Since 2018, Restless Books has partnered with the New York Public Library and other public libraries to offer three-session workshops for immigrant writers. Hundreds of participants from around the world have joined in person and via Zoom. They engage with international immigrant literature published by Restless and produce short pieces—fiction, memoir, poetry—that are work-shopped among all the participants. A few have been published in magazines, anthologies, and other places. This is a selection of pieces by participants, in alphabetical order. Editing was done by students in the course “The ABCs of Publishing” at Amherst College: Sophia Grace Ewing, Deontavious Harris, Ella Peterson, Caroline Seitz, Kalidas Shanti, Camilo Toruño, Colin Weinstein, and Augusta Weiss.
Same Sky, Different Fly
by Tweety Hsiao
Dorothy is sitting at the desk, drawing a dark-eyed junco with her newly bought watercolor pencils. The vibration of cell phone suddenly breaks her peace. “Congratulations Priya, CPA, for starting a new position as Tax Manager at EY,” reads the notification from LinkedIn.
“Tax Manager? Already?” Dorothy mumbles. Slowly raising her head, Dorothy glances at her neatly organized textbooks, which seems to stare back at her from the bookshelf, as if silently protesting that they have not been read for too long. The title “Federal Taxation of Corporations and Shareholders” in big, yellow font immediately evokes memories of those days at school when Dorothy first arrived in the U.S.
Having a master’s degree and nine years of experience in taxation, Dorothy gave up everything and followed her husband to the U.S. That year, she was already thirty-three years old, an age at which most people had found their footings, an age that was no longer suitable for dreaming or changing the runway. “I still can fly, can’t I?” Dorothy had asked herself then. In order to grow new wings, Dorothy went back to school to study American tax law, and that’s where she met Priya, a girl in her mid-twenties who looked educated and polite.
“Hi. Are you new here, too?” Dorothy asked. Priya smiled and nodded. “My name is Dorothy. Have you got your reading materials yet? I just got mine. I can show you where the bookstore is.” Dorothy was quite pleased to have made her first acquaintance in school.
Dorothy and Priya were similar in many ways—they both were international students, came from the same continent, and had working experience. They were excited about the big world, but they also worried that they couldn’t grasp the fleeting opportunity that could take them off to the sky. After all, this sky was already crowded. They were not the first to arrive in this dreamland, nor the last.
It didn’t dawn on Dorothy how fierce the competition could be and how different they were until Priya received a generous scholarship, which was originally geared to students who were in straitened circumstances.
“Hey! Congratulations!” Dorothy said, feeling happy for Priya. When the two were immersed in happiness, Priya accidentally revealed her secret in winning this scholarship—she used the big earthquake that occurred that year in her county as a pitch in the application, even though she was actually from a wealthy family and her neighborhood was intact.
“I know this was inconsistent with the facts and even violated my conscience, but if I didn’t market myself this way, I wouldn’t have received this scholarship under fierce competition. You can understand, right?” Priya said, with an anxious tone.
“I... I don’t know.” Dorothy hesitated, not sure how to react to this new norm.
“By the way, have you created your LinkedIn profile yet? I just updated mine last night. This scholarship will better my profile and bring more connections,” Priya continued, as if winning the scholarship was just her first step in this Jumanji, an adventure game where only people with wit and luck could survive.
“I’ll do it over the long vacation. I’m overwhelmed by the materials now. Besides, I’ve scheduled the CPA exam. I wanna nail it before graduation,” Dorothy responded, confident that knowledge is far more important than connections and glamorous semi-fake profiles on social media.
Out of passion for tax law and respect for the expensive tuition, Dorothy studied harder than anyone else. Her age was also a constant reminder which seemed to say: “YOU HAVE NO TIME TO WASTE.” Whenever Dorothy was too exhausted to understand abstruse concept in the textbook, she always assured herself that hard work would pay off and found the will to keep going.
Hard work did pay off. Dorothy’s grades in the mid-term attracted more study-mates, including many Americans. There were several moments that Dorothy had found her belonging—she loved sharing notes; she loved helping classmates review slides before the exam; and she loved the feeling of fitting into a new environment. Sitting in the classroom, Dorothy felt her wings were stretching, and she knew that after a while, she could spread her wings and fly again.
