THE GOOD IMMIGRANT: Resisting myths & creating possibilities

Season 1, Episode 5 Transcript

V: Happy Wednesday! I’m Vina Orden, here with Tamara Crawford. And this is The Lift Up Podcast — inviting you to discover empowering reads by marginalized writers. In this Episode #5, we’re discussing both the US and UK versions of The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla.

The UK version, released by crowdfunding publisher Unbound in 2016, won the Readers Choice Award at the inaugural Books Are My Bag Readers Awards and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. The US version, published in 2018, was listed as The Guardian’s “Must Read Book of 2019.” And last month, a Dutch version was also crowdfunded and released by Dipsaus, a multimedia organization amplifying the voices and lived experiences of Black and people of color in the Netherlands.

The 46 contributors to the US and UK versions of The Good Immigrant are writers, actors, filmmakers, musicians, fashion designers, scholars, educators, and activists. They are first- and second-generation immigrants in the UK and the US, with roots all over the world — from China to India, Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Northern Cyprus, and so many other places. Each essay comes from a personal place and explores the complexities of immigrant identities and experiences, in contrast to the often noisy, politicized rhetoric in both countries.

So, let’s get right to it …

Hi, Tamara. I’m so glad that we read both collections of essays side by side, because it gave me a sense of the diversity in the immigrant and diasporic experiences — even within the similarities.

T: Hey Vina, I completely agree with you. It was good to read both versions, and I love how the contributors to both collections touched on a range of themes with raw openness, honesty, and at times humour, to help frame the immigrant experiences in the US and the UK. And especially for me, being from the US but also being a UK citizen, I felt the essays illuminated the various complexities around those experiences within and sometimes tied to both the US and the UK. And I think the timing of these two collections is quite interesting …

V: Yes — editor Nikesh Shukla talks about how the UK version of the book came about in 2016 as more of a challenge to the publishing industry, which resisted the idea that exciting, new writing could come from writers of color. And then, Brexit and Trump happened. So, the US version, which came out two years later in 2018, was more of a response to the political climate — specifically about race, which Chimene Suleyman (one of the contributors to the UK version and the co-editor of the US version) noticed when she moved here.

Since The Lift Up has a global audience—and shout out to our listeners in the US, UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Philippines, Australia, and Mexico — I do think it might be helpful for us to give a bit of background about the landscape of immigration, as we see it in the US and in the UK …

So, immigration as a concept is relatively new … It’s been around for about 400 years, compared to the 200,000 years that humans have moved around freely, without borders. And I think it’s so ironic that the first immigration law was passed in the US in 1882 by people who weren’t native to these lands.

The biggest surprise for me in reading the UK version of The Good Immigrant was learning that you could be born in the UK, or have roots that go back generations, and still be considered an “immigrant” to “native” Anglo-Saxons. By that logic, all Americans other than native Indigenous people are the “immigrants.” But, of course, that’s not how the cultural majority here sees it.

I think most people have associated immigration in the US with Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the American Dream. Or, as one of the UK essayists, Riz Ahmed, puts it, the myth we export “of a racial melting-pot solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.”

Except, of course, the reality is that immigrants have been dehumanized throughout our history — the term still used for immigrants in most of our laws are “aliens,” and this current administration has put children in literal cages.

At a campaign rally in Arizona a few weeks ago, Donald Trump kept referring to undocumented immigrants as “illegal aliens with criminal records.” Preying on a strong emotion like fear is so effective against the facts, which to be honest, aren’t that exciting to hear … That undocumented immigrants are half as likely to commit crimes as native-born Americans (probably because they’d face deportation for breaking the law). And, it’s also why an easy fix like “building a wall” at the US-Mexico border is so appealing, even if it doesn’t make any real sense … In the last decade, most immigrants are actually coming from Asia, not Mexico. As one of the US essayists and formerly undocumented immigrant herself (an Irish immigrant), Maeve Higgins points out, most undocumented immigrants don’t arrive at the border — ⅔ of them arrive here legally, like taking an airplane over and becoming undocumented when their visas expire.

And I do believe that Trump is just rewriting the narrative of America in so many ways, and I do think that the US is now perceived as one of the most hostile nations to immigrants. It isn’t just about undocumented immigrants, it’s also about blocking the path to legal immigration for asylum-seekers, international students and workers, and, under the guise of national security, those from a growing list of Muslim-majority and also African and Asian countries. And now, the pandemic and economic recession are even being used as excuses to stop almost all immigration into the country and the issuing of new green cards and visas.

Which makes it all the more infuriating … And I’m sorry I’m getting in to politics a bit here … But it is so infuriating that these two women at a naturalization ceremony were featured in a video at last week’s Republican National Convention, not knowing until minutes before their ceremony that Trump would attend, and just completely unaware the video would be aired at a political event.

T: Wow. What a way to politicize their naturalization.

