MixedThe Times Literary Supplement...what arguably unites these essays are the mixed feelings of their authors in the face of the prompt they have been given: to understand and articulate their personal immigrant experience and also to give it universal meaning, in fifteen pages or fewer. Some writers more obviously throw up their hands ... this collection...opens up a further conundrum for the immigrant writer. Expository pain is relatively easy to record; the narrative of overcoming or succumbing creates meaning even when the lived experience of that pain is senseless. To write a traditional essay on the immigrant experience is to claim authority on what it means to be an immigrant while disclaiming the confusion of what it means to be a person. The strength and wisdom of this collection is its elemental weakness—that no one can divorce what makes them a person from what makes them an immigrant, and that no essay can quite capture all the confusion and ambivalence that comes with life. Luckily, many writers are hard-wired to accept irresolution.
