The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

by Nikesh Shukla

I learned very early that to be an immigrant in this country meant I didn’t have the luxury of choosing what I wanted, only what was necessary.

I learned long ago, under the warmth of another sun, never to swim against a rip current, but to float, to conserve energy, to remain as calm as possible, drifting on the high seas of uncertainty.

I realized right then, sitting at the table, that the measure of my success is not the American Dream but my ability to swim out of the current, parallel to shore, and trust

that the waves would carry me. “Jus’ hol’ yuh breath an’ kick,” came an echo from far, far away.

The Good Daughter considers what

else her father has given his heart to and kept his heart from, the causes and regrets. How foolish he’d been to think either a choice.

The Good Daughter concludes you can’t build a life with what the heart alone wants. You have to pause, weigh options, stay open, close shut. There are times when the cr...

“Some children are born to fathers,” she types. “Others, to mysteries.”

I sometimes feel in my body a paradoxical loss: the loss of forgetting. I find myself longing for an earlier time when what I knew was contingent and always sheltered by what I didn’t know.

the world is made

of what we’re into and what we’re not into, and there’s consolation in knowing what’s yours.

At least once a day, I think: Another world is possible. There’s life yet in our dreams.

I want to be particular about being particular about what we are talking about when we talk about Africa.

Constantly negotiating your difference as a person of color means you are always explaining and excusing the plurality that holds you together, as much as it threatens to split you apart.

People of color learn early to take responsibility for creating their own spaces and their own safety, whether that means choosing a university in a “diverse” area or simply looking for another person of color in the room.

Fitting in, it turns out, is a very physical process. I have spent years in a battle with my body, trying to make it compliant to the needs of others. I have tried to shrink it as though that could shrink my difference. Am I more welcome if I take up less space? If I can perch on the end, squeeze into the middle, hover by the door or against the wall and disappear?

Sometimes I get a glimpse of who I could be if I stopped considering myself through the eyes of others. My potential spills out in front of me like a pint of milk that’s slipped from my hand—impossible to put back and for a second, as it pours uncontrollably, beautiful.

It’s easy to speak openly of the women we celebrate and model ourselves on becoming, yet perhaps it is the women we silently swear never to become that influence us the most.

My heart aches because these are the girls who have learned to accept being

loved only part-time, who must endure the pain of heartbreak by themselves, and then carry the shame alone too. The girls who can’t hear their parents say “You deserve better” instead of “What will people say?”

So my girlhood meant growing up twice. My first coming of age was learning the rules. The second was breaking them.

Patriarchy has a strange way of bowing under pressure when love and economic reality rear their natural-styled heads.

Throughout history, immigrants have made a pastime of developing a strong, if impotent, knowledge of the rules written to keep them caught within death’s jaws.

Many of us learn too late that the seeming fragility of our girls is the great strength that will save us from our own undoing.

There are no right ways to survive as an immigrant in America. But when viewed within the context of a historical struggle for acceptance and self-determination, our reasons for being become apparent. Every song stands as a monument to those whose feet danced to the rhythm of shackles that failed to keep them in place. Every recipe recalls the traditions that held families together, despite the jagged coastlines threatening to keep them apart. And when accompanied by reminders that our daughters are the most beautiful gifts this country has ever received, each of the kisses we place on their cheeks resound as loving acts of revolution.

I am like many. A father. An artist. And, like most immigrants, a teller of obvious truths that are obscured by the fear of otherness.

Race often feels like a planet I don’t understand, one whose rules I’m trying desperately to figure out. What makes us the same? What makes us different?

My people, my people. How I love you

on sight, how you make my heart beat a crowded symphony in my chest.

I both belong and don’t belong to America. When I’m in America, I’m constantly reminded that I’m not actually from here, that I can never have the same access as white Americans. But when I’m abroad, I feel the most American I’ve ever felt: hyperaware that my cultural reference points are American, that I can’t shake my American entitlement, that once I open my mouth and talk, I am perceived as an American.

What I wish for, more than anything, is the ability to stare into my son’s beautiful brown eyes and reassure him that, in his country, he will be judged by his hard work, grit, kindness, and commitment to what’s right. And he will be awarded access to all that his country has to offer. That’s every father’s dream, including, and especially, black fathers.

I know firsthand the importance of telling the stories of people who are underrepresented, particularly during a time when the discourse is becoming increasingly black and white. As the capacity for empathy toward people deemed “other” to one’s own tribe gets more diluted, there is a responsibility to tell stories that engage them, whatever their tribe.

Who are we to judge? People’s lives are complicated, after all. It’s by digging deep into that complexity that we find the universality in their experience. There’s no universality without specificity.

So it had happened this way: we were black or white, right or wrong, patriot or traitor. Life had become binary now, so you must pick one.

America, it seems, has been victim to, and terrorized by, its own ignorance.

America’s enthusiasm for intolerance, it seemed, was not centered in Trumpism; instead it was a template for a nation that had learned to divide and keep dividing until there was no group large enough left to fight.

Jorge Luis Borges said that language is an aesthetic medium, just like painting or writing, that each word is a poem. And since each word arrives with its bags packed full of several centuries of secrets and insinuations, we see that the poem is an epic one, the story of a journey.

Here and now are only temporary resting places in the life of any word, which will inevitably continue its path long after we’re dust, telling our stories alongside all the stories before ours. With each new meaning, each tiny tinkering and misplaced letter, another moment of humanity becomes etched into our daily lives.

The idea of centering your own story can seem nebulous. What is your story, anyway? My focus is always on the two poles of our selves, joy and anger. There are so many ways to figure out who you really are. One of the best is to be honest with yourself about what you really want. When you are, you will know and own your joy and your anger.

Here’s my calculus: the more secure someone is in their own personhood, the less likely they are to ask me to define mine. Identifying these insistent requests for explanations and refusing to engage with the ones that are more about the questioner’s need to preserve their own worldview is a big step toward centering your own story.

There’s a form of currency from immigrants and people of color that publishers, producers, and audiences have long recognized: pain. Whether it’s the larger pain of being a refugee or an enslaved person, or the smaller-scale pain of not fitting in, for a long time these were the only stories that got told. Or, rather, the only stories that got sold. Things are slowly changing. We’re creating new forms of currency in which our joy is as valuable as our suffering.

All I’m saying is this: Be the star of your own life.