V: Exactly. And it just runs counter to what this president says on a day to day basis about immigrants and also the policies that are affecting immigration so negatively. So, if I were to summarize the landscape here, I’d say that immigration in the US is about politics; it’s not really about people. How would you describe the immigration landscape in the UK?

T: It is interesting because talking to some people here, there is this perception that the Home Office is trying to take from the Trump immigration playbook. But, I would say, to actually say that would be discounting decades of hostility … Before I get into this, I just want to give a massive shout out to Nick Kirk for helping me here with research on the historical timeline around immigration policies in the UK.

V: Thank you, Nick!

T: Thank you, Nick … You know, when you talk about preying on immigration fears, that’s what the UK has done for quite a long time, and that was a key part of the playbook since Margaret Thatcher took power. She utilised the fears of growing immigration from former “members” of the British Empire, now the Commonwealth Countries, in the 1979 election, stating that “by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth of Pakistan here” in order to divert votes that would have gone to the National Front. And this is a play that’s not dissimilar to David Cameron’s woeful gamble on the the EU Brexit referendum to break UKIP’s growing voter base. Then, in 1981, she passes the British Nationality Act, effectively creating “three tiers of British Citizenship, but only those born in Britain or the children and grandchildren of those born in Britain possess the right to enter Britain,” thus emphasizing the importance of historical bloodline as a definition of “Britishness.”

But, if we look a bit more recently, Theresa May created a “hostile environment” in 2012 as Home Secretary by stoking racial divisions with this “Right to Rent” policy that was ultimately deemed unlawful, as well as implementing deportation targets that lead directly to the Windrush scandal. In October 2013, May stated, “we will extend the number of non-suspensive appeals so that, where there is no risk of serious and irreversible harm, we can deport first and hear appeals later.” So literally, not even listening to or giving people the right to asylum before sending them back, sometimes to countries where their lives would be in danger. Then the “Right to Rent” policy had forced landlords to almost become immigration officers, because they had to check immigration status of people applying for apartments, which increased homelessness and racial discrimination and was ultimately deemed “unlawful because it caused landlords to discriminate against British citizens from minority ethnic backgrounds and against foreign nationals who have a legal right to rent.” So, especially when Windrush families were not issued with any paper documentation when they came over in the 1950s (because they were considered “British”) that was deemed eligible to prove this status, this impacted their ability to have places to rent, to be able to work because they all of a sudden became undocumented. Further in 2018, Amber Rudd in her Home Secretary capacity, resigned from her post due to misleading the Home Affairs Select Committee on deportation targets as part of the Windrush scandal.

But now, if we look at this current government under Boris Johnson, Priti Patel’s Home Secretary policies follow a similar “hostile environment” thread, so much so that under the current proposed laws, her own parents might not have been allowed to enter the country.

V: The irony.

T: Exactly. So, for example, the new proposed points-based immigration plan would close borders to non-skilled applicants and require a greater understanding of English before entering the country. It’s interesting, considering during this Covid-19 pandemic we have had and continue to have heavy reliance on people who would have been considered non-skilled applicants … In addition, despite warnings of heightened security increasing the risk of more unsafe refugee crossings across the English Channel and previous clamp downs being ineffective, she has doubled down on stepping up the plan to make those refugees faced with no other choice but to to cross the channel “unviable.” Now here’s the kicker, right … In direct conflict with these “closed border”/“unviable” crossing policies, is the announcement that up to three million British National Overseas passport holders in Hong Kong will be able to apply for a special visa leading to citizenship — but it appears that this announcement may amount to little more than lip service as the provisions attached make it unfeasible and also bring the risk of losing Chinese citizenship. So, this is just another example of the UK government being concerned with projecting the appearance of action while actually taking very little.

And then finally, with Brexit — I mean, there’s so much here … While the Windrush scandal still has not been dealt with and rectified properly, we’re seeing that the lessons learned are not being applied to established EU citizens in the UK. There’s this push to a digital-only system of providing identification, and it’s already proving a disadvantage to those who don’t have digital access in order to provide proof as well as those people who are required to obtain that proof not understanding or having access to the digital systems themselves. So, these are issues that lead to scandals like Windrush, and they’re inherent in the system itself. The policies are based on this notion of a “hostile environment,” which means that scandals like Windrush aren’t an aberration, but they’re just shining a light on what the system is actually doing.

V: Yeah, that’s an important point.

T: So, if we go back to the collection, there was a particular passage that makes a very poignant observation on migration which stood out for me, and even though it’s from the US version, I find it applicable to the UK. It is from “After Migration: The Once and Future Kings” by Walé Oyéjidé:

As the empire selectively swings its drawbridge open for some, others must climb in uninvited. Over barbed fences and across miles of sand. Over bureaucratic red tape and across seas of hypocrisy. As it always has been for people of our ilk, and as it will continue until we erect empires of our own, where we will no longer beg to be welcomed, where we will cordially build bigger palaces, and where we will silently wait when those who once excluded us come calling with empty palms.

