“Immigration is amputation,” Weike Wang, author of Rental House, said at the PEN World Voices Festival. “You lose language, you lose the humor, you lose a lot of the cultural context. It’s a complete severance.”
The experience of being a Chinese immigrant, especially a child brought to the United States while still young —the generation Wang refers to as the “1.5 generation”— may bring even more of a severance from the country of origin than a European immigrant, Wang added, because the cultures are so different.
“I see that loss so fast in one generation,” she said during The Wages of Immigration, a panel discussion hosted at the Goethe-Institut New York. “I think because China and the U.S. are so diametrically opposed, that amputation happens a lot faster than if you were, like, French, or Spanish.”
The wide-ranging talk, which examined both joys and fears of the immigration experience, also featured Javier Fuentes, author of Countries of Origin, and Dinaw Mengestu, author of Someone Like Us. Anderson Tepper, co-chair of the international committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival and curator of international literature at the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, moderated the discussion.
On writing the immigrant experience
Fuentes: I started at the beginning. For me, I had this sort of constant fear, being in the United States, first without the correct papers, and then once I got my first visa, and then got a green card, I always had this fear that there will be a point in my life where some bureaucrat in Ohio will say, ‘Denied!’ and I would be forced back to my country of birth. So I feel like to meet that, that kind of strong fear that I experienced through decades was the origin from which everything sprung. And I have been working in restaurants, not initially, Michelin star restaurants (featured in the book), but in restaurants and in bars in New York. So the idea of being undocumented and I’m working in those kind of spaces where you don’t have a lot of visibility to the outside world felt very much like a good kernel from where to start.
Wang: So my book is told in two parts, and the first part is a vacation they take to Cape Cod, where their in-laws and parents come. And then the second one is a vacation in the Catskills. And I wrote the first part, first. I also go into chronological order. I sort of see a novel kind of like a house that I wanted to put my characters in. I conceived of the first idea around the house when I was just stuck in Europe during the pandemic, and I wanted to leave. I was so stuck that I was like, ‘I actually miss my parents.’ And then I thought, ‘I miss my parents and my in-laws, what if they all came to see me?’ That’s where this sort of the idea came from. And then wanting to revisit that relationship in the second part, so sort of having a parallel section, like a foil, but not necessarily its equal.
Tepper: Tell me where your characters come from, going back one generation. Why have they left?
Wang: My parents chose to come here, I’m their child, so I was forced to come here and we ended up in Minnesota. So I gave kind of that similar narrative. And there’s so many people like that, you know. We come here for opportunities. Or opportunity and stability. I’m not sure. I always thought immigration was a zero sum game. I don’t think it’s net positive or net negative, and the longer I think about it, the more I think, like my counterfactual, if I’d grown up anywhere else, would actually be the same. I don’t think there’s a pro and con. But I think with immigrant parents … they’re so gung ho about proving that they made the right decision, right? … There’s always a sense of defending this country. And I don’t. I don’t feel the need anymore. I’m here, so yay. But I lack that same sense of like, this was the right decision.
Your economic precarity is kind of used against you constantly, and that precarity is compounded by the fact that you’re also an immigrant, and that vulnerability doesn’t go away. And I think, certainly now, I think very much, that fear that there’s something might turn on you is very much real.
Tepper: What does America mean to these characters, and what they end up being, what ends up being illusions, of delusions, of disappointments?
Mengestu: It’s not static. And what they find is probably the most important part, because that thing keeps shifting. There are these ideas of being successful in America that Samuel tries to play into. And he espouses all of these sort of entrepreneurial dreams that won’t ever really come true, but also partly because of what he lives through, and that feeling that the country can turn on you, and there’s an anxiety and a sense, we’re here, yeah, but this isn’t stable, and at any point this might turn on us. And that fear isn’t something that I think certainly he experiences and thinks about his interactions, either with police or with other forms of authority. Your economic precarity is kind of used against you constantly, and that precarity is compounded by the fact that you’re also an immigrant, and that vulnerability doesn’t go away. And I think, certainly now, I think very much, that fear that there’s something might turn on you is very much real. We’ve been building up to this moment for a while. It didn’t just happen overnight. And I think immigrants have been very constant that, like this, the rod is going to come out, or can come out potentially.
Wang: What is America? I think it’s a lot of contradictions, right? I think the idea of a melting pot is that it is just contradiction after contradiction, and it’s really confusing to be different in this country. Great, but also confusing and you never know when it could go bad or good.
Fuentes: When you’re an immigrant and you’re not documented in this country, you’re working and always feeling that the rug is going to be pulled out. I feel like that visual really tracks to how Demetrio becomes who he is. Like that, that kind of feeling becomes structural in your personality. He doesn’t want to have long term relationships. He doesn’t want to force any kind of real ties to things. And then when he’s sort of forced out of the country, then he’s sort of trying to come to terms with why he’s become the person he is, and why is he still struggling to exist in space that is now the right space for him to become more maybe what originally he was.
What is America? I think it’s a lot of contradictions, right? I think the idea of a melting pot is that it is just contradiction after contradiction, and it’s really confusing to be different in this country. Great, but also confusing and you never know when it could go bad or good.
Want more?
Check out the panelists’ books:
- Countries of Origin by Javier Fuentes
- Rental House by Weike Wang
- Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu
