The Good Immigrant is powerful. It is a book that speaks truth to power, that lays bare our assumptions, that interrogates privilege, that encourages compassion, and that celebrates difference while underscoring our similarity. In a world of shrinking American global influence, divisive political rhetoric, and seemingly rising hate, this book is a celebration of a diverse and polyvocal America ... The editors have created a book that speaks to all Americans and that seeks to remind us of what is American’s greatest resource, our diverse voices and perspectives, and our greatest shame, how we treat those that don’t fit into the mainstream ... each author brings such a unique voice and perspective on their experiences of being immigrant, queer, marginalized, or linguistically and culturally disenfranchised that it was hard not to find something in each entry that resonated with me as a reader and that energized me to keep reading. Because of this, The Good Immigrant is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the real modern America better.
...as a reader, I worried that a collection defined by politics could crumble under the weight of good intentions ... Thankfully, this collection is a resounding success on multiple fronts. Its righteous rage is perfectly matched by its literary rewards ... As I finished The Good Immigrant, my mind was buzzing with the multitude of voices, stories, heartbreaks and dreams featured in its 300-plus pages. The book is a welcome corrective to the nationalist calls for walls, borders and exclusion that seek to narrow the boundaries of what it means to be American. Each essay is a tantalizing introduction—and invitation—to the larger body of work these artists have already created and will continue to make long after this moment passes.
The collection contains a number of responses to double consciousness in the form of reconciliation narratives told through the lens of both history and personal reflection. In this regard, the reader is introduced to the value of acknowledged disparity, itself a productive function of a pluralism ... The diversity of perspectives in the collection is matched by the diversity of prose, and some of the essays hit their mark with greater impact than others. It’s worth noting, though, that several of these essays stand out in terms of their style as well as their substance, emphasizing Khakpour’s and Chang’s commentary on the value of writing as a way to process experience ... While the book poses no solutions to such problems, it does add focus and texture to their impact, which is arguably more productive than the way current policies are discussed WWE-style on for-profit cable news networks.
...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.
While highlighting the social progress that immigration breeds... The Good Immigrant editors do not forget the ghosts of colonialism ... The Good Immigrant flips the rampant host-parasite paradigm within mainstream US immigration discourse ... At its heart, the collection is a gesture of shoving back. A reaction against immigrant life in North America as borrowed space, as if to say this is our space, we are the space ... Kinship is created between writers and diasporic readers, even when direct address is not formally signaled as such ... The pieces in The Good Immigrant knot together a variety of experience that, though sometimes at odds with one another, complicate contemporary notions of immigrant life. It’s a collection that speaks the language of the future with a keen eye to the past, molding tradition to its own needs ... Through The Good Immigrant, we learn to love the in-betweens because, as Alcalá alludes to, that’s all that we have.
Emotions run high as writers express despair, anger, and many levels of frustration. This anthology adds an intriguing component to the complicated kaleidoscope that is the modern immigrant debate.
...affecting personal essays ... many readers will agree that the first, Porochista Khakpour’s 'How to Write Iranian-America, or the Last Essay,' qualifies as both the most inventively written and most memorable ... the fear spawned by the hatred of Trump and the Republican Party is palpable throughout ... the quality varies, but there are no weak links in this well-curated book.
...[a] revealing follow-up to the 2015 British edition ... The strength of this collection is in its diversity—of gender, sexuality, privilege, experience, and writing style. A gift for anyone who understands or wants to learn about the breadth of experience among immigrants to the U.S., this collection showcases the joy, empathy, and fierceness needed to adopt the country as one’s own.
