but also speaks powerfully about racism, sexual abuse and trauma, illness, family ties, and more. Whichever country I read about, I find tidbits that are the same in my culture. So besides the universal struggle of overcoming otherness and dealing with loss of identity that assimilation brings, I related to her anecdote about the Filipino way of devouring fish—with a head and tail attached—as this is how Croats eat their seafood, too. If you don’t believe me when I tell you the book is great, The New York Times wrote about it twice (here and here).
Essays and Op-eds
Longreads is one of my favorite sites—it runs powerful stories about immigrant life and multicultural issues, such as Notes on Citizenship, by Nina Li Coomes, who was born to a Japanese mother and a white American father.
Since I can’t even draw a cat when my daughter asks me to, I’m always amazed when people can write and do sketch art—I adored this graphic essay, Home is a Cup of Tea, by Candace Rose Rardon (it’s from 2017, but I somehow just found it this year). I am not a big tea drinker, but I made two cups after reading it.
If you like visual essays, check out author and illustrator Kate Gavino’s Unleashed in Paris, another stunning Longreads piece. I love how beautifully she describes the effects that not knowing a language can have on one’s personality—I certainly went through this when learning English as a Second Language.
Bilingual readers will probably also enjoy My Mother’s Tongue, by Zavi Kang Engles in The Rumpus. She writes so skillfully about language and her relationship to it. Here is one beautiful line: “I had thought Korean was an ocean inside of me, its tide ebbing and flowing in conjunction with my proximity to other Koreans.”
I’m Vesna, not Vanessa, so I appreciated this essay by Rebecca Tamás, The Power of a Name, in Granta. She explains why spelling a name correctly is so important, including getting an accent right: “My name is the link to my Jewishness, such that it is; the link to boiling Hungarian summers; eating lángos in the waterpark in my bright green swimsuit; Eszterházy cake in the cool, golden billowing of Café Gerbeaud.”
Finally, here are two op-eds: the first is from The New York Times, Breaking My Own Silence, by Min Jin Lee, the Korean-born author of Pachinko, a novel that made just about every notable book list last year (at 500 pages, it’s the longest book I read in a long time). She’s one of the most impressive author speakers I’ve heard—I attended two events where she spoke and was floored each time. Hard to believe she struggled with public speaking given how good she is at it, but I think the sentiment she discusses is so common among immigrants.
I love when I come across bylines from familiar names, so I was glad to see this bold Washington Post opinion piece, My grandparents survived Hiroshima. A white actor was cast to tell that story, by Aya Tasaki, who I went to grad school with.
Twitter Follow Recommendation
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a writer and a refugee from Vietnam and if everyone’s twitter feed had a tiny fraction of his knowledge about being part of a minority group, we’d be in a much better place.
Thanks for reading—and please feel free to let me know what you’d like to get out of this newsletter,
Vesna
https://twitter.com/vesnajaksic
About me: I grew up in Dubrovnik, a Croatian seaside town now famous as the set of King’s Landing from Game of Thrones, which I did not see because I don’t like watching violence. I live in New York, where I work as a writer and communications consultant for nonprofits focusing on human rights. I used to work on immigrants’ rights for organizations such as the ACLU, and reported on immigration as a newspaper reporter in Connecticut. www.vesnajaksic.com.