Immigrant Strong: January 2023 Issue
On pain, a Dutch oven, and mixed-race identity
I hope 2023 is off to a healthy and productive start for you. I don’t make resolutions, but am trying to be better about procrastinating—about everything from writing to things like dental work (I finally got braces, which I’ve been putting off for years, ugh).
Thank you to Catapult’s editors for including my comment about what I learned from writing this newsletter in this Don’t Write Alone column piece, Little Lessons from Writing Newsletters.
I have a public instagram account, so follow me there for occasional posts about writing and writing opportunities, books, and other work-related stuff.
Book
I’ve featured Cinelle Barnes’s Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir in this newsletter before and am glad I finally got to her essay collection, Malaya: Essays on Freedom. Barnes grew up in the Philippines—a very different place from my homeland in Europe—but her writing has always resonated with me. Whether it’s feeling like a misfit as a parent in America, reflecting on what it means to be an immigrant in this country, or turning to writing to make sense of the world around her, Barnes makes powerful reflections through her lyrical prose. In a series of essays that experiment with style and form, she explores topics like living as a undocumented immigrant, navigating life in a brown body with a brown child, and marrying a white man from the South.
Essays and Interviews
Erica Kanesaka combined personal narrative and research in this great Catapult piece about being Japanese and white, beauty standards, belonging, and more. Here is The Mixed-Race Fantasy Behind Kawaii Aesthetics. The piece is a part of Kawaii Intimacies, a column about Asian American women and “cute culture.”
“As many times as I have relayed these stories of kawaii’s “mixing” in my own research, I did not until very recently connect the concept to my mixed-race identity. This is odd since, as a Japanese/white multiracial woman, I have experienced both the privilege and the violence attached to this highly fetishized and stigmatized racial positioning. So, too, I know the cost of having cuteness serve as your main point of access into acceptance and belonging.”
Any essay that starts with something about an octopus will grab my attention and this one was no different. Here is Karen Kao’s wonderfully creative flash nonfiction essay in Brevity magazine, Taiwan 1969.
“In the morning, my brothers and I are a school of sardines, devoted to the study of Mandarin. Our tutor, the parrotfish, sings to us in the four tones of bopomofo. Our bubbles break against his beaked face. Meanwhile, our mother goes shopping with her girlfriends, the cuttlefish, arm in arm in arm.”
I found myself nodding in agreement many times during Grace Talusan’s Rumpus interview with Monica Macansantos, including on Macansantos’s comments on how assimilation can be painful for new immigrants, how living in the United States is often isolating, and the power of books and literature to transport us to different places.
“While living overseas, writing was the only way I could go back to the Philippines. I wouldn’t have felt transported if I felt pressure to transport these white editors to this place that they expected the Philippines to be. I’d be performing my culture rather than rendering my experiences of it in the most honest way I could. Sometimes the truth is boring, but I don’t think it’s that boring. Sometimes you just have to pay attention to people’s stories, to the minutiae of their day-to-day lives.”
For Guernica, Tali Perch wrote about her relationship with pain in Extraction (you may not want to read it before going to the dentist).
“The thing about being small and having to stay silent and unseen is that most people forget you’re there. I eavesdropped attentively when my parents talked to each other. I knew they would have preferred an American dentist to a Russian one — that taking their ten-year-old daughter to a back-alley dentist was a source of shame. I also knew that they felt far more “American” paying out of pocket for a cheaper Russian doctor than taking government handouts to pay an American one.”
I enjoyed Nina Coomes’s essay about her Dutch oven, how her Japanese mom dealt with her American wedding, the conformity that immigrants are often expected to abide by, and more. The essay, You’re Going to Be Cared For: A Recipe for Braised Chicken Thighs, is part of her Half Recipes column for Catapult.
“If you don’t know the rules, you learn them. Next time, you perfect your errant, un-American behavior to conform to the situation. But if you don’t have the quintessential American Happy Nuclear Family, there is nothing to amend.”
Here is Edward Clifford’s 10 Questions interview with Torsa Ghosal for The Massachusetts Review.
“West Bengal—the state in India where I was raised—influences my writing and imagination. It is also the setting for a host of my fictions. Seasons in Bengal, Bangla dialects, Bengali literature, the state’s notorious work and bandh cultures, its intricate religious and political history, particularly how Leftist ideas and texts entered people’s consciousness while the society also clung on to caste and class hierarchies, all these influence what I write.”
I missed Naz Riahi’s beautiful piece in Harper’s BAZAAR last year. Here is “I am Iran’s Daughter” (and be sure to check out the other essays in this powerful series).
“The only Iran I know is one in which I became aware of my own body, its vulnerability as an object of men, at age six. It's where I became aware of my mortality before I could write or read. It's where I felt responsible for the lives of my family members, learning to keep secrets in the same breath I learned to speak.”
I’ll wrap it up with this conversation between Kavita Das, Gaiutra Bahadur, and Gabrielle Bellot for Catapult. It’s full of great comments; here is one by Bellot on migration and borders.
“Nations, ultimately, are fictions; the borders between countries not separated by water don’t exist, yet humans spend a remarkable amount of time and energy believing in them. Understanding why we reinforce these borders—literally and figuratively—will help us, I believe, feel a little less likely to want to define those on the other side of a border as the “Other.” Fighting against this tribalistic impulse is something I believe in deeply. I want us more attached to the world at large, to people in all their complexities and differences.”
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. Last year, 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.