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.

“You never truly left home. Home is here with you in your memories, which, like the imagination, only belongs to you.”

My writer friends, speaking in low tones by candlelight over wine, began to discuss the possibility of moving to another country. “Black Americans have always struggled here and we stayed,” my wife countered. It was as though they were all speaking a different language as Americans. I began to painfully discern that their America was different from the America I looked to for my freedom. I had never been a part of the history they were individually reacting to. And though they all came from different backgrounds as Americans, they were responding to the potential loss of an empire—their empire. I felt like that newly arrived seventeen-year-old foreigner again. It was strange to find myself in this country of my sojourn, listening to the natives—white Americans—speak of leaving in the same way working-class Jamaicans felt the need to leave the island.

Yes, I had struggled in America, but I had also learned the most valuable lessons about myself, and I had fallen in love. 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.

Those who have to learn black also expand what black can be. My pain is black pain, my joy is black joy, my individuality is black; I arc blackly in the rainbow with all the rest of those pitch-black cats. Next person comes along to learn black will have to learn me too.

The retelling of these stories was an act of prayer, not meant to shame but to instill a fear that would protect me and prevent me from ever becoming one of them. This is how I was raised—how not to be. How Not to Be meant growing up with the promise of a life better than my parents had known. A life in which I would quietly, and often unknowingly, cash in on privileges paid for by the ones who came before me. My sisters and I were supposed to be the 2.0, the reason it was all worth it. Every school photo and each certificate placed on the mantelpiece was a step toward fulfilling this promise, each one an offering, a single penny placed at the altar to repay their sacrifice.

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.

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. Still, if it isn’t enough to deal with the chauvinistic moaning of elders turning in graves that have been emptied by colonizers seeking cheap resources, there will always be your mumsy to contend with.

To my shamed surprise, I find them to be more eloquent and informed than the televised pundits paid to stir up fear while railing against open immigration policies. And why wouldn’t they be? 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.

Fatherhood struck me as it does most men: with the ego-shattering affirmation that from that moment forth, there would always be something greater, more beautiful, and more worthy of the lord’s grace than I would ever be. Many fathers refer to that moment as “humbling.” But what most of us mean is we are terrified at being confronted by the physical embodiment of our unpreparedness, our mortality, and a new obligation to make the world a better place for our children to live in.

Through desert sands, we have migrated. Through neck-high waters, we have migrated. Through invasive customs searches, and through pinhole eyelets of legalese that ensnared the millions of cousins we left behind, we have migrated. For what we have given, for what we have built, and for all we have yet to accomplish, there is no nonindigenous man alive who dares tell us we do not belong. 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.

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.

Trump has played on the fear of foreigners from the time he began his election campaign, when he claimed Mexico was sending rapists into the US, right through to his first speech to Congress, in which he blamed immigrants for everything wrong under the sun, announcing a list, to be published weekly, of crimes committed by immigrants. His administration is desperate to equate immigrants with crime. All this, despite decades of irrefutable evidence that immigrants, with or without papers, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

Vice President Mike Pence, who once tried to ban Syrian refugees from Indiana, often lauds his Irish grandfather’s immigrant story. The grandfather, Richard Cawley, left Ireland in 1923, escaping a vicious civil war. Yet under rules in place at the time, Cawley would not have been allowed into the country had he been Chinese and likely would not have been able to get the job he did, as a streetcar driver, had he been black. And yet the New York Times quotes Pence addressing a group of Latino business leaders in March 2017, saying, “If you work hard, play by the rules, anybody can be anybody in America.” That isn’t true.

“Why am I seeing a post on Facebook for a…queer event…that you’re tagged in?” The word “queer” sounded especially so coming from my mother’s mouth. It made me sick to hear it in the shaky tone I knew meant she was close to tears. First and foremost, I was furious that a woman I still consider the kindest person I know could show so much ignorance and fear about a group of people who had never done anything to wrong her.

The animalistic behavior of police officers who produce black blood as red as the light on their patrol cars is as American as it gets.

