Immigrant Strong: November 2021 Issue
Seeing Cuba from a parking lot, a parallel life in Vietnam, and costs of assimilation
In Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, Michelle Zauner tackles some big topics, including grief, family, and identity. The book is filled with heart-wrenching moments about losing her mother and mouth-watering descriptions of food that connects Zauner to her Korean roots. Known by her indie rockstar name Japanese Breakfast, she brings to light the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship, and takes us along her journey of forging her identity through food, cooking, and music.
Essays, Lists, and Interviews
Let’s start with Mariam Rahmani’s beautiful Granta piece on bilingualism, translation, the author-translator relationship, and more—The Translator I Never Wanted to Be.
“We’re told that the immigrant experience is an act of translation: we translate ourselves back and forth in incessant loops. But to me the metaphor falls short. Growing up bilingual I rarely thought of myself as translating from one language to another. Instead each language had its own spaces.”
Myriam J.A. Chancy penned this heartwarming piece, Departures, for Guernica.
“I was still working out how to live in the shadow of her absence, just as I had learned to live with all that had been lost of our homeland and that we would never see again, re-learning the rituals of dancing the dead to rest whether by movement or by metaphor.”
I don’t know if Anjanette Delgado is a child of immigrants, but I wanted to include her fantastic LitHub essay because it will surely resonate with readers of this newsletter. Here is On the Logistics of Memory; Or, Writing While Uprooted.
“For the uprooted, a room of their own is not enough to write; her most important tool is not paper and pen or pencil, not even place or space. It’s memory. But from the moment she leaves, she is halved; her memories are tainted by sadness, by guilt, by relief cooked in regret. Who did she leave behind? If she was forced to leave, her sadness is unbearable. If she chose to, the guilt murders her daily. She doesn’t yet belong in the new place, but the old place is already dissolving, never to exist again. Not exactly. Plus, forget identity. Who is she, really? Her new environment knows nothing about her—just that she is a person who leaves.”
Check out Diane Patrick’s comprehensive Publishers Weekly list on New and Forthcoming Immigration-Focused Titles.
Katie T Quach’s Catapult essay Searching for My Parallel Life in Vietnam considers what it means to be a part of diaspora and feel unmoored.
“What I didn’t tell Doug—what I couldn’t articulate to him or anyone else who asked because it didn’t yet make sense to me—was that I came to Vietnam in search of my parallel life. In my imagination, Vietnam contained the possibility of a different version and outcome for my family, had they never fled forty years ago. My return felt akin to flipping the pages back to the beginning of a Choose Your Own Adventure book and enacting an alternate choice. What might have happened if we had stayed? What would the life I might have had look like?”
Also at Catapult, here is Vanessa Garcia’s Seeing Cuba from a Parking Lot in Miami.
“She was kicked out of Cuba when she was five, and it was my grandfather who carried their country inside him. He carried it inside him when he looked out and saw it in Miami. He projected it onto my inherited memory forever. Or perhaps, before that, he encoded it into the helix that makes me, into the geography of my biology.”
I loved this short piece by Vanessa Chan, American Spit, in Passages North.
“I wonder if you employ the same tired sigh with your mother, whose Hong Kong accent is stronger than my Malaysian one. Though perhaps I should remind you that everyone has an accent, including Americans, since an accent is merely a vocal inflection. But no, what I mean to say is, your mother, whose Hong Kong accent is even further away than my accent is from the American accent you have—I wonder if you tell her when she misses conjunctions, when she uses the wrong tense, when her verbs are conjugated wrongly.”
I enjoyed Gauri Awasthi’s interview in The Rumpus with Susan Nguyen, author of Dear Diaspora (and fellow TinHouse 2021 participant!) Here is Meditations on Green, Grief, and Girlhood: Talking with Susan Nguyen.
“I write about language—losing it, learning it, the vulnerability in all of that—but I think I’m still learning to forgive myself for not being fluent in Vietnamese and losing this integral part of understanding my parents, my culture.”
I’ve often said that as a society, we’re quick to demand that immigrants assimilate, but we do not consider the costs and losses this entails. Maya Salam explores this topic in her New York Times piece, ‘90s Sitcoms Shaped Me as an Immigrant Child. What if They Hadn’t?
“Like many immigrant children pulled between cultures to the point of splitting, I was compelled to pick a side and stay there. The line I longed to cross, though, wasn’t necessarily between brown and white; it was between American and foreign.”
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, the Washington Post and the New York Daily News. This 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.