This month, Immigrant Strong turns 2! My newsletter may now be a toddler, but it still feels like my baby, and I hope I can keep it alive longer than my plants. If you want to know why I started Immigrant Strong, I discussed that with New Women New Yorkers a while back. (It’s a wonderful nonprofit organization that helps empower immigrant women in New York and is mostly run by volunteers.)
Since we are turning two, I thought that was a good reason to mention two books I recently read. Sejal Shah’s This Is One Way to Danceis an illuminating essay collection that examines topics such as race, culture, and identity—subject areas I love reading about and learning more about. A daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya, Shah explores how our backgrounds can make us visible in some situations and invisible in others in this debut memoir filled with beautiful, lyrical writing.
Roya Hakakian’s A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curiousis written as a guide for newcomers to the United States, touching on the sense of hope many immigrants and refugees feel when they arrive, while also relating the harsh reality of living in a country plagued with racism and gun violence, among other problems. As someone who’s lived in the United States for most of my life, it brought back memories of my early days in North America. Hakakian, who came here as a Jewish refugee from Iran, has said the book is “part memoir, part reportage, and part a work of imagination.”
“Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink or a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opened our mouths and they heard the accent?”
When my family moved from Croatia to Canada, McDonald’s became a contentious place. My sisters and I wanted to experience fast food—something we didn’t have back home, but that seemed to be a common part of life in North America. Thirty years after that move, my parents still cringe at the thought of meat and fish served within seconds. But for Jane Huand her family, McDonald’s became an important part of their life. Here isWhy the Filet-O-Fish Is My Gold Standard for Fast Foodfor The New York Times.
“In Canada, just like in China, eating at McDonald’s was a novelty for us. In the wake of post-Mao economic reforms, the belated introduction of the Golden Arches to China represented a whole ethos about what constituted the good life. Fast food might connote easy accessibility or overindulgence in the West, but McDonald’s presented a different kind of comfort for my family and me.”
Naz Riahi hails from Iran, while I grew up in Croatia—two very different cultures. But every time I come across her writing, it resonates deeply. This Food & Wine essay made me think about the first time I hit EuroMarket in Astoria and loaded up on Balkan goods. Here is This Iranian Supermarket Gives Me a Taste of Home.
“As I grew older, I began to reconcile with the cultural wealth of my heritage. I was no longer the kid desperate to fit in. I wanted to better understand where I came from, who I was. I stopped straightening my curly hair, downloaded Googoosh and Viguen's music, and dedicated my time to Farsi, trying to get rid of the same American accent I had worked so hard to cultivate.”
“Food in general is really important for any diaspora, and it’s really important for Korean people,” she says. “This was a connection my mom and I could always have together that made her feel like I was more hers. No matter what environment I was raised in, it was proof that I was her kid. I had that tongue — that taste for the same kind of stuff that she grew up with.”
“But again, to your broader question, am I an Asian woman? Yeah. Am I Southeast Asian? Yeah. I’m Vietnamese. Am I a writer? Yeah. All of this is playing into my work no matter what. What I write will be shaped by my experience and my perspective. I haven’t considered making my writing more overtly didactic or allegorical, though I know that that’s one response to being alert, or newly alert, to politics. I don’t know if I can center my Asianness in my writing any more than it already is, which is to say, it’s part of every fiber that gets woven.”
“When visiting Minnesota, my dark features and skin that never burned proved I had a heavy dose of genes not often seen at that time in the southwestern part of the state, but the differences didn’t stop there, as I was afraid to even walk near the bull’s pen, and tentatively entered barns. I was the one who got lost in church and didn’t know to look for the party in the basement. And I was constantly envious of my cousins, who could enter a room and not be stared at, who were at home in a landscape that was as beautiful and foreign to me as a different country.”
“Experiencing and observing the heightened machinery of detention and deportation, and how there was a synergy between the war at home and the war abroad, and that that was underwritten by racial capitalism and empire… We can’t think about immigration as a solely domestic issue.”
“Particularly, though, I feel a lot of pain around the fact that it feels like there are limited ways of being, when your entire community has a restricted imagination for how you can go from childhood to adulthood. I feel this among a lot of my other friends who are children of immigrants. They, similar to me, sometimes feel this desire to break open the vessels that our lives are supposed to fit into.”
“To this day, the rush of a terminal brings me back to that childhood feeling of safety, a lit excitement in my stomach that signaled the journey home, though “home” was always nebulous territory. Home was as much my grandmother’s seashell bathroom wallpaper in London as the oil-drenched air of my mother’s native Cartagena marketplaces five thousand miles away.”
“These lessons my father gave me—to be the best you can be, to fight off your enemies and defeat them, to swim to safety if the boat sinks, and in general toughen yourself against everything that would harm you—these I had absorbed alongside certain unspoken lessons, taken from observing his life as a Korean immigrant.”
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.
Immigrant Strong: May 2021 Issue
Immigrant Strong: May 2021 Issue
Immigrant Strong: May 2021 Issue
This month, Immigrant Strong turns 2! My newsletter may now be a toddler, but it still feels like my baby, and I hope I can keep it alive longer than my plants. If you want to know why I started Immigrant Strong, I discussed that with New Women New Yorkers a while back. (It’s a wonderful nonprofit organization that helps empower immigrant women in New York and is mostly run by volunteers.)
Since we are turning two, I thought that was a good reason to mention two books I recently read. Sejal Shah’s This Is One Way to Dance is an illuminating essay collection that examines topics such as race, culture, and identity—subject areas I love reading about and learning more about. A daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya, Shah explores how our backgrounds can make us visible in some situations and invisible in others in this debut memoir filled with beautiful, lyrical writing.
Roya Hakakian’s A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious is written as a guide for newcomers to the United States, touching on the sense of hope many immigrants and refugees feel when they arrive, while also relating the harsh reality of living in a country plagued with racism and gun violence, among other problems. As someone who’s lived in the United States for most of my life, it brought back memories of my early days in North America. Hakakian, who came here as a Jewish refugee from Iran, has said the book is “part memoir, part reportage, and part a work of imagination.”
Essays and interviews
I loved this essay and the accompanying photos; the author’s ex-Yugoslav roots, life in New York, and thoughts on being an outsider created a lot of common ground. Here is On Being an Outsider: Words by Charles Simic, Photos by Romeo Alaeff in LitHub.
When my family moved from Croatia to Canada, McDonald’s became a contentious place. My sisters and I wanted to experience fast food—something we didn’t have back home, but that seemed to be a common part of life in North America. Thirty years after that move, my parents still cringe at the thought of meat and fish served within seconds. But for Jane Hu and her family, McDonald’s became an important part of their life. Here is Why the Filet-O-Fish Is My Gold Standard for Fast Food for The New York Times.
Naz Riahi hails from Iran, while I grew up in Croatia—two very different cultures. But every time I come across her writing, it resonates deeply. This Food & Wine essay made me think about the first time I hit EuroMarket in Astoria and loaded up on Balkan goods. Here is This Iranian Supermarket Gives Me a Taste of Home.
In this interview with Angie Martoccio for Rolling Stone, author and singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, also known by her musical alias Japanese Breakfast, talks about her memoir, Crying in H Mart.
Here is Adalena Kavanagh’s interview with Larissa Pham, author of, most recently, Pop Song, a memoir-in-essays.
Gian Sardar, whose father is from Kurdistan in Iraq and mother is from Minnesota, penned this beautiful LitHub essay, Exploring My Disparate Cultures in Fiction Helped Me Better Understand Them Both. Her latest book, Take What You Can Carry, was just published this month.
I found this conversation about borders, the harmful systems they perpetuate, and what a borderless world would look like very informative. Here is John Washington’s interview for The Nation with Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.
I also enjoyed Preety Sidhu’s interview with Sanjena Sathian, author of the debut novel Gold Diggers. Here is A Potion Made of Stolen Gold to Achieve the Indian American Dream in Electric Literature.
Rosa Boshier writes beautifully about her “tri-hyphenate” identity and searching for her roots through travel. Check out Who Gets to Travel to “Find Themselves”? in Catapult.
I’m a big fan of Alexander Chee’s work, so I’ll wrap up with his powerful GQ essay, What My Korean Father Taught Me About Defending Myself in America.
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.