Course description

In 2017, according to a United Nations study, the number of international migrants worldwide reached 258 million, an increase of 38 million in just seven years. The texts students encounter in this course are among the most vital, affecting, and relevant of our times. Through novels, short stories, memoirs, and literary journalism, the 20 or so students in the room begin to understand migration less as a linear journey from Point A to Point B than as a state of being that endures long after the physical trip is over, with diasporic communities, return migrations, and—especially, for the purposes of our discussions —memory and storytelling blurring the boundaries between here and there.

As director of the University’s annual Fiction Days, I collaborate with the Lowell Humanities Series to bring many of the writers we read to campus. Over the past several years, my students have had the opportunity to speak with Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Gish Jen, Laila Lalami, Dinaw Mengestu, Gary Shteyngart, Maxim Shrayer (from Boston College’s own Slavic languages and literatures faculty), Zadie Smith, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. All are immigrants, or their parents were. A number of students in the class are also immigrants, members of the 1.5 Generation who arrived in this country as children. On the first day, I ask students to write a paragraph about their families’ immigrant histories. What don’t you know?, I prod. What have you never asked?

Required books

By Edwidge Danticat

A gentle family portrait, this memoir is also an unblinking look at the U.S. immigration system that welcomed Danticat’s father, Mira, and granted his children opportunities, even as it hastened her Uncle Joseph’s death, detaining him, disbelieving his medical condition, and providing subpar care. As a child, Danticat lived for eight years with her uncle in a tumultuous Port-au-Prince, Haiti, neighborhood before she was able to join her parents in Brooklyn in 1981 at age 12. The situation endowed her with two fathers (although always missing one) and the ability to move between cultures, yet she also struggled to integrate into a family that included two American-born brothers who didn’t know who she was. Danticat makes it clear that not everyone wants to emigrate, even in the face of extreme conditions in the home country. “Exile is not for everyone,” as Uncle Joseph said. “Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.” A powerful example of how migration can expand the definition of family, Brother, I’m Dying also explores the important but vexed role of the 1.5 Generation in telling the stories of the generations that came before. “What I learned from my father and uncle,” Danticat writes, “I learned out of sequence and in fragments. . . . I am writing this only because they can’t.”

By Anne Fadiman

Lia Lee, a child with severe epilepsy, was born in 1982 in Merced, California, to a family of Hmong refugees from the mountains of Laos. Moving between journalistic accounts of Lia’s family and her doctors, Fadiman leads readers through what she calls a “dense fog” of cross-cultural misunderstanding. Lia’s parents, while not entirely opposed to Western medicine, primarily seek to heal their daughter through animal sacrifice, herbal remedies, and “soul-calling” ceremonies. Her American doctors prescribe medications with labels her mother can’t read, demand repeated blood samples—a practice viewed as life-threatening by many Hmong—and, as Fadiman writes, “never even mention the soul.” Embodying the Hmong concept of hais cuaj txub kaum txub—”to speak of all kinds of things”—Fadiman’s storytelling involves extended detours. There is a chapter, for instance, on the CIA’s secret recruitment of a Hmong guerrilla army during the Vietnam War, in which she describes how these skilled fighters who understood the terrain were paid terribly, treated poorly, and “died at a rate about 10 times as high as that of American soldiers in Vietnam.” That little-known history helps explain why the Hmong in Merced—sometimes seen as intransigent and accused of milking public assistance—feel they are owed a debt by their host country. In the book’s preface, Fadiman expresses what might serve as a guiding principle for the course: “I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand on the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.”

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

When Nguyen, who in 1975 entered the United States as a four-year-old refugee from Vietnam, visited campus in March 2018, the class greeted him still haunted by the many voices from this short story collection. Among them is a housebound ghostwriter who can narrate other people’s traumas but can’t tell her own story until she is visited by her brother’s ghost, who returns her to the boat where he died protecting her from pirates as they fled war-torn Vietnam. The story, “Black-Eyed Women,” is a reverse migration of sorts, though a partial one, since (Nguyen suggests) some losses are beyond the scope of language. In an afternoon public discussion between English professor Min Song and Nguyen, Emily Jennings ’20 asked if Nguyen thought the media might overuse the term “refugee” in a way that flattens out his own experience. Nguyen responded, “No. I don’t think we use the term ‘refugee’ enough. The word is really loaded, because in addition to being a rhetorical term and having a dictionary definition, it’s a legal term,” one conferring protection. “To call someone a refugee is not just simply to name a condition.”

By Gary Shteyngart

Shteyngart’s memoir of his childhood in the former Soviet Union and his new life in the United States, where he arrived at age seven in 1979, is at once hilarious and heartbreaking, full of word play and play of all kinds, even though the subjects he tackles include repressed trauma, anti-Semitism, and the continuous, wearying work of trying to fit in. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Shteyngart writes of young Gary’s bumbling first days at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens. “With my missing scissors and missing glue and my missing crayons and my missing yarmulke and my missing shirt, the one with the insignia of a guy on a horse swinging a mallet, a polo shirt, I learn much too late, I am also missing.” As we follow Gary to a selective public high school in Manhattan, to Oberlin College, and into his adult years, we observe how his writing gains him the admiration of his peers and helps him interrogate the near and distant past, even as his parents, who gave up much to see him succeed, descry a foolhardy path: “‘But what kind of profession is this, writer?’ my mother would ask.” With its photographs and tracing of a Jewish family’s past, Shteyngart’s book resonates with my own novel-in-progress, which tracks my Sephardic Jewish grandmother’s journey from Turkey to Spain to Cuba to New York. I give students a glimpse of my work and share how some of its qualities—language crossings, blurred genre boundaries, fluid ideas of home—are inspired by the texts we’ve read together.

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Nigerian-American author of the 2013 novel Americanah, Adiche describes being pigeon-holed into a “single story” by strangers who make assumptions about her Nigerian upbringing, even as she admits to having similarly typecast others. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue,” she says, but that “they make one story become the only story.” For their final project, I ask students to counter “the danger of the single story” by finding an immigrant or refugee to interview, researching the circumstances of that person’s migration, and distilling a seven-minute video from what invariably ends up being a much longer conversation. Interviews have taken place with roommates, relatives, and strangers hailing from China, Vietnam, Ecuador, Brazil, Afghanistan, Ireland, Haiti, England, Syria, Senegal, Ghana, Cuba, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Caroline Dragonetti ’19 met Faustin Kalombo when he was her Uber driver. A few weeks later, before a camera in a Boston College classroom, he shared his story of leaving the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Burundi and then the United States. Faustin speaks six languages but says his experience of fleeing Burundi’s civil war was “so hard that, when I remember, I cannot find the words to describe it.” Kim Chook ’18 interviewed Andrew Chook, her uncle from Cambodia, where Kim also was born. “Where do you want to be buried?” Kim asks him. After a weighty pause, her uncle meets her gaze: “Cambodia.” My colleague Lynn Johnson, a professor in the history department, has published some of the strongest videos from the class on Global Boston, the website she curates (http://globalboston.bc.edu/immigrant-interviews). They are worth a look.

Elizabeth Graver is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of four novels, including The End of the Point (2013).