Immigrant Authors on What It Means to Belong

Cristina Jiménez was delivered to the U.S. in 1998 as an undocumented teenager and simply over a decade later was assembly with White Home officers to assist craft insurance policies for immigrants in the identical scenario. Her management as cofounder of the immigrant advocacy community United We Dream earned her a 2017 MacArthur fellowship.

When she ultimately sat down to jot down a guide, it wasn’t her coverage experience that she wished to share, despite the fact that it’s what many publishers anticipated from her, she says. “I wished to interact with folks’s hearts and feelings about who we’re as a rustic, who we need to be, and who belongs.”

With polls persistently displaying immigration topping voter issues and the subject about which they’re most polarized, PW spoke with Jiménez and different immigrant authors of fiction and nonfiction about how their expertise informs their work and cuts to the center of what it means to be an American.

Paper chase

Like many immigrant narratives, Jiménez’s was born of her household’s dedication to create alternative for the following era, main them to Queens to flee a rising financial disaster in Ecuador.

“My mother and father believed in alternative and justice for all however I fairly shortly realized that due to our immigration standing that was not going to be the case for folks like us,” says Jiménez, who arrived within the U.S. at age 13. As she explains in her forthcoming memoir, Dreaming of Residence (St. Martin’s, Feb. 2025), despite the fact that she was an honors pupil, she was nearly disadvantaged of a faculty schooling due to her authorized standing.

The group she cofounded would ultimately be hailed for pushing the Obama administration to enact Deferred Motion for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), offering a short lived reprieve from deportation for sure unauthorized immigrants who arrived as youngsters. Whereas she hopes her guide evokes readers to consider within the potential for collective motion, she highlights the centrality of one other theme: “discovering residence even when that place you think about residence tells you it doesn’t need you.”

Komail Aijazuddin grapples with disappointment and a eager for acceptance in his forthcoming memoir, Manboobs (Abrams, Aug.), which PW’s starred assessment referred to as “a stirring account of coming of age and popping out.” As a closeted teenager in Lahore, Pakistan, Aijazuddin adored divas and Disney princesses and dreamed of going to North America, which he noticed as a “homosexual promised land.”

But when he arrived in Montreal quickly after 9/11, a interval of rampant Islamophobia, he was shortly made to really feel unwelcome. Ultimately he made his solution to the U.S., the place he confronted additional challenges. Aijazuddin writes about coming to phrases together with his physique and sexuality whereas confronting prejudice not solely amongst immigration officers but additionally queer hipsters in Brooklyn who couldn’t empathize with the racism he confronted as an immigrant from Pakistan. “I used to be a brown, Muslim male earlier than anything,” he says.

After almost 20 years within the U.S., three of them as a citizen, Aijazuddin says the notion of nationwide id nonetheless troubles him. “One of many questions I wished to pose with this guide was, ‘When does one go from an immigrant to an American?’ When you look and sound a sure approach, resembling I do, you might by no means be seen as an American.”

Anne Anlin Cheng, an English professor at Princeton who was born in Taiwan, wrestles with the identical query. “I’ve been right here greater than 50 years,” Cheng says. “I don’t even dream in Chinese language anymore. I dream in English, and but I nonetheless really feel like an immigrant.”

Within the essay assortment Unusual Disasters (Pantheon, Sept.), Cheng writes about present process most cancers therapy throughout the pandemic amid the terrifying outbreak of hate crimes in opposition to Asians, a mixture of circumstances that compelled her to drop the tutorial veneer with which she usually noticed her adopted nation and contend together with her expertise as a hyphenated American. She discusses her marriage to a white man and parenting biracial youngsters, struggling to search out her footing in each Chinese language and American notions of femininity, and, after a spate of suicides amongst Princeton college students, confronts the unacknowledged emotional toll confronted by Asian American college students pressured to succeed.

“What I believed have been all these abilities I had have been the truth is an emotional job that I’d been laboring beneath for years with the intention to assimilate, and it wore me down,” Cheng says. “This guide was about realizing how profound this immigration expertise has been.”

