The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

by Nikesh Shukla

I began to miss home, my family, my real friends. And though I was feeling this way, I could never tell anyone. For how could one be sad in America?

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.

It did not take me long to discover that we were all absolutely and mercilessly united by our ambitions to stay afloat on our parents’ dreams—the American Dream.

I had learned to accept the terror and the loneliness of surviving on my own in a new country, the dangerous depths stretching below me. And though I’m weary from all the proverbial strikes against me, 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. 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.

He comes to America for a life of ordinary disappointments. But not war, not famine.

Guilt Black, not Hate Black

The Good Immigrant is versed in many types of hunger. Could count more of them than he’d care to if pressed. He files tonight’s away where it belongs, not quite desperate—he’d passed the rice aisle earlier, after all—but somewhere between heartache and home. How do you feed a heart with $1.40? Trick question. You learn to feed something else.

This is how the Good Immigrant comes to give himself completely to the Immigrant’s Lament—an endless fight on two fronts: here and Home, where here is home now and Home is hope, until it consumes him. Until his heart and all its beating have nowhere left to yearn. Here, in this land, America, where his daughter might, could, and would someday, even if it kills him.

The Good Daughter tries not to dwell on what it all means. She thinks about her name, her grandmother’s gift. The Good Daughter used to say its proper pronunciation was reserved for family alone. A small thing that could be hers and her people’s. Yet the Good Daughter is beginning to realize how dangerous this can be, how easy it is to find herself disappearing in the absence of those tongues. How lonely, when surrounded by so many mouths intentionally misled.

I think often about the way I have recreated that feeling of safety. In the cities and towns I have lived in since, I place anchors by remembering which bartenders put the change directly in my hand rather than sliding it across the counter, finding an eyebrow lady who understands “Just a tidy,” and knowing which shortcuts to avoid at night. 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.

Other times I’m so homesick that I forget I’m living here by choice. For the women who ran away, and for those who were told to leave, I wonder how and where they created a home, and what happened when they didn’t have somewhere to return to.

For women like me, who are rarely considered beautiful or powerful, there is always a list. And as a young girl, I had enough conviction to write it all down, believing everything that separated me from acceptance could be condensed neatly into a page of bullet points.

Edging closer to whiteness was my own Sisyphean task, pushing myself further away from looking like the “others” only to be repeatedly reminded that I would always be “other.”

In America, I wore the shorts and the JanSport backpack and the American Eagle hoodie like the other kids. I went to homecoming dances and even had a white boy crush on me. But each day I spoke less and less, afraid that my accent would ruin the illusion and draw attention to the differences I had tried so hard to erase. Most days I didn’t speak at all.

Having grown up with the understanding that I was not allowed to date, doing so felt like something to be feared rather than celebrated. I feared the consequences of showing love, which also meant I feared allowing myself to be loved in return. Giving in to my emotions, as honest as they were, felt like betrayal. I had been defeated and became the girl living a second life. I was consumed with guilt, and as one lie shattered into ten and then twenty, I felt myself becoming closer and closer to the women I had grown up being warned about.

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?”

you will always remember that disappointing your ancestors is a worse fate than deportation or death.

It is often said that mothers from the Middle East lead the arms race in using guilt as a weapon.

The empire might well be enjoying its last desperate gasps, but until it collapses, each of us is going to take what we can from it. Thus, we stand patiently at its borders.

They send me messages to ask how my family is doing. Because they know what it means to miss someone who will love your disembodied voice on a dodgy connection, when she doesn’t have the luxury of loving the real thing.

Later, when I finally earn their trust, they tell me nothing of Lampedusa, the Libyan coast, or any of the places in between where men like them tread water for hours while watching women and children with the same dreams as theirs drown. They speak little of these terrible moments because they would rather tell me about the joys of home. The sounds that bounce off bustling street corners in Bissau. The curves of women dancing Azonto in Accra. The once-beautiful cityscape that used to be shown on postcards labeled “Love, from Aleppo.” They tell me that sometimes it is better to remember these places for the ways they once were, instead of remembering why men like them eventually had to leave.

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.

Whether they are refugees or learned professors acquainted with the masterworks of a thousand dead white men, they are rarely seen as regal.

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.

There aren’t a lot of directives offered to young men with daughters. And there are fewer still for those of us who must balance the fading history of a distant home with an encroaching Western culture. We are taught to show our sons how to ball their hands into fists. As if it is we, not an uncaring world, who should first introduce them to violence. But we are told little about how to raise assertive girls in a world men have shaped by silencing women. Our forefathers feared colonization, crosses, and Coca-Cola. But after immigration, we fathers fear raising children who will think it acceptable to slam doors or call us by our first names. 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.

I couldn’t focus on anything except kissing her, so what caught my attention next was not what she said but the demure and self-deprecating way she said it.

came from a place where a piece of bread was a luxury, but eating the free lunch now came with a social price, so I stayed hungry.

“Son, beware of the naked man who offers you clothes.”

In the Igbo culture, it is considered unethical to render a proverb and then interpret it. It is the sole responsibility of the hearer to investigate the intended meaning of the proverb.

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.

And yet I could never change the minds of the people who denied I was as qualified a Brit as they were. Nor the minds of the people who remarked on how I’d failed to lose my accent, as if losing an accent was a thing a person should do.

But there are still the Turks who do not want to be white. Perhaps if you have seen your neighbors killed by Western powers for praying in a mosque and not a church, playing doumbek and not percussion, shooting guns into the sky at village weddings and not Texas gun ranges (or schools), you may want to hold your identity more dearly, retain your Anatolian distinction, a memorial for the brothers and sisters who have had their traditions pried from their hands by US drones.

He did not want us to write about our identity at all. Not how it had shaped us or what it had taught us—perhaps hoping that if we did not admit to difficulty, it would not be difficult for us.

My father had consumed the stories of others and the flattening narrative framed by the media for so long that I sometimes wonder if, when he lowers his gaze as the border control officer turns aggressive, there is a part of my father that has believed what the world has said about him. That it was not made for him. That in choosing to move here, he reached for more than he was originally allotted, and though he has worked to form a beautiful life, though he has lived here longer than he has lived elsewhere, he is still borrowing his place, walking through the world the way a man who knows he is borrowing does: gently, as though what he has built can be taken away. But if he does not draw attention to his difficulties, if he ensures the survival of his children by teaching them to do the same, then he can get by, carry on, continue creating the life he has wanted for himself, for his children.

My brothers and I were born here because our father, at twenty-two, decided to follow a boyhood dream. I wonder if it is because we had no choice in moving here that it is easy for us to criticize. Perhaps for my parents it is far more frightening, when doing so would also be to question their own choices, and to admit to feeling unsafe or unwelcome would also be to wonder if they should have moved here at all.

Each question, each doubt, if followed, like pulling a thread that could unravel the foundation they built their lives upon.

storytelling is so basic to humans that we have to be able to tell a coherent story of our own lives in order to form a healthy sense of self. No one else can tell that story for us or to us.

joy scares people. It scares people because it’s rooted in desire. And desire is about knowing yourself.

Anger is not necessarily corrosive. Anger can be glorious, a purifying flame that burns away comfortable lies and acts as an engine of change. Anger is also a freeing of desire.

the nauseating balance between feeling desperately grateful to be allowed into the proverbial room and feeling resentful that his gratefulness is expected.

James Baldwin’s

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

There’s a form of currency from immigrants and people of color that publishers, producers, and audiences have long recognized: pain.