Immigrant Strong: Issue 10
A bestselling debut novel, on language and translation, and traveling to Darjeeling
Book Recommendation
Last month, I went to NYU to hear Ocean Vuong read from his debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I arrived 25 minutes early, which I thought was great by New York standards, only to see the line already snaked around the block, with no end in sight. I was sad I had no chance of getting in, but happy to see this talented poet and writer has reached rock star-level fame. In this critically acclaimed book, Voung writes a letter to his mother, who can’t read. Everything about this New York Times bestseller by the Vietnam-born Vuong is gorgeous—the title, the cover, and the prose.
(RIP to this succulent because of course I killed it since taking the photo)
Essays
I loved this Guernica essay, Translation and the Family of Things, by Crystal Hana Kim.
“I wanted language to connect me to my family, rather than act as a barrier. I wanted to fully comprehend how little I knew, how shallowly I had imagined my mother and grandmother’s minds.”
This powerful essay in The Rumpus is also about language, identity, and more. Check out Aswang as a Second Language, by Ella deCastro Baron, a second-generation Filipina American who lives in California.
“The United States freed us from three hundred years of Spain’s Catholic chokehold only to bend us over from behind. They replaced Spanish with English, swapping one imperial tongue with another. Though we were called America’s “little brown brothers and sisters” (translation: “exotic,” “strange,” “from elsewhere”) at least we could assimilate by speaking the right way.”
I visit my home country of Croatia every summer and these trips are filled with so many emotions and thoughts about belonging and not belonging. I am always interested in stories about immigrants returning home and enjoyed this Catapult essay by Ann Tashi Slater, Mountains, Monasteries, and Myths: What I Discovered While Living in My Darjeeling Family Home.
“After a youth spent trying to ignore my Asian heritage, I came looking for it. My journey to Darjeeling after college turned out to be the beginning of an excavation that continues to this day, a digging through layers of memory and myth, a deciphering of physical, emotional, and spiritual landscapes.”
One day, I may issue a newsletter about immigrant writing that does not focus on food. Today is not that day, thanks to this piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by Melissa Hung, When authenticity means a heaping plate of Tex-Mex.
“My love of Tex-Mex is the story of my family’s journey and the hardships they faced, what they lost and what they gained. It is a story that begins long before I am born, in a riverside village in rural Guangdong province in southern China.”
Here is a another great essay from The Rumpus — it’s about identity, race, privilege, immigration, and the intersection of those issues, What Would a Woman of Color Do? by Julie Sunyoung Chung.
“For immigrant parents who come to the United States, pain is supposed to be generational. This narration of sacrifice preaches, “My generation suffered so that my children and their children would not have to.” How do we transcend generations of trauma and let go of our burdensome past? For my own dad, who immigrated from Korea to the United States in the 1980s, the goal was the American Dream and the path was assimilation. Surviving meant tiding over the waves of injustice until reaching the shorelines of whiteness.”
I’ll wrap up this section with Tash Aw’s Granta piece, On Being French and Chinese, which has very interesting first-person interviews about being an immigrant in France. The piece is part of a great issue, Granta 149, Europe: Strangers in the Land.
“Much of what I heard in the speeches that day, as well as in newspaper reports and on social media, felt tragically familiar to me: the cries of a people who felt that they had been ignored by the state. We work hard, we keep out of trouble, no one gives a damn about us, we have to struggle all by ourselves. These were the sentiments I grew up with in my ethnic Chinese family in Malaysia – a sense of frustration and suppressed pain that informed my view of the world.”
NYC Events
On Dec. 5, check out Book Talk: War, Refugees and U.S. Policy in Life & Literature, featuring novelist and journalist Tim Murphy, as well as an Iraqi refugee, and the executive director of The Syria Fund.
On Dec. 6, head to Book Culture in Long Island City to celebrate the release of Catherine Kapphahn's Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me. I recently read this heart-wrenching memoir, in which she explores her roots through the life of her Croatian mom. (Here is a Q&A with Catherine in Newtown Literary.) She will be joined by three other authors—and me! So if you are there, please stop by and say hello. Bonus: Book Culture has a 20% off sale that day, so you get to save money while supporting your local bookstore!
On Dec. 7, writers from Puerto Rico, Bolivia, and Argentina will share their work and discuss their creative process during En Construcción: New Works by Latin American Writers at the Astoria Bookshop.
On Dec. 13, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop is hosting Writing Kashmir: Literature and Resistance Under Occupation, which will feature readings and a conversation with three Kashmiri writers from the diaspora.
Thanks for reading,
Vesna
About this newsletter: Writing about immigrant life—the struggles, triumphs and quirks—by immigrants and children of immigrants. Photo in the logo: Miguel Bruna/Unsplash.
About me: I grew up in the former Yugoslavia 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 Catapult, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.