After graduation, two ambitious women both landed in accounting firms—Dorothy in New York and Priya in San Francisco. Although the takeoff was a bit bumpy, the two quickly found the rhythm of flapping their wings in those vibrant cities. They ventured out to the sky where freedom and infinite possibilities were their companions. They flew over the Statue of Liberty; they soared around the Empire State Building; and they perched on Golden Gate Bridge, for rest and for food.
Nonetheless, everything has an expiration date.
I was selected in the working visa lottery! Priya texted, over the moon.
“Oh, my! Congrats. I haven’t heard back yet. I probably didn’t get it,” Dorothy replied.
Dorothy’s hunch was right. The Goddess of Fortune passed her and knocked on Priya’s door again with a more bounteous gift this time—a computer-generated working visa lottery with roughly a 33% chance of winning. While Priya’s win in the visa lottery had her poised to sail high, Dorothy felt pulled back to the ground again.
This transition hit Dorothy hard, as if her feathers were being brutally plucked out, leaving her bleeding and in pain. “How come a diligent person like me, who never takes advantage of others, didn’t deserve such good luck?” Dorothy shouted to her husband, regretting leaving her country, a place where she used to apply what she had learned and was given recognition. Feeling furious and trapped, she thought of a million reasons to rationalize this phenomenon, or more precisely—to hold on to her remaining self.
Two years have passed now; Dorothy is still out of the job market due to not having a working permit, but she has found the answer to the question that haunted her long time ago. “The Goddess of Fortune did knock on my door. I just didn’t notice it. If it weren’t for my husband’s good luck to receive his working visa, we wouldn’t have stayed. If it weren’t for my transition from working woman to housewife, I wouldn’t have picked up long-lost hobbies—I wouldn’t have had time for playing piano, returning again and again to Rachmaninoff’s ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’; I wouldn’t have developed a passion for plants and turned our room into a lively garden; and I wouldn’t even have joined book clubs, which ushered me into a brand-new world with literature, imagination, and fantasy.”
Moving her gaze from the bookshelf to the window, Dorothy sees a flock of birds flying by, and another thought strikes her. “Those migrating birds will encounter storms or need to rest. I am just like one of those resting birds, waiting for my feathers to grow again, and my wings to turn strong and purposeful like those who travel thousands of miles to nest. When the tailwind comes, I will follow it to a farther place.” Dorothy smiles. With this realization, the notification from LinkedIn does not bother her anymore. Dorothy puts her cell phone away and flips the page in her watercolor pad for a fresh start. This time she is going to draw her own sky—cerulean and vast, blank with promise.
Tweety Hsiao lives in San Mateo, California. She has a M.S. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Member of the Tribe
by Hannah Rosenthal
For immigration purposes they had to be married before traveling to Israel and introducing her family to her love. “Why Vietnamese?” said her dad, “They eat cats and dogs.”
“Keep the dogs locked,” said Hung. “I might choose the cutest for my dessert.”
When they met, they did not know anyone in common. He was an engineer; she was an artist. During his high school years, he was only once at the beach. During her high school years, she was mostly at the beach. When they moved in together, each had a collection of over two hundred CDs, but they had only two—ABBA Gold and The Smiths—in common.
A chance meeting in a Los Angeles cafe altered their lives. They ended up with four weddings, three wedding cakes, and a killer soundtrack they spent hours recording. Three wedding events were in the States and one in Israel.
The first was just the two of them with the county registrar clerk. The second, a carefully planned ceremony at their friends’ house. One friend played didgeridoo and another friend who was a Butoh dancer performed and emceed the nuptials. Rose petals and candles marked their walk towards each other. They held hands surrounded mostly by friends. It was a potluck. The abundance of dishes included Persian kabobs, Vietnamese egg rolls, Bún thịt nướng, shepherd’s pie, Tibetan stew, bourekas, and Thai fried rice. French petit fours, chè bánh lọt and baklava were served for dessert. The variety of foods offered had the host worried; it could be a huge success, or cause diarrhea.
Ma, Hung’s mom was invited, but not Ba Anh, Hung’s dad. His brothers came and so did two cousins. Ma’s closest relative in the US sent his two youngest children. It was hard for the family to swallow a home wedding. A proper Californian Vietnamese wedding had to be at a restaurant.
A proper Vietnamese man would marry a Vietnamese woman, at least ten years his junior, and if not Vietnamese, at least Asian. Hung was stoic through the ruckus. He knew he loved Rachel and that they were good for each other. He did not think he could change his family’s mind. “Vietnamese are undefeated,” boasted his dad. “For generations, nations were trying to conquer the Nam people and they all failed.”
