Hearing Mandarin, Speaking English
In middle school, “Yo Mama” jokes infuriated me. My mother was so Chinese she couldn’t eat a hamburger without pinching her nose. She was so Chinese she wore bamboo slippers.…
Posts by tag
immigrants
213 posts
The Light Men
We moved to Dallas from a small market town in the middle of England. We spent our first Christmas in America driving around our adopted Texan neighborhood, noses pressed against the car windows, looking at the miles of sparkling houses.
“Don’t Let Them Call You Anything Else”
Tasbeeh Herwees has a fantastic essay up at the Toast about her Libyan mother’s insistence that Americans use her given name rather than an anglicized nickname, confusing though they may…
“I Am an Alien”
Moving to the US as a person of color isn’t easy, even when you do everything completely above-board, come from a nation friendly with the US, and arrive with a…
Nuestra Señora de Las Nieves: Seeking a Saint in the Heart of a War Zone
I have so many questions for Cruz. Does she know the whole story about this painting? Did she attend catechism and Mass at Tía Zenaida’s house? Does she know why we took the painting from Las Nieves?
A Stabbing in Finsbury Park
What I’m interested in is: How do you write what you weren’t allowed to know about what you know? How do you write what nobody wants to know about what you know?
The Faces of Immigration 100 Years Ago
To celebrate the Senate’s approval of immigration-reform legislation, Buzzfeed has a collection of photos of immigrants who came through Ellis Island near the turn of the last century. From a…
The Other Side of Nowhere
Our better life started in a small cockroach-infested apartment on the side of a highway in San Antonio, Texas. My mother’s homesickness was unbearable, and we almost went back to Poland. What some may not understand is that this pursuit of a better life breaks you.
The Known World
Reviewing Sunset Park, I am behaving like a Paul Auster character, imagining a dialogue with a famous author, wondering about the ways fiction and reality overlap…”