The Good Immigrant Quotes

“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?”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“Our identities as people of color should not be defined solely by our struggles. But, as we are perpetually made to feel like others in this country, that’s how we are taught to understand ourselves. There’s so much love in my race. I’ve been trying to think of my race as a site of joy. The feeling I get when I see a South Asian or Muslim person succeeding, like I’ve swallowed a handful of fireflies, lighting up my stomach. I glow into the night. When an older South Asian woman I’ve never met calls me bayti and she transforms into my auntie.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“Where are you from?” usually bothers me, but tonight I note his brown skin, and I know it’s not the same thing as a white American asking me the same question. I note his Muslim name. His question is not an attack but an invitation, a cup of tea, from someone who also feels lonely in this country and is looking for a bit of home.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“You must really like curry” is the kind of lazy, unimaginative racism I’d naively assumed people outgrew.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“Half the time I want every single one of you as my kin, and half the time I want nothing to do with you. Perhaps this is the source of my loneliness: belonging and not belonging, always, to you.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“I learned to be who I am by approximating who others are.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“The question “Where are you from?” has punctured most days of my life, and has been both innocuous and frightening. “Where are you from?” usually means “How did you get here?” or the clearer: “You don’t belong here.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“They act with an entitlement that I'm reminded I don't have, laying claim in a way that I cannot. It's a feeling of smallness that will not entertain the illusion, even briefly, that it could have been me, in a world that has repeatedly told me it cannot.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“But I retreated into my own head, my own glass, and my own worries”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“But my strained need to appease my colonized tongue keeps me stuck in this language. It’s the only language I know well, yet it still denies me my freedom.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“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.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“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.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“So my girlhood meant growing up twice. My first coming of age was learning the rules. The second was breaking them.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“The girls who, like me, had multiple versions of themselves would roll them back down and wipe off their faces before returning home. These were girls who dared not fly out of the school gates to flirt with boys but instead flirted with the idea of another life. Girls who knew to stretch the lie just far enough so that it didn’t split entirely into two lives and force them to choose one.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“The Good Daughter sits at her computer. “Some children are born to fathers,” she types. “Others, to mysteries.” She’d had the luck and occasional misfortune of encountering both in the same man, one who loved her fiercely when he wasn’t receding from view. The Good Daughter will spend the rest of her life believing in ghosts because she has met her father and knows he wasn’t entirely man, that a part of the Good Immigrant was always slipping away.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“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 cruelest thing a person can do is love you back.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“Remind yourself that when the performance is honest two things happen: the essay will feel like it’s killing you and the ending will not be what you thought it might be. Learn to respect more than resent those parallel planes of living and the rendering of living.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“Put Iranian-American refugee in your Twitter profile, the way all the other refugees are doing. Question if this is empowering. Imagine you’ve been throwing yourself off a cliff every time you’ve been writing, but it’s hard to know if you are killing yourself or trying to fly.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“It hadn’t meant anything to not be a white girl until I was surrounded by them.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

“One of the many online arguments I've had about the importance of language, how language can hurt, has been about tea. Chai tea means tea tea. The number of times you see this on a menu makes you wonder why people can't be bothered to do their research. Like naan bread too. Bread bread.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America