The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

by Nikesh Shukla

Learn to live with hating yourself. Learn to live with hating Iranian-America. Imagine the hell of dying in America while your parents envision the beauty of dying in Iran, and you wonder if there was ever anything in between for you.

I think this essay was by far one of the most powerful--how to move away from your status as hyphenated-American when the (parts of the) country is so thirsty for your hot take?

I live in New York now, and the truth is that I enjoy the anonymity it allows me. Community brings safety, but it also brings “What will people say?” Sometimes it is a luxury that I’m now able to define myself outside my community.

I miss ittttt

We’re accustomed to queuing, we postcolonial blacks. Along with the resurrected Messiah and criminally hot tea that assaults the tongue with every serving, it’s one of the many social fictions Brits sold us to maintain order and placate our otherwise restless souls.

I give him the standard American bastard first-generation answer: “I don’t speak Urdu, but I understand it fluently.”

I can’t tell when my family is speaking English or Urdu; in my aunt’s mouth, her voice is just her voice.

This hit straight home

They used to close our bedroom doors. They used to worry about the Smell. The Smell, if we weren’t careful, could adhere to our sweaters, to our dresses, to my father’s woolen suit jackets. It could find its way into our hair and the skin of our fingertips and the sticky depths of our armpits, and we would carry it out into the world,

If the Smell was present in the homes of aunties and uncles, my parents would discuss it on the way home, and not entirely without judgment.

I don’t believe in characters that are “just like any other person, except that they happen to be Chinese!” White characters don’t “just happen” to be white. Their whiteness may be unexamined, but they are purposefully white. Each one comes from a specific place and has a specific family experience. We are born in specificity.

What I’d propose instead is two people of color with names actually talking to each other about race or culture in a way that is wholly for themselves, that does not contain an apology or an explanation for anyone else’s benefit. That’s what we want more of. That’s what will resonate. And, yeah, call it the Chang test.

Here’s the thing. I don’t feel like a grateful first-generation immigrant. I don’t feel like I owe my existence to any person or institution’s beneficence. I don’t feel conditional; I feel like a fact.