But as long as people like Trump and their followers dismiss whole countries and populations as shithole nations and shithole people, we will stay trapped in our neighborhoods, police targets without opportunity.

There is this notion that we, as black and brown people, take great pleasure in talking about racism and oppression. One thing I am certain of is this: no oppressed person finds joy in addressing the very thing that stymied his or her fullest potential. I wish that, like my white friends, I didn’t have to be held accountable for every mistake made by another brown individual. And that, like them, I was assumed “innocent until proven guilty.” 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.

There’s this kind of irresolvable trap that occurs when you’re too young to have any power but old enough to know that you want some. It’s the trap of being too inarticulate to have the clarity people expect when you speak of the depressing black hole of systematic racism. What I wanted to say was how it felt to grow up in a country where the consensus seemed to be that Chinese culture looked best as an accessory on a white person. This trap made me think the classmate in the hallway making fun of my Chinese last name while sporting a Chinese character tattoo above her ass was the person I had to defeat, when, in reality, we belonged to the same world—a world where a qipao on me was a garish costume, but a polyester cheongsam mini-dress on a white girl was adorable.

It occurred to me, then, that America was not the man in shiny garments as I had often believed it was. It must have been this realization that had moved my friend so forcefully, and driven him out of the country. Perhaps he’d come to see that America was a naked man who hid himself behind the cloak he holds up for others to take. And I, like many others, have now started to see his nakedness, exposed in the bright light of the living day.

In the last seconds before we took off, I was still in that Park film, but the story had shifted. The writer who believed he was going to die was going to survive. The film now possibly about a writer discovering that Korea is the free country with a democratically elected president, elected by a majority, and the United States is the one with the man elected undemocratically, and bent on ruling as a dictator.

The thing that was emotionally powerful for me was meeting my grandparents, aunts, and cousins. I’d never had grandparents before this. They took me in their arms and cried. No reservations or holding back. Just an outpouring of love. I was moved to tears. They were strangers to me, but I was not a stranger to them. I was family, and they made me feel it.

Maybe there’s a country in the world where you’re accepted, you belong, no matter where your life started. Maybe there isn’t.

I moved before Trump: when it still felt like America was a place that welcomed people, or at least had some intention of doing so. I moved just before the president emboldened the worst of Americans to be open in their hatred of immigrants. I moved just before this hatred began to be enshrined, more and more, into law.

Here is a man who may well subscribe to the temperament of reality TV, of candid straight talk and keeping it real, but the freedom to speak outrageously and with reckless abandon was all along the bedrock of white supremacy. With it, the confidence to act however they wish and still remain confident that the law makes an exception for them—the police officer who murders a black child, the civilian who marches armed and dressed as militia, or the president who grabs a pussy, then tears up the constitutional protection of religious freedom.

When bigotry arrives camouflaged as fear, the outcome may see whole nations and their religions blanketed with the burden of extremist terrorism. Likewise, dogmatism disguised as danger will have Antwon Rose Jr. shot in the back at seventeen. When fanatic bias goes undercover as trepidation, fear becomes its own currency. Synthetic terror rattles in the veins of those who use the law as their own grievance counselor—the shortsighted intolerance of a Starbucks employee who calls the cops on black customers waiting for a friend before buying coffee, the fragility of a woman witnessing a black barbecue who calls the cops, asserting they have no right to be there. America, it seems, has been victim to, and terrorized by, its own ignorance.

As I write this, thousands of kids are being ripped away from their parents in the hypermilitarized US-Mexico borderlands. Hate crimes surge as America’s long-running white supremacist wet dream comes even more brutally to life each passing day. The institutional annihilation of voting rights, cultural studies, and any semblance of racial justice has become the norm once again. Deportation squads target innocent passersby for the simple act of speaking Spanish.

