I believe there's so much to learn from fiction. Yes, it gives us a chance to escape, to immerse ourselves in a world or a life that is not our own, but it also can invite us to better understand hard topics. I may not have picked up a nonfiction book about Afghanistan for instance, but I gained a better understanding about some of the hopes, dreams, pain, and struggles of what it means to be an Afghan woman when I read Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. And to this day, I think of Miriam's fate often and hold her precious life and sacrifices in my heart.
Fiction can be a place to turn when we want to better understand immigration, not just as a political issue but as a human experience. It may not be a replacement for listening to real immigrant voices, but it can be valuable, especially when the daily news can be a difficult place to which to turn. When we read a novel centered on an immigrant character, we are invited to feel what it's like to experience the deepest kind of homesickness, along with frustration, misunderstanding, prejudice, and otherness. We can come face to face too with our own assumptions and conditioned biases, which challenge us to reconsider another's humanity. Through story, we can live someone else's journey, feel their fears, and celebrate their triumphs.
In the words of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake, books give you the opportunity "to travel without moving an inch.”
So, if history is just not your thing, and you're finding the headlines a bit overwhelming, these novels can shed light on what it means to be a first-generation citizen in America.
“If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.”
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“That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.”
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“People don’t want to open their eyes and see the Truth because the illusion suits them. As long as they’re fed whatever lies they want to hear they’re happy, because the Truth means nothing to them. Look at my parents—they’re struggling under the weight of so many pointless pressures, but if they could ever free themselves from this self-inflicted oppression they would find genuine happiness. Instead, they continue to go down a path of achievements and accomplishments and material success and shit that means nothing because that’s what America’s all about, and now they’re trapped. And they don’t get it!”
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“We're the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they've been told they're supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we're not that bad, maybe even that we're a lot like them. And who would they hate then?”
―
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
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“She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.”
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“And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds 'joy luck' is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.”
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“and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.”
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