But what I also find interesting in these conversations is the terminology that’s used, and how that impacts the impression and narrative around people who migrate. For example, what’s the difference between the “migrant” and the “expat” who stays? There is a semantic and class-based distinction between “migrant,” “immigrant,” and “expat,” with “migrant” (often conflated with refugee) and “immigrant” carrying negative connotations and indicating a perceived lower status, and then with the “expat” indicating a level of wealth and choice. But at the end of the day, they’re all immigrants, and yet the narrative around those experiences remain so starkly different. And I will add that being an expat of colour completely throws out that perceived level of wealth and choice, given people use stereotypes based on skin color to make judgements about others. So, I find it strange that it is difficult for some people and governments to agree that collectively the migrant experience has brought numerous benefits to their countries.

And I think it would be fitting for us to start digging into many of the themes explored in these essays by starting with a quote from the essay, “Wearing Where You Are At: Immigration and UK Fashion” by Sabrina Mahfouz. In this essay, Sabrina explores how immigration has influenced fashion, and I find it an apt example as to the richness that immigration can bring and add to a society. And in it, she writes:

Even in the most mundane high street stores you’ll see colors, fabrics, and styles that have been taken from every part of the globe. The ones that are popular here are often ones that originate from the very places that have a large diaspora in the UK … nothing can be called “British” without including the huge array of cultural influences that make Britain what it is, but sometimes that is not what it feels like … by not widely acknowledging the influence immigrant groups and individuals have had on UK fashion, we allow the story of colonial superiority in all realms to perpetuate …

And I think Sabrina has a point here. When we look at various fashion collections — I mean, for a start, just take a walk through Room 40 at the Victoria and Albert Museum here in London — you can see the various global influences on style, color, fabric, notions of sustainability … And what I like in this essay is that Sabrina doesn’t shy away from calling out that by not acknowledging these influences, you perpetuate the erasure of the richness of immigrant influences and how they have become part of the culture, thus showing it can have a defined place within this space …

V: That’s a great point. And I’m glad we’re starting here with contributions, because food is also another way — perhaps even the first way — that people learn about immigrant cultures. I was surprised going into pubs in the UK and in Ireland and finding curry as a staple on their menus. Tejal Rao, who’s a restaurant critic and food writer for the New York Times Magazine, wrote an essay in the US version called, “Chooey-Booey and Brown.” That title comes from the way that E.M. Forster, the writer, described a sauce in a dish he’d eaten in India. I, too, am as shocked and disappointed as Rao to see a writer like Forster, who, as she points out, “is generally quite good at describing things — a professional! — reduced to his most childish and useless words.”

She goes on to explain that “curry” was a generic term that British colonists used for

… new, foreign, and hard-to-categorize foods they encountered in India … And eventually, curry really did become a dish, made for the British, in British India, by Indian cooks … A dish built to accommodate a misunderstanding, to oblige a collective and willful incomprehension of a vast, nuanced cuisine.

The other thought-provoking point Rao makes is about how obsessed Americans are with “authenticity,” but how they look “right past the expertise and experience of Indian cooks around them” and instead get their “recipes, and their ideas for how Indian food should be served and what it should taste like, through intermediaries.” So, as you know, this Indian restaurant that I used to order takeout from closed. I found myself looking up recipes for chana saag and tandoori chicken on the The New York Times “Cooking” app — which I’ve been using a lot during the pandemic to find new things to cook for dinner. And the only recipes I found were by Mark Bittman and Martha Rose Shulman. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that these recipes have been simplified for the home cook in a hurry, but they miss the layers of flavors that you’d find in traditional Indian recipes.

What excites me, though, are writers like Rao or the Pilipina food critic and writer Ligaya Mishan who give us community-based food stories in The New York Times that would be missed otherwise, like “A Day in the Life of a Food Vendor” or an interview with Pilipina chef, Angela Dimayuga, who gives her own take on essential Pilipino recipes. And what both these writers make visible are the people and cultures behind the food we unthinkingly consume or even re-appropriate in “fusion” or “ethnically-inspired” cuisines.

T: Right. You know, that explanation around “curry” I found incredibly enlightening! And I never knew or realized its origins.

V: Yeah, me neither!

T: And it’s interesting … Because in some ways, I think about Caribbean food, and I think about the way in which people describe their interaction with Caribbean food — which is either jerk or something that’s got mango or pineapple in it — when we have a very full, rich, and diverse catalogue of cuisines across the Caribbean and across the islands themselves. Even our version of “curry” is very different and probably taken from, or as a result, I should say, of colonialism within the Caribbean.

So, Vina, quite a few stories had touched on the theme concerning why people immigrate, and there were some powerful stories in both versions that touched on this point. So what were some of the points or linkages in these essays that stood out for you as to why people immigrate?

