Myth and reality?

Before Natalie headed back off to college after Christmas I asked her for some book recommendations off of her shelf of many interesting-looking books. One of the books she gave me was Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, which tells a tale, which at least seems at least largely autobiographical, of a young, gay Vietnamese boy growing up in Hartford, CT with his mom and his grandmother. Though we may eventually prove gorgeous, through the first half of his book his life is anything but. It's a hard immigrant's life full of poverty, hard physical labor, shitty food, sleeping on floors, all carried forward by a narrative style that's fairly stream of consciousness, proverbial and non-linear -- flitting easily from the present in Connecticut to origins in Vietnam. In many ways it's stylistically reminiscent of another favorite book of Natalie, Karla Cornejo Villavicensio's The Undocumented Americans in that the immigrant first-person view of the world is very fragmented, violent and precarious.

It's hard not to contrast it with the immigrant tales told by Jhumpa Lahiri, in which we read of South Asian graduate students -- future doctors, professors, what have you -- who struggle in cold apartments in Rhode Island or wherever while thinking of family and food back home and have to deal with dislocation and disconnection, but we know they will settle in. "Model immigrants," little Horatio Alger tales. The stories of coming to the New World that we want to hear because they recapitulate our own origin stories from centuries past. In reality, making it to the middle class in America is more of a slog for most newcomers than it is for Lahiri's Brahmins and their stories are harder to tell because we are less used to and open to hearing them.