Another wedding was for their friends with young kids. They dressed up again and had a wedding cake in their apartment. The last wedding event was in Israel. It was a hot night at Rachel’s brother’s yard. The material of her wedding dress did not work for the weather and her friends and family did not see her in traditional bridal garb. Unlike Los Angeles, in Israel everyone wore casual attire. Rachel felt sorry that her mom missed seeing her dressed as a bride.
Nothing prepared her parents for Rachel’s romantic life or her lifestyle. Men came and went. They could not tell who was a friend and who was a lover. They were afraid to ask. Her mom was proud that she was a virgin on her wedding night.
A shanda averted.
Times were changing so fast and her parents had a hard time catching up. “You are worse than ten boys,” her mom said regularly. In her twenties Rachel was not showing any signs of settling down. She studied abroad and it took a day, a night, different planes, different airports, and a vast ocean for her aging parents to visit her.
Rachel was the apple of her dad’s eyes. He had sleepless nights worrying about her future. As a Holocaust survivor, her dad had a pessimistic outlook on life, in general.
He was born in Poland in 1926. Growing up he experienced antisemitism, persecution, and forced labor. He became an orphan at age fifteen and had to hide in pig pens and live on potato peels for long cold years. When the Germans were closing in, he hid in the forest. After meeting a Jewish Russian army commander, and with nowhere else to go, Rachel’s father joined the Russian army, and later on was one of the soldiers who liberated Berlin.
As far as her father knew, Rachel needed a good man to take care of her. Each grandchild was, for him, his personal victory over the Nazis. He had six victories so far, but none from her.
Hung and Rachel seemed like an odd couple. She was taller, much heavier, and four years older. Their race combination was one of the least common among marriages at that time.
Someone knew someone who knew of a Korean chiropractor in NYC married to an Israeli woman. Someone else knew a Jewish-American married to a Japanese man, both were dancers. Rachel also met a woman who told her that her Jewish niece was living in Vietnam with a local man.
Rachel and Hung invited that same couple for dinner a few months later when the couple visited Los Angeles. Hung, a laid back, flexible man who was looking for a feisty strong partner did not find much in common with the guests. The niece’s husband wore proudly every notion of a chauvinistic male attitude on his North Vietnamese, cigarette chain-smoking, black gabardine trousers and buttoned rolled-up sleeves white shirt. His wife acted timid in his presence.
Rachel’s older brother married a local girl who he met at the pool when he was fourteen and she was twelve. At twenty-two, he became a father. His wife’s parents were a similar combination: an Ashkenazi Polish Jew father, and a former Soviet Jewish mother.
Rachel’s other brother ventured a little further and married a Sephardic girl. Her parents were from Turkey. With them, Rachel’s parents could only speak in Hebrew.
Rachel was sure that she’d marry a MOT: Member Of her Tribe. In other words, an Israeli, or at least a Jew.
Ba Anh, Rachel’s dad, was an ex-South Vietnamese army captain, and a successful fortuneteller in “Little Saigon”, the biggest Vietnamese immigrant cluster in the US. When he read Rachel's chart, he warned Hung not to marry her. “She is too independent,” he cited. “She is just like your mother; she will end up leaving you.” After twenty torturous years full of abuse and violence, Ma managed, with Hung’s support, to buy her another house and file for divorce and a restraining order. They were Catholic, and divorce was unheard of. A few years after the divorce Ma married Don. He was a tattooed midwestern, working-class man in his fourth marriage. He had a heart disease that did not stop him from smoking. He had a mouth on him. Ma’s English, a relatively new language for her, started to take the shape of a turn-of-a-century rowdy sailor. “Why are you a wuss?” she would ask, “Don’t be a pussy.” Continuing with a big wide smile, “Don told me that I have big balls.”
Ma and Hung’s stepdad were also unhappy about Hung’s and Rachel’s union. They warned him that Rachel was too fat and in ten years he would have to push her in a wheelchair. His older brother flatly asked him to cut the nonsense and to not embarrass the family.
When it was time to introduce Rachel’s dad to Hung’s dad, they realized that they had a problem. Rachel’s dad was fluent in Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Polish and German (the last of which he refused to speak), and Ba Anh was fluent in Vietnamese, English, French, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. They did not have a language in common.
