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S. Zainab would like to think she bleeds ink but the very idea makes her feel faint. She writes fantasy and horror, and is currently clutching a manuscript while groping in the dark. Find her on Twitter: @szainabwilliams.
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My mom immigrated from Singapore to the U.S. after she married my dad. I remember the word “alien” being thrown around, growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, which, even for the child of an immigrant, made the idea of immigration feel distant and unreachable to my understanding. My mom’s immigration story was told through a romantic lens—a whirlwind romance blown in with the ship my dad worked on that carried her to a different country where she worked her way up to a high-paying career, stomping the corporate runway in a power suit. Later in life as my mom opened up about the harder parts of her experience—being on her own in a foreign country without her big family, being a first-time mom in her early 20s in this strange land while my dad spent long stints at sea, the fears, the sadness, the rage—I became more curious about what it means to be an immigrant. By that time, I was also paying more attention to the news and was increasingly aware of how immigrants were discussed, the language used around and about them. I innately knew but began to work harder to understand how America treated different types of immigrants differently, and refugees even more so.
My mom isn’t light-skinned; she’s as brown as her African American and Southeast Asian daughters, so she didn’t fit the dominating depiction of the mythological model minority, but I have distinct childhood memories of white Americans exoticizing her once they learned where she was from. When I was little, I thought this kept her safe from being treated like a burden to society or questions about her right to be in this country. As an adult, I know that exoticization is just another flavor of danger.
Now that I have deeper knowledge of what it means to be an immigrant, it’s the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants with equal opportunity to claim a slice of the American dream that feels unreachable to my understanding. As I write this, birthright citizenship is being challenged, schools and religious institutions are trying to keep ICE from raiding their classrooms and congregations, and the Trump administration is sending Venezuelan migrants to Guantánamo. Now is as good a time as any to connect and reconnect with stories by immigrants and refugees about immigrants and refugees, and so I recommend these eight excellent books for Read Harder Task #5: Read a book about immigration or refugees.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
This short speculative read won all the awards when it published, and its success was well-earned. The story follows Saeed and Nadia, a couple fleeing civil war. While their city is unnamed and it’s through magical portals that they migrate to various countries, Hamid manages to make their story more familiar than unbelievable. There can be a tendency, if one only encounters refugees through headlines and political propaganda, to see this community as a problem rather than as individuals with multifaceted lives. When Exit West was published in 2017, the “refugee crisis” was an inescapable topic and the world seemed keen to dig in that pen tip and deepen the lines around countries as a not-so-subtle KEEP OUT sign. Through personal moments between Saeed and Nadia, Exit West serves as a reminder that when we’re talking about refugees, we’re talking about people—people with relationships and shifting identities and desires—not monoliths, stereotypes, or resource sinks, and that boundaries are constructs.
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Villavicencio wrote this nonfiction National Book Award finalist when she was on DACA. Writing a book about being undocumented under your own name takes deep, deep courage—Villavicencio did that to take us with her on a journey to learn the stories of other undocumented folks trying to find their place in this country. This is a memoir and essay collection that, like Exit West, shares intimate stories that expose what the headlines and politicization of entire communities miss. Villavicencio doesn’t report on the lives of the people she meets from a distance—she goes all in to get to know them and walk in their shoes, if just for a moment, and does not hold back in sharing her own story.
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S. Zainab Williams
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