Immigrant Strong: We Are Turning One!
On queerness in Poland, naming a child, and becoming American
Immigrant Strong is turning 1! It was on May 29, 2019 that I sent the first issue of this newsletter. I had been thinking for several months about how to combine my love for writing and reading with my desire to elevate immigrant authors. Once I settled on the name, I’m glad I hit ‘send.’ (If you want to know more about why I started it, the wonderful team at New Women New Yorkers interviewed me back in November.)
Like most work done for free, it takes up more time than I anticipated. I started with two or even three e-mails per month and now stick to a monthly issue. But I enjoy searching for essays for every issue, reading them, and learning from them. I love reconnecting with writers I’ve read before, discovering new ones and promoting stories written by immigrants, refugees, and children of immigrants and refugees.
We need these stories to understand the fascinating and complicated facets of these lives and the people behind them. We need them to become more informed and educated in an increasingly connected world. And we need them to build empathy and tolerance.
Eighteen e-mails, nearly 100 essay recommendations, and hundreds of subscribers later, I’m glad I’m still doing this. Thank you to everyone who has read the newsletter, shared it with others, and sent me kind notes — they always keep this project of love going. Now, on to the terrible twos.
Books
I am still not back to reading books. It saddens me, but two months since schools and everything else closed, I have not found the mental or physical energy during this pandemic to stay up and read books after my daughter goes to bed, like I usually do. So here are two books I read a while back. Both of these writers were born in the United States to at least one parent with international roots (China in the first case, Turkey in the other).
T Kira Madden’s Long Live The Tribe of Fatherless Girls is one of the best books I’ve read over the least year. The coming-of-age memoir is a fearless debut by this talented queer and biracial writer. I cried and laughed and was left in awe of her life and her skillful writing.
I know my list of fiction is slim, but Elif Batuman’s The Idiot — a Pulitzer Prize finalist — is a delight. It’s funny, witty and smart, and even at more than 400 pages, it never felt long to me.
Essays
Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee, draws from her experience as a child in Iran during war and a refugee to reflect on life during the pandemic in this Washington Post piece, In an Iranian bomb shelter or a locked-down Paris, I search for joy and meaning.
“Maybe we can learn something from refugee life: It teaches you to be patient, to live in the present, to find purpose in everyday pleasures. It teaches you to fear the idle days that easily turn into wasted years. Somehow, too, it makes everyone more compassionate, generous and attuned to other people’s needs. To have lived in purgatory, it warms your embrace, fattens your tears, swells your laughter.”
Here is an illustrated piece with another refugee’s perspective by NPR’s Malaka Gharib, author of the beautiful memoir I Was Their American Dream. Take a look at A Lost Boy, A Snake Bite, A Lesson in Resilience.
“And he held on to the tiniest thread of hope that they would magically appear and take him home. That hope kept him alive.”
You know I love pieces about food, immigration, and culture so of course I enjoyed A Mother, a Pandemic and Scorched Rice in The New York Times by Lynn Jones Johnston.
“In Saigon, one of my earliest memories was going to the market on a moped with my aunt, sitting on her long, traditional ao dai to keep it from flying in the air, my 3-year-old hands white-knuckling her waist as we zipped through traffic. Even though it was war time, I never felt more alive.”
Here is a wonderful read in The New Yorker by Patricia Park, Taking My Place At My Father’s Grocery Store.
“Most all of us are people of color; most all of us are immigrants or children of immigrants. Each day, we communicate in a jumble of English, Korean, and Spanish—like when one of our Mexican workers says, “Bap mukja!,” which is Korean for “Let’s eat!,” when he’s going to lunch, or when the delivery guys and I exchange regalitos (“little gifts”) of empty shopping carts to put away. None of us are quite fluent in one another’s native tongue, but still we try to cobble together meaning with the handful of words that we do know.”
Let’s move on to essays not related to the global pandemic. Whether discussing belonging or bureaucracy, Jakki Kerubo does a wonderful job in American Tests for Longreads.
“Finally, I was moved to a small cubicle with overstuffed binders covering every square inch, including the extra seats. Each one held the dense, intricate details of human migrant history — bloody wars, financial catastrophes, the incurable optimism of new beginnings.”
Here is an important piece from Tomasz Jedrowski, On Writing the Story of Polish Queerness, for LitHub.
“Over the years that followed, I lived in many different countries, worked a variety of jobs, but the more I thought about my personal and familial history, the more it struck me how arbitrary our birthplaces are, how arbitrary privilege and our sense of self really is. I began to imagine what my life would have been like had I been born just a little earlier, in my parents’ country.”
My daughter has my American husband’s last name, but a Croatian first name, so there are many things I related to in this essay by Jami Nakamura Lin for The New York Times, Does My Child’s Name Erase My Identity?
“The issue tugs at me as an Asian-American, as a person with recent immigrant history. Our names are often fundamental parts of our identities. They function as shorthand, as synecdoche, as a way for us to find each other. They cannot explain all of our experiences, but they can gesture toward community.”
Here is Donna Hemans’s very interesting Electric Literature essay, I Can Only Save My Grandparents’ Home By Preserving It In Fiction.
“It is a story most every immigrant in America can tell of family land left alone too long or lingering in limbo, of migrants who had great plans to return home but who, after years abroad, find it hard to return to a place they’ve long left, a town empty of friends and family.”
In The Many Meanings of the Mango in Catapult, Jessica J. Lee’s skillfully weaves her personal story with intriguing research about mangos.
“These stories weren’t about some tropical Other, but about the traces of a past—of skill and familiarity—that remained after migration.”
Finally, I hope everyone can find the time to read this gut-wrenching report from Raquel Gutiérrez, Do Migrants Dream of Blue Barrels? in the Georgia Review.
“Living in the borderlands, you count among your friends and neighbors those who want things to be different here. We use our time to stay aware, to be in service. We live here to embody the lesson that everyone should be entitled to improve upon the conditions of their lives. That often means leaving behind a pressure-cooker combination of corrupt governments, violence, and barren lands.”
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 moved to Canada, and now live in New York, 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.