V: Yeah, well, reading both versions together just made me more aware of the linkages between colonialism and immigration. In his essay in the UK version, “Window of Opportunity,” actor Himesh Patel talks about his family who had moved from Kenya to the UK in the 1960s. He doesn’t mention it was around the time Kenya gained its independence from Britain and a time of uprisings against apartheid in South Africa. It was also a time of reckoning for Indians in Southeast Africa who benefitted from the caste system the British exported to those colonies — so for instance, Indians were the market-dominant minority in Kenya and Uganda. Some Indians sided with Africans and joined nationalist independence movements, but others wanted to protect their status as “Asians” in Africa, distinguishing themselves from the “non-white” natives. As Sarah Sahim points out in her UK essay “Perpetuating Casteism”:

There is a colonial ‘hangover’ of sorts and it isn’t just limited to the borders of India. It pervades other countries and the Indian diaspora … Even when the politics of respectability encourage variation in the way Indians of different castes or socio-economic status are treated in Britain, the end result is still racial discrimination.

A couple of the US-based writers also explore post-colonialism in response to (and I don’t know if you remember this) Trump’s question, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” The criminal justice advocate Jim St. Germain talks about how centuries of American and French policies contributed to the chronic poverty in Haiti, and then, how de facto segregation in schools and neighborhoods in the US deprived immigrants like him access to social capital and upward mobility here.

And, in her really provocative essay, “Return to Macondo,” journalist Susanne Ramírez de Arellano, addresses American colonialism and Trump directly. She says:

[Puerto Rico] sits stewing in a colonial limbo, hanging on a thread, eaten by men with money bags. But this is not the Puerto Rico you read about in the United States of America … We are, in the words of its fearless leader, a shithole nation.

We are billed as lazy, second-class citizens from an island in the middle of a huge ocean. [And referring to Trump’s visit after Hurricane Maria] Where you go in your imperial splendor … to throw bog rolls at people who have lost everything and where Wall Street is the United Fruit Company of its time.

She also gives context to why El Salvadorans (she covered the civil war there) have been seeking asylum in the US. More than 75,000 civilians died in this twelve-year civil war at the hands of a right-wing government — which was financed and armed by the US because of their fear of “a Communist contagion in the region.” She says:

Immigration is retribution; it’s payback for the killing fields of Washington. But the legacy of that little war is now small children held in cages in detention centers in Texas. The separation of families. As Trump moves to end immigration protection and build a wall to keep out what Uncle Sam wrought, 200,000 Salvadorans may be forced to leave the United States.

T: Yes, I found Return to Macondo a powerful and indicting essay on the impact of US policy on foreign nations, and how it has effectively created the need for people to seek asylum from their countries because of US interference. And you can see the similar impact here in the UK with former nations that were under the British Empire — like she mentions, the United Fruit Company of its time, I think about the East India Company — but you can also see it anywhere there were imperialistic, hegemonic policies across European nations.

In other essays I also noted some additional points on why people immigrate, for example in “Swimmer” by Nicole Dennis-Benn in the US version where she notes:

I had left home for more or less the same reasons he did — the ability to thrive, the desire for upward mobility — and though unlike him I didn’t have children to support, I knew deep down that I’d want them with a woman.

Which, if we go back to some of our earlier discussions on why families immigrate, upward mobility has a huge factor to play in the decision.

But additionally, I found the point made in Walé Oyéjidé’s essay, “After Migration: The Once and Future Kings,” very interesting, where he writes:

For me, the journey began as all great things do: with the naive and self-important notion that one individual’s actions can shift the course of an ocean. Or failing that, one’s efforts can help to stem the tide of negative perception washing over refugees before their feet even touch the first punishing waves along the Libyan coast.

And I found it interesting that sometimes, we have this view that if we’re a “good immigrant,” maybe we can be that one person that helps create a ripple in the ocean of hostility around immigration. And I think this is a good segway for us into the topic of what it actually means to be a “good immigrant” and the application of that label. So, to start, Vina, what are your thoughts around the narrative of the “good immigrant”?

V: So, this issue comes up a lot in my extended family and in the Pilipino community at large, especially when talking about undocumented immigrants or about Black Lives Matter. As in many colonized countries, Pilipinos have been indoctrinated in white supremacy — whether that’s having a standard of beauty that elevates lighter-skinned Pilipinos, or being dependent on and grateful for “white benevolence” or to our “white saviors.”

And I think this is amplified when immigrating to the US, where, being neither Black or white, we feel the need to align with one or the other — otherwise we’re invisible. The political scientist Claire Jean Kim explains that for many Asian immigrants, “White supremacy has pushed them down, and anti-Blackness has provided the floor beneath which they cannot fall.” I think about that a lot when some of my first- and 1.5-generation relatives who’ve never learned about African-American history — or, frankly, their own colonized history — don’t understand what systemic racism is and believe that everyone can succeed in America if they just spoke, or dressed, or behaved the right way; if they got a college degree; and worked hard. And it’s entirely your fault if you fail to achieve the American Dream.

