The biggest thing I learned from this class is that immigration isn’t always what I used to always hear about. My mom came to the United States when she was two, but her parents immigrated to give my mom, aunts, and uncle a better life. That’s typically the motivation. It’s also the struggle I’ve heard about, ever since I was a kid. In third grade we took a field trip to Ellis Island, and I vividly remember skipping around happily to take photos with my disposable camera. They had minature models of the statue of liberty and the whole port immigrants went into. My smile faded when I saw the darker exhibits. Hellish instruments gleamed in the dim light, that met the diseased flesh of the sick who came in. Giant brown chests towered over me, belonging to large families who had to haul all they could stuff in there to the promised land. Everyone knows the American Dream isn’t always what it seems.
The pieces I read didn’t oversaturate America. At least the ones I focused on for my final project. Take Unterzakhn, where the opening scene involves a woman dropping dead on the crowded streets of New York City, bleeding out after her pregnancy. However, the true struggle of Unterzakhn is so much darker than that. The sisters have to handle the tough life they are given, each growing more and more resentful of each other as they get older in their opposing professions. By the end, readers learn that the life they had isn’t truly what they dreamed of as children, but it was what society manipulated them into. Fanya and Esther never had glamourous ideas of how they would live. All they wanted was to survive.
The dysfunction of family like this is a theme I also saw in Black-Eyed Women. The protagonist remains unnamed for the duration of the story. She doesn’t know herself, and her family barely knows her. This contributed to the themes of grief as her brother was brutally murdered on their journey to America. She not only contended with losing her brother, but losing herself. She finds meaning through writing other peoples’ tragedies as a ghostwriter, not processing her own. Many, many, people must have faced similar fates while trying to immigrate to America. It’s a very specific trauma, to not have your loved one in your new home. It must already feel awful leaving everything you know behind, and then leaving the one thing that’s the most important to you.
Fair and Lovely was very different in this way because the author is daughter to immigrant parents. While her story is less about immigration, she struggles with how she perceives herself in different places. In Canada, she is the minority. In India, she has privilege. She compares herself to her niece, who is mixed and white-passing, and comes to learn that there will always be people who live between the sometimes very harshly-defined boxes of racial identity. How race and racism are complex and aren’t always as obvious and understandable as we think.
I have never read immigration stories like these. I learned that struggles due to immigration aren’t often so different from those who haven’t experienced it. They overlap with other trauma like loss of a loved one, neglectful upbringings, and racism and colorism in society and in one’s own family. Immigration is a complex beast. It doesn’t just yield the hardships that come with learning to live in a new place. It can mean something different to every immigrant.
Another thing that surprised me is how many diverse ideas and projects these stories yielded. Liv’s piece, More Than This is something I was convinced had to be from a real book. It must have been a spin on something else. I looked up the title and no novels that came up matched the plot or characters Liv wrote about. Then I remembered that she had read One Piece. I scrolled down to the reflection, and that was the inspiration. I was shocked. Something so creative that felt like a published piece of fiction came from something so different.
Olivia’s surprised me too. I was so intrigued by the collage she made. It caught my attention right away. Grapes of Wrath is an old book, and yet the collage blended classic elements that felt like they belonged in that period with a modern spin. It felt raw with the torn-up landscape clippings, and new and fresh with the old quotes recreated with colorful letters. To me, it communicated that immigration stories can be timeless. This is why we still read them a hundred years later. We are still learning new things from these stories.
This all taught me that I still have a lot to learn. My ideas of immigration, even from within my own family, have been expanded by what I have read and what I have seen from my classmates. This class was humbling, but also made me proud of the work I produced. I feel rewarded for all that I have learned. With the publication of my posts, I hope to give readers something meaningful that will further contribute to the broad scope of immigration literature.
