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A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

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A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

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Overview

From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations.

Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as twenty writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures.

Victoria Blanco relates how those with family in both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez experience life on the border. Nina Li Coomes recalls the heroines of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and what they taught her about her bicultural identity. Nur Nasreen Ibrahim details her grandfather’s crossing of the India-Pakistan border sixty years after Partition. Krystal A. Sital writes of how undocumented status in the United States can impact love and relationships. Porochista Khakpour describes the challenges in writing (and rewriting) Iranian America. Through the power of personal narratives, as told by both emerging and established writers, A Map Is Only One Story offers a new definition of home in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948226783
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/11/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	437,275
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nicole Chung is the author of All You Can Ever Know, a contributing writer and editor at The Atlantic, and Catapult’s former digital editorial director.

Mensah Demary is a founding editor of Catapult magazine and an editor at Catapult books.

Introduction Nicole Chung Mensah Demary xi

Why We Cross the Border in El paso Victoria Blanco 3

A Map of Lost Things Jamila Osman 15

My Indian Passport Is a Bitch Deepti Kapoor 27

This Hell Not Mine Kenechi Uzor 43

Arab Past, American Present Lauren Alwan 53

How to Write About Your Ancestral Village Steph Wong Ken 67

Carefree White Girls, Careful Brown Girls Cinelle Barnes 79

Return to Partition Nur Nasreen Ibrahim 91

Undocumented Lovers in America Krystal A. Sital 105

Say It with Noodles Shing Yin Khor 120

My Grandmother's Patois and Other Keys to Survival Sharine Taylor 133

The Dress Soraya Membreno 139

What Miyazaki's Heroines Taught Me Nina Li Coomes 147

How to Stop Saying Sorry When Things Aren't Your Fault Kamna Muddagouni 157

The Wailing Nadia Owusu 165

Writing Letters to Mao Jennifer S. Cheng 175

Dead-Guy Shirts and Motel Kids Niina Pollari 183

Mourning My Birthplace Natalia Sylvester 193

Should I Apply for Citizenship? Bix Gabriel 199

How to Write Iranian America; Or, The Last Essay Porochista Khakpour 209

Acknowledgments 225

About the Contributors 227

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

10/21/2019
Catapult magazine editor and memoirist Chung (All You Can Ever Know) and Catapult founder Demary (coauthor, Let Love Have the Last Word) show how “literature can provide a pathway to greater empathy and understanding” in this collection of essays gleaned from the magazine’s archives and focused on the theme of immigration to the U.S. (and, in one piece, Canada). It features writers from the world over, including both documented and undocumented immigrants, as well as first-, second-, and third-generation Americans. Some contributors, such as Sharine Taylor writing about her Jamaican immigrant grandmother’s sly use of patois, focus on older relatives (“Patois was our secret, allowing us to be in the English world and then escape to Jamaica through language”); others confront past and future choices with ambivalence (“Should I—an immigrant to, a writer in, and a critic of the United States—apply for citizenship?” Bix Gabriel asks at the end of an essay detailing her odyssey from India and concern over the Trump presidency). Other essayists relate encounters with racism, clueless natives, and fellow migrants. This collection is a vital corrective to discussions of global migration that fail to acknowledge the humanity of migrants themselves. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"How do we define home? The 20 voices in this essay collection seek to articulate what it feels like to live between cultures. From stories about being undocumented in the U.S. to living on the border with Mexico, these personal narratives delve into the challenges―and power―that we derive from our connections to place." ––Annabel Gutterman, Time

"This powerful first anthology from Catapult magazine features twenty writers sharing their stories of migration, family and what home means to them." ––Ms.

"A collection of 20 essays on immigrant and immigration experiences, A Map Is Only One Story will move you with its global depictions of life across borders." ––K. W. Colyard, Bustle

"In this stunning collection, the debut anthology from Catapult magazine, each writer invites you alongside them as they contend with unnatural borders and their devastating consequences, which hide in plain sight in our daily lives in America. Without the necessity of an outside voice to translate their experiences for the public, the writers let their stories be complex, but even that word seems to do a disservice to their work. Refusing clean narratives, these stories dig deep and entangle themselves in ways that, once you walk through the mist of otherness that words like 'immigrant' and 'undocumented' inspire, you will find are deeply human, deeply relatable, and merely circumstantial . . . These writers prove that the idea of the faceless, voiceless brown mass is the biggest lie yet." ––Frances Nguyen, Electric Literature

"A moving, deeply personal examination of what it can mean to be an immigrant―or the child of immigrants or even the grandchild of immigrants . . . A Map Is Only One Story reminds readers that the collective gaze isn’t passive. It has power to connect as well as to limit." ––Bridey Heing, Paste

