Immigrant Strong: January 2022 Issue
On family estrangement, bath houses, and immigrant parents
In Where You Come From, Saša Stanišić writes about his family, their life in Bosnia before the war, and in Germany after arriving there as refugees. Translated by Damion Searls, the autographical novel is sometimes delightfully funny, sometimes heart-wrenchingly sad, and sometimes odd and experimental (it has a Choose Your Own Adventure-type ending). Stanišić jumps back and forth in time to explore the meaning of memory, and the connections between past and present, and fact and fiction. I was born in the same year, month and country—Yugoslavia—as Stanišić, so it’s not surprising that many of his sentences impacted me deeply.
“My family lives scattered around the world. We shattered along with Yugoslavia and have not yet been able to put ourselves back together again.”
Migration often involves trauma, and Stanišić contemplates what it means to have no clear answer to that four-word question that haunts many of us—Where are you from?
Essays and Interviews
I’ll start with Elizabeth Acevedo’s great LitHub piece, Words with Fangs: Finding Myself in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.
“Here, I was introduced to the Julia Alvarez who had been compelled to get this particular story in the world before all others; the one who debuted into literary stardom with an honest, unflinching narrative that captures the misery, messiness, and marvel of departing from a homeland and making yourself and your family anew. Told in reverse chronological order, the novel is about the dynamics of loss—how each girl’s accent is slowly polished smooth, how each girl sheds an island version of herself.”
I’ve featured Raksha Vasudevan’s work here before, and her writing is always beautiful and moving. For Harper’s BAZAAR, here is her latest essay, The Many Meanings of Family Estrangement.
“Explanations are always demanded from women like me, who exist outside the white maleness that is America’s baseline for “normal.” Where are you from? Really from! Where is your family? So you’re here all by yourself?!””
I often say that as a society, we need to become more aware of language attrition, so I was glad to come across another essay tackling this topic—The Pain of Losing Your First Language, by Kristin Wong in Catapult.
“Like a phantom limb, the memory of my first language stays with me even with it gone, but that’s all it is: a memory. It occurs to me that trying to relearn this language is the embodiment of my bicultural identity. The American in me is determined to reclaim the Chinese part of myself.”
Here is Liuyu Ivy Chen’s gorgeously written piece about the notion of home and returning there in Ploughshares, The Distance of Home.
“Slowly, home was blotted out as the future-gazing of immigrant life demanded my full attention. Now, America, disintegrated by a tiny virus, screeches to a halt, leaving me a small buoy on the open sea.”
Who says dirt can’t be beautiful? Guernica’s special Dirt issue is filled with wonderful writing, including Jung Hae Chae’s essay At the Bath House.
“By the time I was reunited with my mother in our small apartment, I knew this was our only chance to reaffirm our bond forged in scarcity — of resources and emotion. Despite and through all of our unwitting silences and mishaps and unhappinesses, we would come to know each other. Our monthly ritual of soaking and sloughing would go on.”
This Georgia Review piece by Darby Jo, who defected from North Korea, nearly broke me. The Way Home, translated from the Korean by Deborah Kim, is a difficult but important read.
“Now, I’ve lived longer outside of North Korea than I have within it. For seventeen years, I’ve lived in foreign lands, under the skies of China, South Korea, and the United States. Breathing that air and living among foreign people, their food has become part of me and I’ve long since adjusted to this life. But still, I ache from homesickness. When I think of North Korea, my heart roils, my pulse races unevenly. I am not whole; my body is in one place and my heart in another. I am ever a stranger.”
Here is Yara Zgheib’s very interesting LitHub essay about the travel ban, and the distance between truth, fact, and fiction, Crossing the Distance Between Fact and Truth in a Story About Love and Exile. Her latest book, No Land to Light On, is out now.
“Not searing, bleeding, because I am no longer angry, not suffering; I learned the difference between freedom and liberty. Not a memoir, because I am not unique; there are so many stories, faces we do or do not see; on screens or behind laws, on either side of seas and oceans and borders; in that shattered, displaced space, suspended, mid-air.”
I started my career in journalism, then went into nonprofit communications, and didn’t really immerse myself into creative nonfiction until after I had my daughter seven years ago. Becoming a parent changed my path and identity in other ways as well—it made me think about teaching my child my mother tongue, and connecting her to a country I love deeply from an ocean away. Many parents who are immigrants and children of immigrants are constantly trying to strengthen these emotional and cultural bonds with our children, so Flora Tsapovsky’s interview with Masha Rumer struck a chord with me. For San Francisco Chronicle’s Datebook, here is Immigrant author finds motherhood reawakens the roots of her identity.
“The conclusions I drew would be that having a child just really reawakens certain big and strong feelings for people, about their culture. Certainly longing. Nostalgia, too. But a lot of immigrants have a hard time because there’s a lot that they love about their birth country, but some other things, they’d leave behind, like the sociopolitical role of women.”
I loved Veena K. Siddharth’s piece about having privilege while also being persecuted. For Hippocampus magazine, here is Floating.
“I was both the persecuted and the privileged, taunted with a racial slur but also envied for being able to get on a plane and go to the U.S. when my temporary stay in Nepal was over. These elite Nepali officials would never dream of venting their jealousy, anger, and frustration with the white men who came to see them from the donor agencies, but I was familiar enough to allow them to assert their primacy in the one way they could: by color.”
I’ll wrap things up with Jenna Tang’s beautiful essay about translation for Catapult, Why We Should Translate Literature About Trauma.
“Translation is one of the most profound ways for us to understand trauma and violence from around the world. Through words, sentences, and literature, we get to explore how emotions take shape culturally. Translating trauma and violence is not just about deciphering pain but also about recreating an emotional language that gives the narrative its unique strength, the power of transformation across languages, and brings us all together as human beings.”
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. 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, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.