Immigrant Strong: March 2024 Issue

My upcoming class, and essays on yearning, mixed families, and defying classification

Dear reader,

I’ll be teaching a two-part zoom class called Writing About Your Immigrant Experience on April 2 and 9. We’ll discuss tropes around writing by immigrants, read passages from contemporary immigrant authors, and do some generative writing exercises. We’ll talk pitching and goal-setting, and all participants will walk away with a comprehensive resource document to help get you writing. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the class—and I hope to see some of you on Zoom next month!

Shout out to Dr. Amy E. Wright and her migrant storytelling class at Saint Louis University, where I recently gave a Zoom preview of Writing About Your Immigrant Experience. Check out her book, Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now.

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Book

Before a certain billionaire baby ruined Twitter, it was a great place to find and connect with other writers, which is how I came across Grace Loh Prasad. We had many things in common—we were both immigrants, married with one child we had in our late 30s, and living in America with parents in a different country. I related to her writing about living in the diaspora and trying to forge ties with her culture, and felt the same way about her memoir, The Translator’s Daughter. It especially resonated to read about the grief and guilt that come with living across an international border from your aging parents. In this debut memoir, the Taiwan-born writer contemplates the challenges of trying to maintain relationships and roots from a distance—something many of us cope with.

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Essays and Interviews

I’ll start with this great HuffPost piece by Rebecca Morrison that I know immigrants and children of immigrants will feel deeply. Here is The Beauty Of ‘Past Lives’ Is Its Ability to Capture The Immigrant Experience.

“I left Tehran with my family during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and, similar to Nora, went on to marry a white American man, and worked toward my picket-fence dreams. But, I’ve always wondered what my ghost life would have looked like had I stayed in Iran. I suspect many immigrants think about their could-have-been lives, even if they left under difficult circumstances.”

Victoria Chan’s The Perks of Yearning also mentions the movie Past Lives. As a very nostalgic person, I appreciated how she weaved personal narrative with research about nostalgia for this essay in The Walrus.

“Nostalgia, or the act of longing for something from the past, has always seemed more bitter than sweet to me. In the years following my move from Hong Kong to Canada, reminders of the place I once called home came with a fear that my connection to it was fleeting or, worse, lost forever. I can’t help but continue longing for something I can never get back.”

I have featured Lana Bastašić in this newsletter before and have been so impressed by how outspoken she has been about what’s happening in Gaza, and the failure of many in the publishing world and beyond to do the same. I related to so much the Bosnian Serb writer said in this interview, such as her comments about coming from a war-torn country and living as a perpetual outsider. For LitHub, here is her fantastic conversation with John Freeman, “Humanity is Not an Abstract Concept.” Lana Bastašić on Palestine Solidarity, Dubravka Ugrešić, and More.

“It’s more than just an opinion on a conflict in the Middle East. It is the question of how we relate to the human condition. To what extent have our privileges uprooted our lives from the context that makes those privileges possible? I’ve had people tell me that as a writer I should only think about writing, but this to me is the ultimate triumph of neoliberal capitalism: a voluntary, almost self-congratulatory blindness to that which doesn’t concern my job. Literature to me is inseparable from humanity, but it seems like we need to be reminded that humanity is not an abstract concept. It means people.”

Suja Sawafta writes beautifully about longing for Palestine’s Mediterranean in Two Shores, One Sea for The Baffler.

“It was almost as if we knew that this was a definitive shift in the world of language—that the language we knew in and of itself, and its capacity to express our longing for return, would never be the same after Darwish was lain to rest. These moments physically alter you. Nothing can be done about it.”

Here is Ahmed Moor’s powerful Boston Review piece, We are Not from Where We Are From.

“Palestinian refugees, most of whom have never lived anywhere else, identify with their neighborhoods—the streets, the names, the feel of the seasons. Simultaneously, they cast backward into history for a sense of rootedness, a place and an identity. To be a refugee is to be unsettled, fundamentally. We are not from where we are from, an experience I know firsthand.”

It’s always a pleasure to come across Raksha Vasudevan’s writing, so it’s no surprise her latest essay is worth sitting down for. Here is Functionally White: What I Didn’t Say About Being South Asian in Uganda, in off assignment magazine.

“I was starting to understand that race was a different beast here in Uganda. Here, class and politics were factored into racial classifications, rather than existing apart from them. Since most expats bore the markers of the rich Western world—our Birkenstocks, our accents, our safaris—even those of us who weren’t physically white became functionally so.”

Musih Tedji Xaviere penned a piece about her country’s struggles and facing her fears for LitHub.

“To stay safe in Cameroon is really simple: don’t say anything. And what I’ve gathered from my French-speaking friends is that they would rather live in complacency than have a disruption of peace. However, it is this complacency that sabotages our collective peace, that stifles progress and reduces us to puppets, stripped of power and agency.”

The Rumpus interviewed Armen Davoudian, who grew up in Iran, about his debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, which encompasses themes of migration, queerness, and the meaning of home.

“The Palace of Forty Pillars in Isfahan, Iran, actually has only twenty pillars. But, reflected in a pool, the twenty pillars become forty. Similarly, at the heart of my book is a sequence of twenty sonnets, which reimagine the traditional asymmetry within the form, prosodically divided between octave and sestet, as a liminal space of migration. Asymmetry implies hierarchy, and so the sequence interrogates the power relation between unequal halves: original and translation, home and exile, childhood innocence and adult experience, queerness and familial belonging.”

I’ll wrap up with Tessa Hulls's “My Mother is Chinese and My Father is English…” On Defying Racial and Cultural Classification in Northern California, a beautiful excerpt in LitHub from her graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts.

“Culture dilutes across generations and oceans. And the thread of my family was lost somewhere in the passage to the United States.

My childhood felt severed from any connection to China, while also dominated by that incision.”

Thanks for reading,

Vesna

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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 in the human rights and international affairs fields. I have written about my immigrant experience for the Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023, The New York Times, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. I participated in Tin House workshops in 2024 and 2021, and attended the 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Conference as a parent-fellow. Find me on Instagram, @vesnajaksiclowe, or twitter, @vesnajaksic.