I’ve written before in my blog hyffeinated about my frustration with family members who just can’t empathize with the plight of the Dreamers and undocumented immigrants. Instead they’re enraged because they planned, saved up for, and waited to immigrate to the US in the “right” or legal way, and so why can’t others do the same? They conveniently forget that we had at least one family member who was undocumented, whom everyone felt pity for. They were so convinced that if the government just gave him a chance to get his paperwork sorted out so he could get a job, then he wouldn’t have died young of alcoholism and depression. So, when I think about that story in my own family, what makes this relative of ours deserve special consideration from the government amongst other undocumented immigrants? I mean, is it because he didn’t fit media portrayals of “illegal immigrants” who live off welfare and commit crimes?

The thing is, who we let in or not into this country has always been arbitrary. And as you know, because I’ve shared this story before, my paternal grandfather was able to migrate to California in the 1920s because the Philippines was a US colony and he was considered a US national, whereas there were other Asians who were completely banned from immigrating here at that time. But — and this is kind of where I connect a little bit to Windrush and the Windrush scandals — there were many Pilipinos who became undocumented when, all of a sudden, they were reclassified as “aliens” in a span of a few years, in 1934, and couldn’t afford a ticket back to the Philippines. So, I really don’t understand what there is to gain by distinguishing yourself as a “good immigrant” compared to an “undesirable” one … especially in the eyes of this administration and other racists and xenophobes who don’t want any of us in this country.

And I thought that the writer and blogger Wei Ming Kam in her essay, “Beyond ‘Good Immigrants’” … She has this interview with Jiaqi Hou, who is the project manager of the British Chinese Project, and he reminds us that:

Labels can be easily removed. It’s not controlled by the minority community itself … labels just show how vulnerable the communities are, because today they can be a model minority, but tomorrow they might not be.

T: And how true is her assessment in this discussion around labels — how they are applied and how easily they can be removed, especially when you have no control over those labels. Within the arc of this theme I’m reminded of the essay “Sidra (in 12 Movements)” by Rahawa Haile, which features in the US version, and she notes:

Despite reading widely before his departure — yes, the Good African read widely; what did you expect? — he had never lived in the pure vulnerability of his skin, a thing until now either alive or dead, transmuted into a liminal namelessness against the blood-white canvas of the United States. The Good Immigrant spends days staring at himself in the mirror. At the swiftness with which a person can become less than without changing a thing at all.

And then later, she notes: “The Good Immigrant chafes at a theft of dignity for which no quantity of books could have prepared him.”

V: It’s just so devastating — that essay …

T: Exactly, and it made me think of how this notion of a “good immigrant” is difficult to capture because no matter what you do, no matter how much you educate yourself, no matter how much you try to prepare, you’re still subject to someone else’s perception of you before they even get to know who you are or what you know. You try to play be these “rules” that you describe your family had mentioned they ascribe to — and a lot of people’s families when they come over to the US or the UK — and your parents try to prepare you the best they know how by ascribing to these “rules” that you think, yea, if I follow them, then I can show that we’re all the same and use my status to help lift others … I mean, Nicole Dennis-Benn notes this in “Swimmer” when she writes:

It did not take me long to discover that we were all absolutely and mercilessly united by our ambitions to stay afloat on our parent’s dreams — the American Dream. We were, after all, the good immigrants.

But we’re seeing it doesn’t work out this way. And I think Musa Okwonga’s essay, “The Ungrateful Country” also adeptly illuminates this point through his experiences in the UK.

As an aside, I’m quite interested in reading Rahawa’s book that’s coming out in 2021 titled, In Open Country: A Memoir, where she details her experience hiking the Appalachian trail as a black woman. As a fellow hiker, I noted in a panel I participated in the difficulty I had going out on trails on my own to prepare for Kilimanjaro, because even when I went with friends in the past, I still had to be aware of my safety moving in spaces where people were wary of my presence, and some quite openly. So it would be very interesting to get her views on that.

V: Yeah, definitely.

T: So just moving forward on this theme arc, I think about the various ways in which 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation immigrants are affected by the experiences of those who come before them, which quite a few contributors have shared their views and experiences in both collections. And I’m reminded of a quote from “How Not to Be” by Priya Minhas in the US version in which she writes:

How Not to Be meant growing up with the promise of a life better than my parents had known. A life in which I would quietly, and often unknowingly, cash in on the privileges paid for by the ones who came before me. My sisters and I were supposed to be the 2.0, the reason it was all worth it.