By means of the trying glass

Different writers handle related sentiments by way of fiction, amongst them Ismet Prcic, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1996, within the wake of the Yugoslavian Wars. He debuted with 2011’s autofictional Shards; within the forthcoming Unspeakable Residence (Avid Reader, Aug.), a middle-aged immigrant from Bosnia named Izzy Prcic writes confessional fan letters in regards to the breakup of his marriage to comic Invoice Burr. Interspersed among the many letters are quick tales written by Izzy whose narrators signify completely different variations of his damaged self. PW’s assessment referred to as the guide a “intelligent and transferring work.”

Prcic says he sees the 2 novels as a part of a attainable trilogy that explores his ongoing wrestle to beat the trauma that informs how he writes in regards to the American expertise. “Lots of immigrant fiction likes to inform a sure story to People. Anyone got here right here from someplace they usually figured it out. I complicate the immigrant story by not writing success tales. I write about people who find themselves damaged.”

Cherry Lou Sy’s debut novel, Love Can’t Feed You (Dutton, Oct.), can be involved with fracturing—of household, of a way of self. A Chinese language Filipina teenager named Queenie strikes together with her brother and father to the U.S. to affix her mom, who has been working as a nurse in Brooklyn. After years of dreaming about America, the household is upset by the cramped residence stuffed with objects snagged from sidewalk junk piles. Queenie’s mother and father combat consistently and stress her to neglect about faculty and get a job. Amid the dehumanizing grind, Queenie additionally discovers that her hybrid id continues to be a supply of scorn.

Just like the novel’s protagonist, Sy is of blended Chinese language Filipina heritage and says that amongst her most complicated experiences when she moved to the U.S. was discovering her id “flattened.” Within the U.S. she wasn’t Chinese language sufficient to be accepted by different Chinese language immigrants; People noticed her as a part of a monolithic Asian group. “Shifting right here, I had an enormous cultural id disaster,” Sy says.

A want to see her blended id represented in literature about Asian People is a part of what led her to jot down the novel. There are numerous Filipino writers, she notes, however not many have written explicitly about their Chinese language heritage. “There was nothing about what occurs while you’re othered already and you then transfer right here, you’re requested to examine a field, after which requested to talk for this field.”

Tara Isabel Zambrano, {an electrical} engineer in Dallas, moved together with her husband from India to the U.S. within the mid-Nineteen Nineties for work. The tales in her second assortment, Ruined a Little When We Are Born (Dzanc, Oct.), leap from communities in South Asia to the Indian diaspora within the U.S. South and infrequently function moms straining in opposition to limits to their needs.

Zambrano hesitates to characterize her writing as representing any particular expertise past what she invented on the web page however acknowledges a standard backdrop: the profound rupture brought on by transferring between one world and one other. “I needed to relearn every thing once we moved right here—tips on how to work together with my youngsters’s academics, the nuances of a dialog; every thing was completely different,” she says. “A form of longing to really feel at residence developed, and I believe you see that manifested in several methods in my tales.”

Nigerian American author Sefi Atta, who divides her time between Lagos, London, and Meridian, Miss., prevented broaching the subject of immigration when she first started publishing greater than 20 years in the past, fearing she would lapse into cliché. As literary areas have opened up for African authors, she says, she’s develop into extra comfy with enjoying with tropes about immigration.

In her forthcoming novel Good-for-Nothing Lady (Interlink, Nov.), a younger lady agrees to journey to the U.S. to work as a relative’s nanny in hopes of pursuing a school schooling, then finds herself trapped in a modern-day type of indentured servitude. She escapes and turns into a trigger célèbre however resents the way in which activists depict her as helpless, and resists provides to commodify her story.

Whereas the novel connects to wider world points, Atta, like different authors interviewed for this piece, hopes readers will respect her protagonist’s particular person expertise. “There’s a sure expectation that our tales be in a roundabout way extraordinary or calamitous,” she says. “My character might have been by way of a unprecedented journey, however she desires to be seen not as a case research however as an actual individual.”

Jasmina Kelemen, a author in Houston, grew up Yugoslav Canadian and now calls herself an American.

Learn extra from our In-Focus: Immigrant Experiences function

Youngsters’s Books About Immigrant Experiences

New image books, graphic novels, and YA fiction grapple with the short- and long-term results of leaving residence.

The Tremendous Print: PW Talks with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin

The anthology ‘Right here to Keep’ serves as a mission assertion for members of the Undocupoets and different writers who’re or have been undocumented.

6 New Works of Fiction and Nonfiction About Immigrant Experiences

Authors from throughout the globe doc the fun and travails of diaspora communities.