{"id":6144,"date":"2016-10-25T07:50:54","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T11:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6144"},"modified":"2016-10-25T07:50:54","modified_gmt":"2016-10-25T11:50:54","slug":"feats-of-true-grit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6144","title":{"rendered":"Feats of True Grit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"suitcase,

photo adapted from Roger Wagner, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

In this political season, when so much airtime has been expelled on the issue of immigration and the negative characterization of immigrants, I\u2019m reminded of what a rich vein of stories the immigration experience has provided us and continues to do so.<\/p>\n

Immigration Stories in Literature<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Shawna Yang Ryan<\/a> has written a beautiful meditation on recent immigration. Her mother immigrated from Taiwan when she married Ryan\u2019s father and worked for a time as an \u201cAvon lady\u201d\u2014a desperate choice that daily forced her to confront strangers at their own front doors and in their language, to face rejection. \u201cTo displace one\u2019s self in adulthood, to uproot, to leave behind ways of speaking, moving, being that are second nature is a feat of true grit,\u201d Ryan says.<\/p>\n

The immigrant\u2019s persistent sense of dislocation and not-belonging has nourished many great stories. We think of C\u00f3lm Toib\u00edn\u2019s Brooklyn<\/em>. We think of Jhumpa Lahiri\u2019s The Namesake<\/em>, of Sandra Cisneros and her culture-straddling kin, never feeling fully at home anywhere, of Celeste Ng<\/a>\u2019s Everything I Never Told You<\/em>. We may even think of The Godfather<\/em> and his literary family.<\/p>\n

And In Your Own Back Yard<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

These stories, separate and unique, yet all similar and at a fundamental level, shared, are the sometimes uneasy bedrock of America, \u201ca rich array of experiences: loss, longing, duality, triumph and contradiction,\u201d as revealed by the immigration stories<\/a> of Latinos who work for National Public radio.<\/p>\n

Members of my mother\u2019s family came to America as early as 1634, but on my father\u2019s side, I know little. I\u2019ve researched and developed a speculative jigsaw puzzle of these grandparents\u2019 separate experiences. Hungary was all my dad knew, and the rough time period, 1900-1910.<\/p>\n

The treaty of Trianon at the end of World War I changed their origin story forever. My grandfather<\/a>, to the best I can determine, came from a part of Hungary that is now Romania (Transylvania, to be exact), and my grandmother<\/a>, about whom I know even less, from a Hungarian region ceded to Czechoslovakia, now the Slovak Republic.<\/p>\n

Share your family\u2019s immigration experience at MyImmigrationStory.com<\/a>, whose message is a nice counterpoint to the political debate: \u201cStatistics do not tell the story of immigration. People do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this political season, when so much airtime has been expelled on the issue of immigration and the negative characterization of immigrants, I\u2019m reminded of what a rich vein of stories the immigration experience has provided us and continues to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Feats of True Grit - every immigrant's story. Your family has them too.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[366,40,174,41],"tags":[128,654,416],"class_list":["post-6144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-genealogy","tag-history","tag-immigration","tag-real-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1B6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6145,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6144\/revisions\/6145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}