So, I’ve got quite a few thoughts about this arc, but I wanted to start with your thoughts on what essays resonated with you on this …

V: Yeah, so there were quite a few of them … I’m a 1.5-generation immigrant, so someone who arrived in the US as a child or adolescent and whose identity is split — mostly American, but not quite entirely. In the essay “On Going Home” by the music and political writer Kieran Yates (who’s a 2nd-generation Punjabi Indian), she talks, on the one hand, about the pain inflicted by, and you had mentioned, some of these political policies and aggressive social pressures in the UK for immigrants to assimilate — so, for example, being targeted when you speak your own language in public spaces or if you don’t speak English well, or when you try to keep up your cultural practices, which are seen as a rejection of British values.

But, for as much as she participates in and proudly asserts her Indian identity in the UK, for her, going back to Punjab

… flags up all the things I can’t do properly — my rotis aren’t round enough, my hands aren’t steady enough to apply mendhi, my teeth are too weak to pull sugar cane … here I am a fraud … too modern to gain favour with the simple tasks, and too strange to be adored by my masis. Despite this, I love every minute of my inadequacy, and it’s the intimacy of the unsaid — that they describe me as beautiful when I’m not there, that they worry when I’m out of sight — that allows me to grow roots.

And, you know, I understand how she feels as someone who, depending on who I’m around in a given moment, is not American enough or too American, too Pilipino or not Pilipino enough … especially when it comes to speaking Ilokano or Tagalog. For many complicated reasons, I know my colonizers’ languages, Spanish and English, better than my own.

Another essay I related to was Fatimah Asghar’s “On Loneliness.” She talks about how the question “Where are you from?” (which I get a lot), can mean different things depending on who’s asking the question. Most of the time, what they’re really saying is “‘How did you get here?’ or the clearer: ‘You don’t belong here.’” But, she tells this story of being asked the question by a cab driver:

I note his brown skin, and I know it’s not the same thing as a white American asking me the same question. I note his Muslim name. His question is not an attack but an invitation, a cup of tea, from someone who also feels lonely in this country and is looking for a bit of home … He’s from Lahore, but actually from there, as in was born and raised there, whereas Lahore is just in my blood, the clearest origin point of my lineage … But here we are, in an Uber in Los Angeles, linked by a different city halfway around the world, both real and imagined.

I was just at a rally where someone I met for the first time asked me if I was a fellow Pilipino and if I spoke Tagalog or another Pilipino language, and even those kinds of brief encounters leave me with a sense of belonging, of community. It’s like Asghar says:

We’re strangers … and yet there are layers of shared understanding between us. Even in our moments of silence I feel sadness tinged with history and diaspora. A desire to connect, to bridge the distance of land, sea, and childhood in order to find a mirror we can recognize ourselves in.

I’m lucky to have grown up in New York, to have family and friends who share my Pilipino heritage. But, like Asghar, there are moments when I’m conscious of being in spaces where there aren’t people who look like me — when I worked as a fundraiser or took writing workshops, for example … And it feels lonely. Asghar shares a story about how upset a friend of hers got because she never told him she was an orphan, and it reminded me of how some friends and even extended family members didn’t realize that I was an immigrant. It just never came up in conversation, or if it did, no one expressed interest in learning more about that part of myself, so I held it back from most people. Asghar adds that, in addition to feeling isolated because we’re not represented in the culture, we also are erased when the culture assumes sameness in everyone’s lived experiences.

I had heard this interview recently on NPR’s Code Switch podcast with David Eng, literature and Asian American studies professor at UPenn who co-wrote the book Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. He explained that:

Processes like immigration and assimilation, which are never complete … put immigrants and Asian Americans along a continuum where they can never quite mourn or get over the losses of homeland, of language, of culture.

And, as we’ve talked about before on this podcast, many immigrant parents focus their children on assimilating, so they choose not to teach their children their language or history. So, you grow up feeling like you’re missing half of yourself, that you don’t quite belong anywhere. And when you can’t really identify that thing that you’re missing or what you’ve lost, you fall into a state of permanent mourning, so this “racial melancholia.”

T: I agree, and I think going back to How Not to Be by Priya Minhas, I felt her essay captures the essence of having to, as she notes (and I paraphrase here):

Constantly negotiating your differences as a person of color means you are always explaining and excusing the plurality that holds you together, as much as it threatens to split you apart …

And, it reminds me of a conversation I had here in the UK with a colleague who was trying to deny my Jamaican heritage because I was born in America, as if it didn’t matter that my parents are from Jamaica, even if they have long been US citizens, or that this heritage can be passed down and celebrated in duality with being American. And furthermore, that there’s this shared relationship and culture in some instances with England because of the Commonwealth, where I can participate in all these various aspects, and it really angered me that someone wanted to try and dictate to me who I am when they barely knew me or my life, based off of their own impressions. And I really get tired of having to explain and negotiate that with “well meaning” ignorant people …

V: Yeah, I’m so sorry …

T: No, I think it happens to a lot of people quite often, which is the unfortunate part. And this pulls me towards a quote from another essay, “Death is a Many Headed Monster” by Vinay Patel in the UK version where he writes:

Every continent we’ve been through has left a mark on us. I’m half-amused, half-annoyed that the little Gujarati I speak is infused with Swahili words and dialect, a coded language fully available only to those who have made that particular journey. Broadly useless to me, but in itself a wonderful reminder of how far they’ve come in every sense. We are happy to change and adapt even something so fundamentally important to us as language in order to start sinking into our new homes.

And that’s what I like about this, is that it recognizes the impact immigration has on us as people who immigrate. For example, I’m not Japanese, but I still use Japanese even though I left ten years go, and I have assimilated quite a bit to being in the UK, naturally, as one would do when you live somewhere for a long time. And all that becomes a part of you, but as we noted in our last podcast episode, it doesn’t change you, per se. It becomes another piece of you to celebrate and, in turn, helps you as Vinay says, “sink(ing) into your new home.”

Lastly, I thought many of the essays covered the impacts on the depiction of people of color via media, for example, “Kendo Nagasaki and Me” by Daniel York Loh, “Forming Blackness Through A Screen” by Reni Eddo Lodge, and “You Can’t Say That! Stories Have to Be About White People” by Darren Chetty, amongst others … where they pointed out that even now, after people have immigrated, assimilated, and shared their culture, stereotypes pervade in such a way that they perpetuate these depictions of people and make it difficult to change the negative rhetoric around immigration but also around people of color. And I think for me, the quote that, sums up the impacts explored in the above essays is in Bim Adewunmi’s essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About Tokenism,” where she writes:

If you cannot bring yourself to imagine us as real, rounded individuals with feelings equal to your own on screen, how does that affect your ability to do so when you encounter us on the street, at your workplace, in your bed, in your life?

V: Absolutely. Really, ultimately, all these essays are about asserting the writers’ humanity, which unfortunately, society forgets or even refuses to see. And there are just so many stories and ideas in these two books, which I wish we had all the time in the world to discuss — but listeners, you can read them yourselves! (Go buy them!) So, Tamara, just to close out, did you want to share some final thoughts about what we can learn from these essays, these very personal stories?

T: Sure, and I apologize because my final thoughts are going to be long … I think these personal stories, at least for me, have put onto the page things I have felt, experienced, and have been thinking about in a much more passionate and eloquent way than I could have done. I think these collections written in 2016 and 2018 are just as much required reading in 2020, given the global discourse on immigration and race. And I hope that people are reading them and trying to put themselves in another person’s shoes. As I reflect on final thoughts, there are three particular essays that come to my mind.

The first is “Luck of the Irish” by Maeve Higgins, which we discussed earlier, and she ends with this particular quote:

I’m not extraordinary at all. It’s dumb luck that I was born white and Irish. And that luck, combined with a history of radicalized immigration policies meant that I was allowed to move here, to a country whose leaders look at me and see themselves, and welcome me with open arms as they push others away.

And I appreciate how she acknowledges firsthand how the system is designed to favor people based on race rather than on a particular merit.

Second, I reflect on this one line from “Flags” by Coco Khan, where she notes in this guy’s response to the weight she feels in having to try and suss out people’s true sentiments towards her based on her race in that, “It’s not your job to try and correct everything,” which is true! It’s not our job, because it’s not an issue we made or a problem we can solve on our own, as we have seen through our discussions on these essays, as well as what’s going on in the world … Nor is it good for one’s mental health to think that they are the one key to solving these problems.

And lastly, but perhaps a bit more deeply for me, I reflect on “The Ungrateful Country” by Musa Okwonga, as there were quite few passages for me that I think we can take away as we bring ourselves towards the close of this conversation. Musa writes it best, so I’m just going to note directly the passages that he has written that stood out for me:

And the first one is in relation to Stephen Lawrence’s murder by white racists in 1993 here in the UK, where he notes:

Lawrence’s death annihilated the lies we told ourselves — that if we were just good little black boys and girls, that if we stayed away from the bad crowds, no harm would come to us.

And further on, he notes (as I piece a few of his points together):

There’s only so much you can do to convince your fellow citizens that a multiracial society is A Good Thing, especially when they perceive that it’s hitting them too hard in their pockets …

And this, I think, is what I hoped to see the media coverage of the immigration discourse — a recognition of what people like my parents brought to the country, both economically and culturally. But that nuance was often absent, and took a Daily Mail-esque tone.

