7 Must-Read Books About Immigration and Refugees
My mom immigrated from Singapore to the U.S. after she married my dad. I remember the word “alien” being thrown around, growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, which, even for the child of an immigrant, made the idea of immigration feel distant and unreachable to my understanding. My mom’s immigration story was told through a romantic lens—a whirlwind romance blown in with the ship my dad worked on that carried her to a different country where she worked her way up to a high-paying career, stomping the corporate runway in a power suit. Later in life as my mom opened up about the harder parts of her experience—being on her own in a foreign country without her big family, being a first-time mom in her early 20s in this strange land while my dad spent long stints at sea, the fears, the sadness, the rage—I became more curious about what it means to be an immigrant. By that time, I was also paying more attention to the news and was increasingly aware of how immigrants were discussed, the language used around and about them. I innately knew but began to work harder to understand how America treated different types of immigrants differently, and refugees even more so.
My mom isn’t light-skinned; she’s as brown as her African American and Southeast Asian daughters, so she didn’t fit the dominating depiction of the mythological model minority, but I have distinct childhood memories of white Americans exoticizing her once they learned where she was from. When I was little, I thought this kept her safe from being treated like a burden to society or questions about her right to be in this country. As an adult, I know that exoticization is just another flavor of danger.
Now that I have deeper knowledge of what it means to be an immigrant, it’s the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants with equal opportunity to claim a slice of the American dream that feels unreachable to my understanding. As I write this, birthright citizenship is being challenged, schools and religious institutions are trying to keep ICE from raiding their classrooms and congregations, and the Trump administration is sending Venezuelan migrants to Guantánamo. Now is as good a time as any to connect and reconnect with stories by immigrants and refugees about immigrants and refugees, and so I recommend these eight excellent books for Read Harder Task #5: Read a book about immigration or refugees.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
This short speculative read won all the awards when it published, and its success was well-earned. The story follows Saeed and Nadia, a couple fleeing civil war. While their city is unnamed and it’s through magical portals that they migrate to various countries, Hamid manages to make their story more familiar than unbelievable. There can be a tendency, if one only encounters refugees through headlines and political propaganda, to see this community as a problem rather than as individuals with multifaceted lives. When Exit West was published in 2017, the “refugee crisis” was an inescapable topic and the world seemed keen to dig in that pen tip and deepen the lines around countries as a not-so-subtle KEEP OUT sign. Through personal moments between Saeed and Nadia, Exit West serves as a reminder that when we’re talking about refugees, we’re talking about people—people with relationships and shifting identities and desires—not monoliths, stereotypes, or resource sinks, and that boundaries are constructs.
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Villavicencio wrote this nonfiction National Book Award finalist when she was on DACA. Writing a book about being undocumented under your own name takes deep, deep courage—Villavicencio did that to take us with her on a journey to learn the stories of other undocumented folks trying to find their place in this country. This is a memoir and essay collection that, like Exit West, shares intimate stories that expose what the headlines and politicization of entire communities miss. Villavicencio doesn’t report on the lives of the people she meets from a distance—she goes all in to get to know them and walk in their shoes, if just for a moment, and does not hold back in sharing her own story.
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
This is one of my all-time favorite graphic memoirs. In it, Bui answers her own long-held questions about the Vietnam War’s impact on her parents and their flight to the U.S. to escape war. After navigating the past with her parents to write an oral history as a graduate student, Bui learned to draw and put their story to page. The present mingles with the past as she considers the birth of her first child and her new role as a parent, shifting her perspective towards her own parents, and as her mother and father come of age in wartime Vietnam, full of hopes and dreams and then taking harrowing risks and making sacrifices to get their family to safety. I still think about this book many years after reading it.
The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman
If you’re looking for multiple voices speaking on personal experiences as first- and second-generation immigrants, this essay collection featuring some familiar and some possibly new-to-you writers is one to check out. Alexander Chee, Jenny Zhang, and Chigozie Obioma are just some of the writers sharing about what it means to search for one’s place in America, navigate identity between cultures, and be othered. I hate to say what’s old is new again, but this and some other works on this list were published during Trump’s first term when antagonistic views of immigrants seemed to be at a boiling point. The collection, which is a follow-up to The Good Immigrant: 21 Writers Reflect on Race in Contemporary Britain, feels more timely than ever.
Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
I remain impressed by children’s literature that successfully translates what is nuanced and challenging into stories young readers can understand. Other Words for Home is one such book. This middle grade novel in verse follows Jude, new to America having left her older brother and father behind in Syria where trouble is brewing. Far from home, Jude navigates a new family in her Cincinnati relatives, cultural differences, classmates, and labels. But rather than shy away from her sometimes overwhelming new home, Jude is ready to step into the spotlight. For some middle grade readers, the idea of war or violence splitting up families and having to flee your country will be a new one. This hopeful book sets up an opportunity to start the conversation about refugees.
The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar
Full disclosure: I edited an anthology that included a story by Zeyn Joukhadar. You might think I’m biased here, but beyond my praise, he’s an accomplished, Pushcart Prize-nominated author and this novel tracing the journey of Rawiya, a 12th-century mapmaker’s apprentice, alongside that of Nour and her family’s flight from modern-day Syria after a bomb destroys her family’s home and nearly kills her is not to be missed. This is a historical fiction about a cartographic quest, as well as a story about a family faced with the hardest choices, and about being displaced again and again by violence. The Map of Salt and Stars was nominated for Goodreads’ Readers’ Favorite Historical Fiction and Readers’ Favorite Debut Author so, again, I’m not the only one singing Joukhadar’s praises.
When Stars Are Scattered by Omar Mohamed and Victoria Jamieson
Omar Mohamed’s story about childhood in a refugee camp in Kenya, as told to Victoria Jamieson, comes to life in this graphic novel. Omar and his younger, nonverbal brother, Hassan, face the daily challenges of life in a refugee camp, including access to resources. When Omar gets the chance to go to school, he has to make a difficult decision about whether to leave his brother every day to pursue a potentially brighter future or stay together. Jamieson, whose Roller Girl was a Newbery Honor book, helps share Omar’s story through thoughtful and evocative words and art. I would say this about most of my favorite books for young readers, but you don’t have to be a kid to learn something new from kid lit.
What book do you recommend for this task? Let’s chat in the comments!
Check out all the previous 2024 Read Harder posts here.
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