Immigrant Strong: June 2022 Issue
On raising kids as an immigrant parent, Costco, and running while trans
When you live in a country where guns have more rights than kids and women, every piece of news is another tragedy. Barely enough time has passed to bury another class of children massacred in grade school, and the Supreme Court has made it even easier for everyone to walk around with deadly weapons. The nation’s highest court thinks guns can’t be controlled, but women’s bodies must be, so it also took away our constitutional right to reproductive health care and our right to bodily autonomy. On the day my daughter graduated from first grade, she lost a fundamental right generations before her had fought to secure. She is no longer deemed an equal citizen or a human being free to make decisions that impact her body, her livelihood, her life.
The party that claims to be pro-life but has ensured the United States has no paid parental leave, no affordable child care, and no universal health care is going back half a century in time to force individuals to carry babies to term. The Republican party thinks putting a mask on your face for a few minutes to protect others from a deadly virus is too much of a burden on your liberty and freedom, but forcing someone to carry a pregnancy and raise a human being—without any support from the state—is the rule of law. They refuse to ban or so much as regulate guns and rifles, but believe the state should control child bearing individuals’ bodies and make health decisions on their behalf. In some places, the punishment for having an abortion is now much steeper than that for committing rape.
Anyone with even an ounce of common sense, intelligence, or morality understands this has nothing to do with protecting life, but everything to do with seizing power and control. It’s part of the conservative movement’s relentless efforts to decimate people’s rights, subjugate and control women and marginalized groups, and further entrench this country’s unfettered capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. In a matter of days, we have gone decades back in time, reversing years of hard-fought progress. While functioning democracies work on securing and expanding people’s human rights, the United States is going backwards, removing or chipping away at existing fundamental rights.
No matter how much I try to intellectualize this horror, breathe through it, cope with it, it is impossible not to feel the weight and the trauma of these decisions. How can a body not react to a government that actively works to diminish and disempower it? Like most of these decisions, those already marginalized will suffer the most—people of color, women, trans individuals, poor people, immigrants, and others under constant attack from their own government.
For anyone who is feeling angry, sad, hurt, or simply numb from these atrocious human rights abuses: know that you are not alone. Your rage and anger and grief and sadness—or whatever you may be feeling—is valid and appropriate.
I’m trying to consume less news while refusing to be ignorant or apathetic about this kind of fascism, so I turned to fiction to at least momentarily escape some of this reality.
I enjoyed Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay, a novel about an ICU doctor in New York who is a daughter of Chinese immigrants. It’s a witty book about family, home, belonging, and more. I love the main character’s refusal to go along with societal expectations, and related to her exploration of identity as a child of immigrants.
“Was it harder to be a woman? Or an immigrant? Or a Chinese person outside of China? And why did being good at any of the above require you to edit yourself down so you could become someone else?”
Wang, who was born in China and grew up in Australia, Canada, and the United States, has an impressive resume that includes a doctorate in public health and several awards for her debut novel, Chemistry.
Essays
I did not grow up poor, but as a parent and an immigrant, I found many things that resonated in this LitHub piece Reyna Grande on Giving Her Kids the Childhood She Never Had.
“I don’t know how to reconcile my poverty-stricken childhood and my children’s childhood of abundance. My success in this country has allowed me to give them the life I’d once dreamed of, but in my quest to spare them the trauma of growing up poor and on the margins of American society, I overcompensate and overindulge.”
I avoid megastores like Costco because they remind me of America’s never-ending appetite for consumerism. Yet I loved Yuxi Lin’s Longreads essay Love Song to Costco, and feel that I could have written the last line in this paragraph (maybe just swapping lobster with octopus).
“Over the years and our continuous fights about my increasing Americanness, food has become the only safe subject between my parents and me. It is also the only language through which they can tell me that they love me. While my white friends receive care packages of cookies and candles from home, my parents offer to overnight me live lobsters that they bulk-order.”
This piece in The Rumpus by Dujie Tahat is worth your time. Here is Where You Want To Be: Notes on Listening to Taking Back Sunday to Make White Friends.
“I can clean up, work hard, and gain access to a governor or a CEO. Many in my family do not. Many of my bygone beloveds cannot. If I paint my nails, my immigration status remains the same. So I don’t clean up anymore—my hair spills outward, curls around bright jumpers and glittering accessories—and that’s my choice. I can choose to betray myself, who I come from, and what I desire.”
I somehow ended up with lots of LitHub essays in this issue, like Nandita Dinesh’s On Writing (and Not Writing) About Mutton Biryani.
“I was going to write about why mutton biryani matters to me; how its preparation symbolized “occasion” during my childhood. How it is a particularly poignant allegory for the ways in which flavors collide and mingle in India’s worlds, and how the dish carries a unique, evocative aftertaste for which I have no words in Malayalam, Tamil, English, Hindi, or Spanish.”
And here is Yoko Tawada Captures the Unique Joys of Having an Uncategorizable Identity by Yurina Yoshikawa, also in LitHub.
“What none of Tawada’s critics seem to consider is the realism of her stories once you get past the hypotheticals, and the significance of her work on people like me who don’t easily fit into an existing national or ethnic identity. People who are gradually losing their mother tongue—a thing that is somehow deemed so sacred that to lose it would reveal a person’s laziness, or acceptance of cultural annihilation.”
I enjoyed Malali and Me, written by Aliyeh Ataei and translated from Persian by Salar Abdoh for Guernica.
“I was who I was, a frustrated immigrant. If you never had a choice in leaving your country, no one should claim the right to ask why you don’t go back. How should I know where my home is! I suppose home is where you grew up, where you went to school, where your son grows up, where your name sits inside some birth certificate.”
I’ll wrap it up with Vivian Lam’s On Running Shirtless While Trans for Catapult.
“But I think that deep down, my parents and I both know that our safety is conditional. And maybe that’s one of the presumed truths they’ve tried to get me to wear like its own form of armor: Girls stay covered; Asian people avoid conflict. They point out women walking down the street with a target on their exposed backs, cousins who died for mixing with the wrong crowd. They tell me to stand down when I want to speak up. “It’s not worth it,” they tell me, because they have seen the consequences.”
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, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.
I have a similar impulse with regard to the toxic news cycle, which is to focus on long-form writing instead. Love this essay roundup too. Thanks for putting it together, Vesna.