Oct 14, 2021
Longing for the Netherlands, Stroopwafels, and the Real Thing
We don’t crave the things we’re close to, even if they’ve shaped us into who we are.
We don’t crave the things we’re close to, even if they’ve shaped us into who we are.
If you’re looking at something, you don’t know where it’s going; if you know where it’s going, you don’t know where it is.
In class we’d learned the Australian flag was blue to represent the sky and ocean both, our collective identity shaped by that constant hue.
I love our Little Odessa because it is the closest approximation to a home I will never really know.
Sometimes, the word “belonging” feels more apt when snapped into two: be longing.
“The borders don’t even matter,” Kartik said. “The British just made them up.”
When we decided to immigrate to the US from Iran, I thought I was ready to face any possible hard times ahead—but there was still so much I had to learn about living.
My parents wanted to give me opportunities that they never had, to let me participate in bizarre American rites of passage.
What did it mean that now both the villages and the qilin were gone? This portal to the ancestors gone forever.
The contours of a border become a lot less rigid when you carry what are deemed to be the right documents.
My idea of home had changed, so I took the symbolic step of finding a new tailor—marking Philadelphia as a place that now fit me right, too.
Home means that you’re anchored in something deeper than second-hand nostalgia, that you miss your country because it is a part of you.
There are rules to who gets to live the American dream, and who doesn’t.
I grew up in the in-between: white, Hispanic, a pigment of mixtures that blended unevenly.
In Hindi, you don’t say ‘sorry;’ you ask for forgiveness. So, growing up, I made the mistake of apologizing for who I am.
“Nobody will stop a young blond girl, that’s the truth,” you said. This was when I grew angry with you, when I wanted to scrap our week-old friendship.
I felt my mom’s grip tighten around my hand as dozens surged across the Rio Grande, the water waist-high. Adults held children in their arms or carried them in rebozos across their backs.
German chemists. They empowered us, they ruined us, they controlled so very much.
What makes immigrant parents like mine worthy of love, respect, and admiration in our country?
How two diasporas shaped who I am.