Traditionally in Vietnam, and even in America, families meet bearing gifts. There are many festivities where the whole community is engaged. Hung was first in his immediate family to get married. His family was broken. Ba Anh was still very angry that Ma left him to marry another man. He did not spare any name calling or ill wishes towards her.
Hung’s relatives owned a large Vietnamese restaurant his cousins used for their weddings. It was common practice. Ba Anh, as the eldest living son, was the honorary speaker at these events. The bride would change outfits a few times, lots of photos were taken, delicacies were served, and speeches were made.
When Rachel’s parents arrived at Ba Anh’s home, they were anxious. “What on earth could we talk about?” her dad asked. “Don’t worry Aba,” she said, “you’ll talk to me, and I’ll find something to tell him that he’ll like to hear.”
Rachel’s dad, a retired police detective, was an atheist. He grew up in an Orthodox home. After World War Two, he decided that there was no God. Besides rare visits to the synagogue to accompany his wife on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, he did not care for any religious or spiritual practices.
Ba Anh’s living room and office walls were covered with Chinese astrological symbols. Incense sticks were placed in Asian themed decorated ceramic pots. On the center wall, was an altar with photos of his ancestors, and bowls of fruit offering. Big yellow chrysanthemums and orchids, gifts from happy customers, were scattered everywhere. It was hard to find a place to sit. Ba Anh was a small, bold man. His diet consisted of cigarettes and cheap red wine. Rachel’s dad was tall. His belly showed his love for food.
The conversation started with introductions and pleasantries. Rachel’s dad would tell her in Hebrew, “I don’t really know what to say” and she would turn to Ba Anh and say, “My dad said what a beautiful home you have, and we heard that you are a great fortuneteller.” Ba Anh would say, “Welcome to America, we love Moshe Dayan.” Rachel translated it, and so forth. It felt like that was going to be a long and miserable visit.
Hung could not help much. He did not speak any Hebrew. Rachel was not sure that she could last even twenty minutes of it. Hung’s dad suddenly said something about the war and his three years at a re-education camp. Rachel’s dad got very interested. He too spent three years at a communist prison in Russia. According to him, in the USSR, it was very common for a Jew to get arrested for one thing or another.
Before they knew it, the two men from distant lands and foreign cultures were animated, discussing their hatred of the communist regime. They had lots to talk about. The two elders exchanged war stories, trials, and triumphs.
Ba Anh told about the family journey in a small fishing boat, during a storm, with bodies of other refugees from other fishing boats floating around. The family of seven, arrived at an island in Malaysia where a bowl of rice and a bunch of bananas was their only food for a day. On the island, they needed to arrange a makeshift shelter. They left their family home and beloved dog in the dead of night, with only the clothes on their back.
In return, Rachel’s dad was telling about his journey to Israel. When Stalin died, everyone with less than five years sentence were released from prison. Another prisoner, an old Jew and a black-market trader invited him to go home with him to Odessa to meet his oldest daughter. That is when Rachel’s parents met. Soon after, they were married. A few years later, they headed back to Poland to see if anyone of the family survived. No one did, so they continued to Italy, and from there, also on a boat, to Israel. “Stalin was horrible,” Rachel’s dad said. “He was,” agreed Ba Anh. “Communists are the worst,” said Rachel’s dad. “The worst,” echoed Hung’s dad.
Rachel is now a part of a much larger tribe. The dads are long gone. After Hung’s dad’s death, they reconnected with his side of the family and have yearly reunions. With the years, a few other cousins ventured out and married non-Asians. Rachel and Hung’s kids have a Mexican uncle; Filipina and Malaysian aunts. The United Nations is their tribe. It is a mystery who Rachel and Hung’s kids will marry.
Their daughter wants everyone to know that there are six plus pronouns that can be used to describe a person. She is exasperated by her parents’ current mental limitation of male, female, and transgender as their only options. It is easy to imagine her traditional Vietnamese and moderate east European grandpas turning in their graves with this outspoken Jewish-Asian powerhouse granddaughter who, when sensing discrimination and injustice, nips it in the bud.
Hannah Rosenthal (Israel) is exploring Los Angeles when she is not elsewhere. She studied Photography in Tel Aviv and has a B.A. in Aesthetics of the Visual Language from Empire State College, SUNY.