Immigrant Strong: Issue Eleven
German identity, vacationing with immigrant parents, and the model minority myth
I enjoyed Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir Good Talk so much that I picked up a few more visual books since then. In Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, Nora Krug uses words, photos, historical documents, and illustrations to examine her German identity and her family’s role in the Holocaust. If you want to learn more about her research and writing process, here is an interview with her in The New Yorker. She discusses being a “German among non-Germans,” and how going back home can make her feel both like she belongs and like she’s out of place, a sentiment I think is familiar to many immigrants.
Essays and Op-eds
I’ll open the section with this beautiful translated Granta essay, Exile, by Elif Shafa
“Self-imposed exile is hard to explain to yourself, let alone to others. It does involve a geographical displacement, a physical separation from language, culture, familiarity. But more than that it is a feeling you cannot shed: a sense of being only partly present.”
I featured work by Raksha Vasudevan in this newsletter before and recently came across another one of her essays because it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Check out Steps to Becoming Fine: As Lived By My Mother in Hippocampus magazine.
I liked this Catapult essay, For My Immigrant Parents, a Vacation Is a Reprieve from Labor—for Me, It’s a Time to Work, by Tiffany Teng.
“These days, I am reckoning with the guilt. My parents chose to clear the path for me, sacrificed so much so that I wouldn’t have to. I have the luxury to seek these experiences because of them, but I can repay them by showing them the world in whatever way I can.”
And here is a beautiful Granta essay by Sema Kaygusuz, A Language of Figs (translated from Turkish).
“I have a home where I was never born, languages which I never learned, relatives whom I mourn without ever having known them. Even if I wrote for a lifetime, I don’t think I could ever fill that deep void.”
This heart-wrenching New York Times opinion piece, Why I Couldn’t See My Dying Father One Last Time, by Mehrnaz Samimi, helps explain the cruelty of our government’s Muslim travel ban.
“I remain caught between the land of my birth and my adopted country, feeling helpless, a bit like a lost animal caught in the headlights on the highway.”
Here is another New York Times opinion piece I enjoyed, A Honeymoon on a Harley, by Marcos Villatoro.
“There are some who believe that the Latinos at our southern gate are a menace to their American way of life. But the thousands of migrants from Mexico and Central America who work our crops and butcher our chickens — jobs that few American citizens want to fill — are woven into the fabric of this country. Along the way they’re falling in love, just as my parents did. I’m part of this mestizaje, the multicultural mixing of America.”
I’m glad to see more immigrants tackling myths and stereotypes in their writing; here is Vivian Lee’s “Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Taught Me to Break Free from the Model Minority Myth,” part of a new Catapult column on music and memories.
“We knew that our last names (and sometimes our first names) already made us sound unknown, foreign. We knew we couldn’t change how we physically looked. We knew that we were already a few steps behind the starting line. We thought if we aspired to how white people acted, we wouldn’t dock ourselves any more points. We had to be a “good” Asian.”
NYC Event
On Dec. 19, check out this event with The Rumpus and Pete’s Reading Series. I’ve previously recommended books by two of these authors (Melissa Rivero and Mira Jacob).
Thanks for reading—and happy holidays! I hope to send another issue in coming weeks with my 2019 reading roundup,
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, then moved to Canada, 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.