And then lastly — I really sat with this particular passage, because it’s so true — he describes how tiring this all gets, to a point where one can feel a degree of hopelessness. And he says:

Here’s the truth of the matter. I find racism boring — really dull. I wish it didn’t exist, and have spent most of my life trying to help to counteract many of its worst effects in society. Contrary to the belief of some of the digital pitchforkers who jab away at the bottom of each of my blogs, I genuinely wish that I never had to write about it again. Unfortunately however, that is a luxury that I do not have. Because even though we’re well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, young black people are still being shot on sight in the USA because they are regarded as inherently criminal due to their skin colour; black people are having disproportionate trouble renting apartments in the world’s most cosmopolitan cities or even getting job interviews because of the foreign-looking names on their CVs … I had thought that there would be a greater level of awareness about the British Empire and its historical role in shaping the world as we see it today. But I was wrong, and to that extent I had to admit some form of defeat.

V: I mean, I totally get that about how tiring it is to be educating people. But sometimes, it really isn’t about that. And what I appreciate the most about these essay collections is how they’ve empowered marginalized writers to tell stories that resonate with and have meaning for underrepresented readers.

You mentioned one of the essays in the UK edition by a primary school educator, Darren Chetty, and its title, “‘You Can’t Say That! Stories Have to Be About White People.’” So, this refers to how one of his British students reacted to a Nigerian immigrant boy naming his main character in his story assignment after his uncle. The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche had a similar experience, thinking that books had to have foreign characters and had to be about experiences she didn’t personally identify with because that’s what she read growing up in Nigeria.

Chetty cites research that shows that children from the dominant culture often are able to see themselves and their lived experiences mirrored in the books they read, while children from marginalized groups rarely do, and that tells them something about how they’re valued in society. He quotes the Black children’s author and former UK children’s laureate Malorie Blackman who says “I think there is a very significant message that goes out when you cannot see yourself at all in the books you are reading. I think it is saying, “well, you may be here, but do you really belong?”

And the importance of representation in the stories that we tell extends to film as well. And I think we are seeing that in the way the public is mourning for the late Chadwick Boseman …

T: Rest in power.

V: Rest in power. And he taught us not only about real-life heroes like Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, and James Brown, but through the Black Panther, he also taught us about the importance of being able to imagine an alternative present where Black lives do matter and where they can live with dignity.

And as a writer, I think discovering our stories — so, the ones that only we can tell — is so powerful as well. In his essay, “The Long Answer,” filmmaker Yann Mounir Demange, who struggles with his postcolonial British and French Algerian identity, talks about visiting Algeria for the first time:

How strange to think I had “history,” that I had a tribe I had been estranged from, that I was part of a larger narrative I wasn’t aware of …

Throughout all this, knowing my aunt had been in The Battle of Algiers strengthened my love for film. As absurd as it sounds, on some level I think I felt like I had discovered an inheritance to some sort of personal lineage in movies. It gave me a kind of connection and claim to film. I may just be projecting this onto it now, of course, the human need to try to make sense of, and find meaning in, narratives being so strong.

… But it’s also clear that the problem of identity and tribelessness is why, and how, I got into making films. It’s all linked to the question of “What stories am I going to tell?” with the opportunities that have now opened up … “Whose stories do I want to focus on?”

And, I think that’s what’s really most inspiring about all of these writers. Despite the struggles of immigration and juggling multiple identities, they’re able to recognize the privilege of being able to claim all of those experiences and identities, for as fraught as they may be.

In his essay, “Your Father’s Country,” Korean American writer Alexander Chee gets at this beautiful but complex truth in a poignant way. He talks about how he went to see a fortune-teller in Seoul, who finished the session by saying that:

“[Korea] is your father’s country, and so it is your country too.”

… His suddenly still hands underscored for me the shock of his words — that this was my country also — and I felt how much I had wanted someone to tell me this.

Would I die here? … That day it meant dying apart from my husband, my family and friends back in America. But I knew I would die here if I had to, and it would be a happy death, because it was born from that same shock of belonging, some deepening of the earlier one. As the plane returned me to America, I knew I would die here because I wanted to live here. That these were the same feeling.

T: I know, it’s interesting when you live in different countries and have an affinity to those countries, you ask yourself sometimes the same question about your future. Yea, I definitely understand that sentiment in “Your Father’s Country.”

So, Vina, once again, great chat about the US and UK version of The Good Immigrant both edited by Nikesh Shukla. If you have any other thoughts on The Good Immigrant or collections that you want to share with us, our dear listeners, please interact with us through our Instagram page @theliftuppod.

V: Yes! And to close out, we do want to give you a heads up on what we’re reading. So for sci-fi month in October, we’ll be reading N.K. Jemisen’s The City We Became, along with selected short stories from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut short story collection Friday Black (I think that’s our first short story collection). So, October is also Filipino American History Month, so do keep an eye out — we’ll be posting our reading recommendations on that topic on our blog, medium.com/the-lift-up-podcast. And we are so excited to be switching gears here in terms of stories we will showcase. So, please feel free to send us questions or suggestions through our Instagram page, again @theliftuppod, and thanks again for listening to us here at The Lift Up Podcast.

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