And what the epic myth of language tells me is that the United States has never been a monolingual country and it never will be. The ghosts of a thousand other languages haunt the houses of each word we speak. Forged in the fires of oppression and resistance, we are and always have been a nation of complex identities, slowly gathering clouds, epic poems, and power plays, and so the question of national identity isn’t up for debate. It was answered many, many years ago, and the answer continues to echo down, day after day, across the entire country. The echo will never stop ringing, not because of high fertility rates or illegal entries but because no Act of Congress, no state of heightened alert, no amount of border control or bigotry, will ever be able to stop our children from recognizing the faint traces of pure sadness that linger in our eyes when we try to describe the meaning of a word that has no translation.

Once, a casting director told me I wasn’t acting “Latina enough,” and I asked if he wanted me to do the lines in Spanish, and he said, “No, just act more Latina.” Which likely to him meant being loud and having an attitude and a quick temper. Which I certainly have, but not all Latinas have. Some are quiet and soft-spoken, and it doesn’t make them any less Latina. I know several of my African American friends have been told in auditions that they need to “black it up” or be “blacker,” as if this white casting director even knows what “being black” means.

In a study done by the dean of social sciences at UCLA that looked at 234 original series across 18 platforms (including digital) for the 2016–2017 television season, only 14 percent of writers were from a minority group.* I also know my Latinx friends would love it if casting directors stopped assuming all Latinx people are Mexican. We don’t all sound and look the same! We don’t all know each other either. We’re not all on some secret Hollywood Latinx group text message chain…that you know of.

And before you try to come at me with the “Well, Latinos are taking our acting jobs in Hollywood” argument, please know that we still make up only 5.8 percent of all speaking roles in television and film.

When Trump first proposed a Muslim ban, my grandmother lowered her voice and told me, “Keep your passport on you. They’ve made their intentions clear. We have to be ready to leave at any instant.”

After hearing the election results, I called my brothers and asked them to please not go out that night—a line I never thought I’d speak, having rolled my eyes for years when hearing it from my grandmother. “I can’t go to school tomorrow,” Mahdi told me. “I just can’t do it.” I told him I’d pretend to be Mumma and would call in sick for him, and he could go to the movies instead. We would not tell Mumma or Baba. Each of us was in shock. That night, the vertigo hit so strongly, it would be months before my mind settled to the shift, and I knew: what was possible or impossible to expect in one’s lifetime was so delicate, and so easily undone. Each time I closed my eyes, my mind crowded with headlines and chants from the campaign I had not even realized I’d absorbed. For years we had been told it was just one man, not tied to anything greater. Yet just one man takes a stage and addresses a nation, and the next day my brother is shoved in the hallway of his high school. And just one man tweets a photo likening refugees to a bowl of poisonous Skittles, and that very week Skittles are delivered to my mother.

I knew somewhere there was a catch, but it was hard to discern where among all the convoluted explanations and justifications. I carried a US passport, but I was called an immigrant. I couldn’t vote in their elections, so therefore I had no representation, yet we fought their wars. Who can forget Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman—“Ah, Puerto Ricans, they make the best infantry men.”

Recently, Hurricane Maria demonstrated what the US thinks of Puerto Rico. Around 3,000 people died as a result of this catastrophic event—an American tragedy, supposedly. As the late, great Anthony Bourdain wrote, “It has been six weeks since the hurricane, and 70 percent of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million American citizens are still without power. About 25 percent are without fresh drinking water—people are drinking from streams and other contaminated sources. They are burning their dead. This is, of course, unthinkable. And grotesque. It is also true.”

Colonialism has fucked us up. It feels like forced prostitution, a gulag of the soul. We’re left confused, like we landed in an alternate universe where we’re not us but what someone else determined we are.

Because when you are daily faced with reminders that there are people in public office who want to negate your existence, living unapologetically is an act of defiance. It’s not everything. It’s not a solution. But it’s a completely worthwhile act. And if living unapologetically is a rebellion, then joy itself is a rebellion.

A month after the election, I did an interview with a literary magazine. It was a written Q&A, and the last question was, in part, “Is America done with us?” The only response I could give: “How can America be done with us when we are America?”