"Twenty writers from Catapult magazine cross borders and straddle cultures as they provocatively, vulnerably examine 'immigration, family, and the meaning of home.'" ––Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

"A vast, astute collection exploring questions of identity and belonging. A Map Is Only One Story is about margins, ideas of home, migration, and the violence of borders, but it’s also so capacious that it’s impossible to summarize. Candid and devastating." ―R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

"Moving and intimate. These disparate voices come into their power when they reach beyond the broken self toward something greater―love, kindness, family―even as homes are lost, pride shattered, identities remade." ―Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

"A Map Is Only One Story has a kaleidoscopic effect, breaking our image of the world with fixed borders and identities to create something new again and again. In this anthology, finding home is more than just a search for a place, but for a way to exist. Funny, poignant, and thought-provoking." ―Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods

From the Publisher

★ 01/01/2020
Editors Chung and Demary compile essays on the immigrant experience. Standout pieces include Cinelle Barnes's "Carefree White Girls, Careful Brown Girls," Krystal A. Sital's "Undocumented Lovers in America," and Shing Yin Khor's illustrated essay "Say it with Noodles." The literary world has seen an explosion of crossing narratives lately; it is easy to forget about the increasingly nuanced, complicated, and human ways that immigrant lives unfold after arrival. This collection contributes to the burgeoning canon of works set beyond the crossing. The essays move like ink in water, dispersing in infinite directions to illuminate psychologies, family dynamics, steamy affairs, vibrant foods, politicized accents, and particular kinds of losses. Most powerful of all is its subtle work of demonstrating that violent immigration policies implicate everyone in a country, immigrant and citizen alike. Victoria Blanco conjures this in "Why We Cross the Border in El Paso," writing of the deaths that take place in the Rio Grande. VERDICT A standout collection that adds new dimension and depth to the lived experiences of immigrants long after they settle in a new community.—Sierra Dickey, Ctr. for New Americans, Northampton, MA

Library Journal

2019-10-28
Two Catapult magazine editors gather essays about immigration and "the meaning of home" from 20 emerging and established women writers.
Chung (All You Can Ever Know, 2018) and Demary (co-author, with Common: Let Love Have the Last Word, 2019) select personal reflections from writers such as Victoria Blanco, Shing Yin Khor, Cinelle Barnes, and Porochista Khakpour, all of whom are "immigrants, the children of immigrants and refugees, [and/or] people directly affected by immigration policy and how this country treats those who come here." The book opens with Blanco's "Why We Cross the Border in El Paso," which establishes the overarching theme of crossing cultural boundaries. The author revisits childhood memories of watching Mexican families "rush across the Rio Grande" on the way into El Paso. Blanco then muses how, two decades later, a dam that regulates water flow and a tall steel fence now act in concert with border guards to "turn families away." Khor's graphic essay, "Say It With Noodles," explores the emotionally liminal space the author inhabited as the English-speaking daughter of a Chinese family and how food was the medium for how they communicated feelings among their family and to others. In "Carefree White Girls, Careful Brown Girls," Filipina American author Barnes writes about the meaning of being undocumented. A brief friendship with a former drug delivery girl made her understand how being "cute [and] blonde" allowed her white friend to "get away with danger" while she had to live "forever clean" in order to stay safe from the inevitable judgments others passed on Barnes' immigration status. In "How to Write Iranian America; Or, The Last Essay," Khakpour discusses the exhausting burden of being an Iranian-born refugee living in America. With origins that have been "obsessed over" by the news, she must continually explain herself and the "Iranian America" of which she is part. Fierce and diverse, these essays tell personal stories that humanize immigration in unique, necessary ways.
A provocatively intelligent collection.

Kirkus Reviews

Chinese-Thai-American narrator Cindy Kay delivers a powerful performance in this audiobook. With daily negative messages from popular media, it can be easy to classify humans by categories such as refugees and immigrants without seeing the individuals behind them. In this compilation from CATAPULT magazine, the human aspects of those who have taken on those classifications shine through as 20 individual writers describe their definitions of home, immigration, and family. Kay emphasizes the sometimes lyrical nature of the short biographical pieces. Each story is unique, and Kay captures both great sadness and great joy. Her strong delivery makes it easy for listeners to find themselves relating to these stories from beginning to end. V.B. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

Chinese-Thai-American narrator Cindy Kay delivers a powerful performance in this audiobook. With daily negative messages from popular media, it can be easy to classify humans by categories such as refugees and immigrants without seeing the individuals behind them. In this compilation from CATAPULT magazine, the human aspects of those who have taken on those classifications shine through as 20 individual writers describe their definitions of home, immigration, and family. Kay emphasizes the sometimes lyrical nature of the short biographical pieces. Each story is unique, and Kay captures both great sadness and great joy. Her strong delivery makes it easy for listeners to find themselves relating to these stories from beginning to end. V.B. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home

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