My experience of existing as a person in America is a very specific one. I’m a first-generation immigrant, in the sense that I am the first person in my bloodline to be living here. I started that process when I was in college, and my parents didn’t end up moving here or immigrating with me, so I didn’t really have any family around me.
When I first came to the U.S., I had to adjust to a whole new lexicon. Even though I’d learned English simultaneously with Bangla, there were new modes of language that were a culture shock, from writing the month before the date and measuring the weather in Fahrenheit, to accepting the fact that I was always going to be an outsider, no matter what.
I felt like an outsider in terms of pronunciation. Many of the words I’d learned to pronounce in certain ways—whether influenced by Bangla or the old English colonizers—were different here. CON-tribute vs cun-tribute. Tur-meric vs tew-merik. We were raised to say dun-key instead of donkey, because it made sense to rhyme it with monkey. I experienced a lot of unlearning and adapting that first year. And of course, there’s the fact that I have a “difficult” name. To this day, I find myself making my name sound more Anglicized to accommodate people who say, “can you repeat that?”, when I introduce myself.
There was also language that labeled my status of existing in the country. First I came on a student visa and was labeled a nonresident alien. Then I had a Green Card and I became a resident alien. I was technically a permanent resident, but it was conditional: I had to behave well for five years, and then I could apply for citizenship. Words separated me from people born here, and language was used to test my right to become a citizen. At the citizenship interview, they asked me, by then an English MFA grad and an adjunct professor in — you guessed it, English —if I could read a sentence out loud (“who can vote?”) and write its answer (“citizens can vote”) to prove myself fit to be a citizen of this country. (I also had to answer questions about the history and government that many of my friends who were born and raised here hadn’t known or remembered.)
The year I became a citizen was the same year I wrote my debut novel, Appetite. As I was plotting the story, I found myself wanting to obviously focus on a Bangladeshi protagonist, but one where being Bangladeshi or any other facets of her identity — including her lack of interest in romance or sex, her gender, or her skin color — weren’t the defining drivers of the plot. Even though I did ultimately write a story of my protagonist Zarina achieving her lifelong goal of opening her own restaurant, I also aspired to write a plotline where immigration and identity were mere truths that existed in the lives of these characters.
In writing the book, I wanted to capture that experience of a person being thrown into the adult, capitalist world fresh out of college with no sense of direction in a new country where chasing a dream is supposed to be easier. I knew I wanted to write but I didn’t know how to climb up any ranks. Zarina similarly knows she wants to be a chef, but she doesn’t know how to even begin starting her own restaurant. I don’t get into the technicalities of whether Zarina is on a work visa or OPT or Green Card, because that’s not the point.
Rather than the plot focusing on Zarina’s immigration status or sexuality, Appetite is a story about being a first-generation immigrant chasing a dream in the age of social media and fandom and celebrity and parasocial relationships and figuring out who you are. It’s about falling in with the wrong crowd and eventually finding your way to your people.
I love immigrant stories. The first time I actually knew it was possible for brown girls to find their stories in the midst of western canon was when I read books by Jhumpa Lahiri as a kid. I loved The Namesake, The Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth and still do. I love how those experiences captured the lives of these young couples who had just moved to the U.S. for education and wanted to figure out how to create a world that their children felt safe in. The language in her work normalizes the immigrant experience. It captures the everyday joys and struggles of living in the States, rather than the process through which people moved here.
I wanted to achieve a similar effect in Appetite. In Zarina’s case, she is her own caretaker in a lot of ways, which is why I give her so much grace as she makes cringey and weird mistakes. She is a bad friend at several instances, and gets caught in a web of uncertainty and awkwardness when her favorite celebrity suddenly gives her attention. What I loved most about Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories was that the people had already immigrated. They weren’t struggling in the process itself but were instead reckoning with what to do once they had settled in the U.S.
My favorite part of writing Appetite was crafting the food descriptions. Instead of using language as a tool to capture trauma, I used sensory descriptions to detail the taste of different dishes my chef protagonist came up with. I used language to implement the fact that she attempted to capture Bangladesh via her dishes, all while creating fusion recipes, as a nod to the fact that she was in a new country.
Don’t get me wrong: I love border stories, and I think they are incredibly important, especially in a time like this, but I also believe there is a lot to be said about unique stories of immigrant joy and finding power and agency in chasing your dreams. And at the end of the day, I just wanted a story where the main character was simply having to deal with the mundane parts of her life like her annoying boss and her wrestling fandom group chat.
The joy of language was found through planning her own restaurant and coming up with recipes. My personal favorite part of the book is a grant application Zarina writes, where she conceptualizes her restaurant based on the six seasons of Bangladesh. I read recipe blogs by Bengali moms for the correct words to use when talking about the taste of the national hilsa fish during monsoons and the warm winter wedding biryanis.
I owe so much to my family for giving me a good head on my shoulders and teaching me to understand good from bad. I also owe in my own immigrant story, the people that raised me and supported me as their own here, to friends that become family. I also owe so much to recipes I looked up, to food shows I watched, and to restaurants I ate at. In a time when immigrants are under attack, I feel like there is a need for joy, for laughter, for celebration towards the success of a young person chasing and achieving their dream.
Western languages alienate through gendered pronouns. While English doesn’t gender every object, humans and animals do indeed get sorted by language that marks them as a certain category, whether it’s assigned at birth, by themselves, or by the society that perceives them. When those things are not aligned, people can self-categorize in ways that are very affirming for many. When I encountered this in the U.S., especially as part of introductions and icebreakers, I felt like no matter what I said, people would box me a certain way, even if I said I wanted nothing.
Growing up, the language my family and I spoke at home didn’t have an assigned male or female gender for a table or a chair the way Spanish or French does. Nor is the Bangla equivalent of “he” or “she” separated by gender the way it is in English. The word “shey” (সে) is a third-person singular pronoun that can refer to anyone of any gender. Isn’t it funny that সে sounds like a blend of “she” and “they?” The same neutrality applies to “ore” (ওর) which can be translated to her, his, or their, depending on who is being referred to when spoken to. The reason no pronouns feel right or wrong for me is because ultimately it all feels the same and, at the same time, neither feels fully me, which also feels like an accurate descriptor for the English language itself.
In my novel, I wrote Zarina the same way. Pronouns feel unattached to her sense of self, because she didn’t grow up with gendered pronouns.
Perhaps this then begs the question of why I write in English in the first place. In a guest lecture for my “Writing the Body” class taught by Leslie Jamison during my first semester of grad school, the poet Kaveh Akbar actually addressed English as a means of communication as well. He said using the colonizer’s language to tell powerful stories of marginalized people who had been harmed by it was a process of reclamation. I internalized that quite hard. It’s worth sharing a story of a character who faces hurdles in the form of the newness of the United States of America and still thrives.
I live in the U.S. because even though I feel othered here, it provides me with greater access to the career and communities I crave. I want to have a career writing in English. I want to share a story about immigrants where they live their lives and, despite facing cultural barriers, achieve their dreams. If English is the way it can reach a lot of people, so be it.
