Immigrant Strong: March 2021 Issue
Connecting with roots through head wraps, learning Mandarin, and Cantonese food
In Conditional Citizens, Laila Lalami explores the rights and liberties that are not always afforded equally to U.S. citizens because of factors like gender, race, and national origin. The Morocco-born award-winning author and professor, who has also written four novels, turns to personal experiences as well as historical research and recent events to explain these inequalities.
I work in human rights, so I am very familiar with many of the topics she discusses —like Republicans’ relentless attacks on voting rights, and the unfair expectations our society places on immigrants. But at about 170 pages, the book offers a quick overview of some big issues that I wish every American would be more knowledgeable about — especially those of us who are white and benefit from the status quo. While having a U.S. passport confers certain privileges, Lalami’s book shows how this does not erase the injustices that many citizens are still subjected to, such as discrimination, suspicion, and rejection.
Essays and Interviews
Given yesterday’s news of more horrific anti-Asian hate crimes, I’ll start with this interview between two great authors whose books I’ve featured in this newsletter. For Medium’s GEN, Alexander Chee talks with Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings, which is out in paperback now. The interview was published before yesterday’s latest wave of violence, but I wanted to start with this quote from Cathy Park Hong.
“I think that we have to constantly say that discrimination is wrong. Hate crimes are wrong. Demeaning another group is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Black person demeaning an Asian person, an Asian person demeaning a Black person, an Indigenous person demeaning a Latinx person, or a Latinx cis person demeaning a trans person. We need to hold each other accountable in our respective communities and make sure that other marginalized groups are not being demeaned and denigrated. We have to be better than those white supremacists.”
Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country is on my (insanely long) to-read list; here is Jane Ciabattari’s interview with her for LitHub.
“People close to me have been challenged by the injustices of unstable and unjust immigration laws that fracture families indefinitely, administrations that criminalize people for doing what is only a natural instinct; that is, seeking better resources and opportunity, which is literally how mankind has ensured its survival. I wrote this book out of love for them.”
Many of us who are immigrants or children of immigrants will likely relate to Connie Chang’s New York Times essay, Connecting My Children to Their Heritage in Mandarin.
“In Mandarin, I can almost see the people they were before they uprooted their lives in search of better opportunities in a foreign land. I think about how frightening it must have been, what an act of bravery it was, to raise their children in a language whose rhythms and meanings will always remain cryptic to them, to know that those children will forever be wai guo ren — “foreigners.””
Here is another beautiful piece centered on languages: Claudio Lomnitz’s A Shipwrecked Mother Tongue: On Confronting Linguistic Dispossession in LitHub. It’s excerpted from his memoir, Nuestra America: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation.
“From that moment forward, I have remained sandwiched between Spanish and English, feeling comfortable to a certain point in each of these languages, but also insecure in both. Spanish is my Yiddish, and English is my Esperanto, but I have always lacked the perfect language: the one that names things without distorting them. For me there is not, nor can there be, a language of Paradise such as those possessed by the truly great writers, who make their homes in their language.”
I featured Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks memoir in the last newsletter; here is her New York Times Magazine essay, Why I Started Wearing Head Wraps.
“Tying a wrap becomes an everyday celebration of Blackness. Try it. After a while, you’ll develop muscle memory in your tying, and you’ll feel connected to your mother, aunties, grandmothers and the ancestors you never met.”
I recently gave a workshop on writing about the immigrant experience and we talked about tackling some big topics — like multilingualism, assimilation, and straddling more than one culture — by zeroing in on small, everyday objects. So I was thrilled to come across this great example for the class: Toilets: A Journey, by Anu Kandikuppa for The Offing.
“We moved frequently when I was growing up; each house reflected my father’s fortunes as did its toilets. After the house with the blue-door toilet came two houses with toilets that were probably bad but in unmemorable ways. Then came a house with the most beautiful toilets I’d ever seen.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s highly anticipated novel The Committed is out. Here is April Yee’s interview for Electric Literature with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a refugee from Vietnam. He discusses topics like confronting colonialism, anti-Asian violence, and the importance of choosing the right names for his characters.
“I think we can place hope in theory, in ideas, in philosophy. Because when we look at the revolutions that have happened, they’ve been driven by people doing action, taking action, mobilizing themselves—but they’ve been driven also by ideas. Ideas that have given so many of us the language by which we understand our oppression, our anger, our hatred, our feelings, and how to direct those feelings into political action.”
It’s always exciting for me to come across stories from my motherland — the former Yugoslavia — so it was great to see Amra Sabic-El-Rayess recently publish her memoir, The Cat I Never Named. Here is Laura Evers’s interview with the author and Columbia University professor in The Rumpus.
“People tend to ask me how I have gotten over the trauma of genocide, but one cannot get over a deeply embedded experience. The emotional imprint of genocide is inseparable from who I am. It is tattooed on the inside and defines everything I’ve done. Inevitably, in my day-to-day life, someone’s voice or a certain smell that wafts past me sends me right back to Bihac during the war. The difference with memorializing my story is that I have invited others to live it, for a moment.”
You know I have to include at least one essay related to food so here is a great one: How Cantonese Cooking Helped Me Fall Back in Love with Who I Am, by Kristin Wong for the Kitchn, an online daily food magazine.
“Like my mom’s fish, I seemed to make people recoil. And that’s how I started to feel about everything around me that was Chinese. I learned to hide those parts of myself as best I could, like stuffing tofu into my pockets. Years went by, and I felt more and more disconnected from that part of my identity.”
Here is Madhushree Ghosh’s interview with Bhaswhati Gosh for The Rumpus, Making A Shelter of Language.
“You know, as I was growing up in Delhi as a second-generation East Bengali refugee, I saw how food constituted the very grammar of displacement. It seemed to be the one tenuous link one could hold on to, albeit with compromises, to one’s past. I remember the love with which my grandmother tried to recreate flavors of her Barisal kitchen. When I wrote this book, food naturally became a marker, primarily of the memory of one’s desh (native village) but also of the new palate which the refugees had to adjust their taste buds to.”
I can’t remember how I came across Cindy Lee’s essay, Am I A Conditional American? in Transformations, a storytelling initiative at Arizona State University and a publishing channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. But I’m glad to mention her first published essay, which discusses the rise in anti-Asian hate and violence. This was published before yesterday’s hate crimes outside Atlanta, and it breaks my heart that so many people live with this fear every day.
“I now understand viscerally, not just intellectually, what it’s like to feel afraid for how I look, to worry about people reacting irrationally to my race, my ethnicity. It’s one thing to know it exists in the U.S.—I couldn’t live here, grow up during the civil rights movement of the ‘60s, live in Arizona, and not know it. It’s another thing to experience it firsthand, to really feel it.”
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. 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. I have written about my immigrant experience for The New York Times, Catapult, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. Find me on twitter, @vesnajaksic, or on my website, www.vesnajaksic.com.