Immigrant Strong: September 2021 Issue
Mexican Americans' in-between lives; airports; and traveling with aging parents
Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican-American Literature on Families in Between Worlds edited by Sergio Troncoso is a beautiful collection of essays, poems, and short stories that explores lives of Mexican Americans grappling with ever-shifting identities, cultures, and languages. The theme of these in-between lives will likely appeal to many followers of this newsletter, and I enjoyed reading works by some very well-known writers, like Sandra Cisneros, as well as others I was not familiar with. Participating in the Tin House workshop in July motivated me to read more poetry, and I loved having access to all three genres in one book.
Essays and Interviews
More than a decade ago when I started drafting some personal essays — before ever publishing one — the first piece I wrote was about airports: how often I frequented them as an immigrant, how many times they were the site of family reunions, and how, for many years, my family’s hairdresser worked from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. I got goose bumps from this graphic essay by Shing Yin Khor, Why I Love Airports: A Comic. I love how they acknowledges the privilege that traveling embodies for those of us with multiple homes. The essay is part of their Catapult column, Curiosity Americana.
“Airports, to me, have marked adventure, or home — as much as home could ever be.”
I’ve written here before about how we often expect immigrants to assimilate and learn a new language, but we do not confront the losses that entails. I’ve certainly been struggling with this for years as English has become easier for me than Croatian, my mother tongue. Jenny Liao writes beautifully on this subject in her New Yorker essay, Forgetting My First Language.
“During my visits back home from California, our time together is quiet, our conversations brief. My parents ask about my life in Cantonese over plates of siu yuk and choy sum while I clumsily piece together incomplete sentences peppered with English in response. I have so much to say, but the Cantonese words are just out of reach, my tongue unable to retrieve them after being neglected in favor of English for so long.”
I enjoyed this Electric Literature interview with Rémy Ngamije, the Rwandan-born Namibian author of The Eternal Audience of One.
“Migration of any kind, really, is moving from one clearly defined source of home to search for another. That search, sometimes, becomes “a home” because everything else is never perfect, never enough to stop the search in the first place.”
Here is another great Electric Literature interview, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, author of Names for Light: A Family History, in conversation with Raksha Vasudevan.
“The immigrant narrative has this temporal relationship where there’s a past and a present, and then and now, here and there. That all exists for people to understand in simplistic terms what it means to be an immigrant, but my lived experience has never been that simple or easy.”
I love coming across writing by people with ties to my home country, the former Yugoslavia. Here is Annabelle Tometich’s The Mango Missile Crisis in Catapult.
“Mom rarely spoke Tagalog. She called it useless. In Fort Myers, a town of retirees and fishermen in Robert E. Lee County, Florida, it was. Mom had moved here to escape the poverty of the Manila slum where she grew up. She’d left her islands to become an island, a speck of brown adrift in a sea of the white and elderly.”
I also enjoyed Thu-Huong Ha’s Catapult essay on traveling, aging, and her parents, Traveling With My Parents Taught Me “Growing Up” Is Not “Growing Old.”
“My parents were refugees who arrived in the United States with next to nothing. Before she was airlifted out of her home country, my mother had only left its borders once. They had now been to so many places in the world they had forgotten all together that, on a cruise a few years prior, they had stopped at this very spot.”
Here is Anne Liu Kellor, whose debut memoir Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging is out now, in an interview with Grace Loh Prasad for The Rumpus.
“But over time I realized that my life’s trajectory has been about claiming my voice—as it is for so many of us, especially for women. For me, this meant reclaiming Chinese, but it also meant claiming my voice in English, both in speech and in the written word. Writing this book over many, many years, changed me just as much, if not more, than the time I spent in China.”
I’ll end with Jenna Tang’s beautiful Catapult essay, Loss, Uncertainty, and Love Brought Me to Literary Translation.
“I often think about translation as a standalone language, how without it, we all become our own islands, floating on a vast ocean without ever coming across each other. Translation is not just about communication; it is about approaching, crossing over; it is about understanding one another by learning how we express ourselves, how we interpret universality, and how we shape our languages based on the influence of our mother tongues.”
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 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.