10 International Reads to Celebrate National Immigrants Day
By Nanda Reddy
It’s often said that everyone, everywhere, is an immigrant because the world was populated and inhabited by migration, from prehistory to present-day. Yet, immigration remains a hot-button topic. Perhaps that’s why stories of people trading one land, language, and culture for another have everlasting appeal. To be an immigrant is to feel like an outsider, to question identity, and to endlessly redefine home, often in the face of marginalizing factors like class and race.
Immigrant stories provide unique armchair travel—transporting us into intimate spaces impossible to see on vacation, showcasing nuances of culture that transcend food and song, and reflecting humanity’s hopes and dreams through varied lenses. This group of memoirs, novels, and short stories will take you around the globe, but I hope you will also glimpse yourself within the pages.
What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad
A vivid, textured novel with a plot so compelling it kept me on the edge of my seat. Amir is the lone survivor of a capsized refugee boat somewhere in the Mediterranean, and Vanna is the local island girl who helps him escape the authorities. Through an interwoven backstory, we learn how young Amir, a war refugee, ends up on the boat, leaving behind his mother and infant brother. The real time narrative focuses on Amir’s cat-and-mouse game with the obsessed immigration officer closing in on him. With pitch-perfect sentences, the story examines difficult themes related to immigration with a thriller-like pace.
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
I grew up in the Cutler Ridge, Florida, area where many of these stories are set, and I lived through Hurricane Andrew like the Jamaican protagonist. I’m also Caribbean. But you don’t have to relate as closely as I did to these stories to love them. Often hilarious and always beautifully written, this collection is perfect for anyone who enjoys books about complicated identities and culture clash.
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades
This lyrical compilation of short vignettes uses the collective point of view to create one beautiful coming-of-age story of a group of multicultural girls in Queens, New York. The girls see themselves as the "dregs of Queens,” and their myriad experiences are portrayed around life’s rites of passage. The pieces capture the experience of being a young female immigrant, feeling conflicting pressures related to family, success, education, and assimilation, and never having a proper answer for "where are you from.” Like me, you might restart this quick read after you’ve finished.
Solito by Javier Zamora
I held my heart in my throat reading this harrowing tale of a sweet nine-year-old boy traveling alone ("solo, solito") from El Salvador through Mexico to the U.S. without documents. This honest, beautifully written memoir puts us in Javier’s shoes and gives faces to migrants and the migration process we often only see in news clips. Though trauma is a theme, this story is also a heart-warming one of found family on an unforgettable journey.
A Cup of Water Under My Bed by Daisy Hernandez
I discovered Daisy Hernandez through The Kissing Bug, a journalistic book that chronicles her aunt’s battle with Chagas. In this memoir, she focuses on her immigrant experience as a bisexual woman of Cuban and Colombian descent in New Jersey. Using poetic language, Daisy chronicles a life that straddles two worlds, her bilingual home and the American culture outside, worlds about which she has complicated feelings. This memoir gets its title from a ritual related to Santeria, Daisy’s family’s faith, portrayed with intriguing details.
Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang
Almost mirroring Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation, this story depicts a Chinese girl’s assimilation into America. But unlike Jean, Qian arrives without documentation when her family leaves behind a life of privilege to flee communism. America means “beautiful country” in Chinese, but instead of beauty, Qian discovers a prison of sweatshops and the constant fear of deportation. This story gives voice to thousands of invisible workers in America.
Honor by Thrity Umrigar
In this reverse immigration story, Smita, an Indian American journalist, is forced to return to India to cover a horrific Muslim hate/honor crime after her colleague gets ill. The work triggers Smita’s painful memories of her family’s persecution and escape decades earlier. As with all of Thrity Umrigar’s stories, this novel examines nuances of race, caste, and class with stark honesty, and though the crimes are difficult to stomach, they reflect reality. This story of an Americanized Indian woman reconciling with India’s entrenched race conflicts does not disappoint.
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
This story juxtaposes two sets of dreamers: an immigrant couple from Cameroon and the white married couple for whom they work. The Cameroonians, the Jongas, hope to make a stable middle class life for their family; the Edwardses dream of growing their wealth and maintaining their elite status. As their lives intertwine, their dreams falter and their families fracture. In the end, all must reckon with the fallacies of the American dream.
Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri
An Iranian American story told with an “Eastern” flair. Daniel, born Khosrou, imagines relaying this tale to his elementary school bullies as an eleven-year-old, and he embodies Scheherazade, the fictional narrator from Arabian Nights. Starting with his forbears and interweaving mythology, he tells of how his mother, a Christian, fled Iran with him and his sister to escape religious persecution. Daniel endures a long journey with stops in refugee camps across Europe before arriving in America, where the grass is not greener. In Oklahoma, he must face all he’s lost (his father, a life of privilege and delicious food, and an extended family) and learn to love his new home, a place that seems reluctant to love him back.
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas
Jose Vargas’s plight encapsulates so much about the “illegal immigrant” experience, most notably the perpetual feeling of transience. In his case, homelessness is almost literal, as he remains a well-known undocumented journalist (now in his forties), belonging neither to America or the Philippines and unsure of the future. He arrived in California at age twelve on a tourist visa to live with his grandparents, naturalized citizens, and he wasn’t aware of his tenuous status until he was sixteen. But he is no victim. With this brave memoir, he pushes back on the master narrative of illegal immigration.
Nanda Reddy is a Guyanese-American writer, former teacher, and part of an enormous extended family who mostly live in Florida. Her father is one of seventeen siblings; her mom is one of nine; she has over fifty first cousins. In her teaching days, she co-wrote 180 Days to Successful Writers, a day-to-day writing curriculum best suited for elementary classrooms. She loves visiting off-the-grid places (national parks!) with her husband and two teenage boys, and she sometimes messes around with watercolors to clear her mind. A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl is her debut novel.
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