Translating the Immigrant Experience Into Fiction

These stories are my inheritance, which is not the same as sole ownership.

When my novel, All-Night Pharmacy, was out on submission, I remember feeling so cheerful as I hopped on the latest call with a potential editor. Editorial meetings were a joy after the purgatory of waiting for news from my agent and nearly having an aneurysm every time an email hit my inbox. The meetings I’d already taken had been largely positive, and I went into this one semi-confident that my novel would find a home somewhere. This particular editor seemed very into the toxic sisterhood and addiction elements of my novel, and they had a specific vision of how to draw that out in revisions. I readied myself to sound open to whatever ideas they had in mind. But before delving in, they wanted to know—which parts of my novel were autobiographical?

If I were a cartoon, I would have done a spit take. This was the sort of question I expected from rogue audience members at readings or the parliament of Goodreads—not an editor at a major publishing house. What exactly were they asking me to disclose: my drug history, my sexuality, whether I’d ever scammed pharmacies out of expired opioids, whether I’d been assaulted, whether a member of my family had been murdered? I’ve since blacked out my response, but I imagine I said something ambiguous. We moved on, but the moment is one that I’ve thought about a lot in the year since I sold my novel (to a different editor), particularly as I start to consider how I want to discuss the book in public. I’m sure readers will have similar curiosities, and that’s fine—I too love knowing everyone’s secrets. With my poetry collection, Emergency Brake, my chronic people-pleasing led me to answer every intrusive question thrown at me. The emotional hangover was exhausting. With All-Night Pharmacy, I hope I’ll have the willpower to resist exposing more than I feel comfortable—in part because, this time around, not every secret is mine to share.

My novel is a container for the wild family lore I heard growing up. At one point, my narrator says, “I never know how to react to Jewish trauma. To its extremity.” Girl, same. Because my novel reckons with inherited trauma, I needed to explore those stories of earlier generations on the page. I wanted to honor my family’s experiences under Soviet state-sanctioned antisemitism, and the idea of subjecting my characters to similar-but-different horrors that I’d devised felt grody. There was something unsettling and arbitrary about brainstorming novel ways to punish my characters’ ancestors when my ancestors’ own stories were right there. It felt natural to inject some of my family history into my book, to memorialize these oral histories that might otherwise be lost.

Or so I tell myself. There’s also something ethically dubious about packaging trauma I didn’t personally experience into a commercial narrative. About fictionalizing the details of what my family went through in ways that are convenient to me as the author. These stories are my inheritance, which is not the same as sole ownership. Which parts are autobiographical? doesn’t have a straightforward answer. These aren’t my experiences, but they do live in me.

My family knows I’ve incorporated our history into the book, but knowing this won’t necessarily prepare them for how it will feel to read a fictionalized account of what they and their loved ones experienced. It might be uncomfortable or even offensive for relatives to recognize skewed versions of their lives and their stories portrayed by unlikeable characters. Will assuring them of my honorable intentions put them at ease? Will tacking on a disclaimer that says, “I cannot emphasize enough that my family is not the family in this novel!” prevent their discomfort or hurt feelings?

There’s also something ethically dubious about packaging trauma I didn’t personally experience into a commercial narrative.

Fictionalizing someone else’s story is already a fraught endeavor. When that story is also an immigrant story—congratulations, you’ve made a fraught sandwich. Many immigrants and children of immigrants like myself feel a sense of duty to honor the sacrifices our families made to give us a better life. It can feel like an unrepayable debt, and trotting out our family’s traumas for the world to see isn’t exactly a straightforward show of gratitude.

Having read a lot of excellent debut fiction by authors whose work explores immigrant experiences, I knew I couldn’t be the only one muscling through my discomfort. I had to find a way to bring that history to the page, and I wanted to do so as ethically as possible. At the height of my angst, I spoke to several writers from immigrant backgrounds to see how they navigated this act of translation in their work.

Mina Seçkin, author of The Four Humors, described fictionalizing her family’s experiences as a compulsion. Though the ethics of collaging real life with fiction can be complex, she ultimately believes that “a story or a person you know is imprinted on you, and you may put that imprint to the page. The imprint is not the person, and the character that evolves is not the person.”

The fear, of course, is that the real-life person won’t recognize the difference. The Four Humors follows a young Turkish American woman with a mysterious headache who spends the summer in Turkey with her grandmother. The novel dips into the perspective of the grandmother, who is partly modeled on Seçkin’s own. In an escalation that left me speechless, Seçkin confessed, “I wrote this scene where she [the grandmother] is having premarital sex with the man who becomes her husband. In the first draft, I got a bit carried away, perhaps, and I’d written the character giving her soon-to-be husband head. My mom, who graciously read a first draft of the novel, laughed when she read this. ‘Mina,’ she said. ‘Your grandma already may never speak to you again for suggesting that “she” had premarital sex. I don’t think she can handle this additional detail.’”

Seçkin is close with her grandmother and ended up cutting the oral sex. Her grandmother hasn’t read the novel, and won’t be able to until it’s translated into Turkish. Seçkin wishes and fears that day will come. “I’m hoping that she will understand, the way my parents and siblings do, that characters in fiction are not bound to the complex people they are in real life—they have a spirit and perversion of their own,” she told me. This is something I hope my family will understand as well: that sharing a biographical detail is not the same as sharing a self. Though I didn’t run into a scenario quite like Seçkin’s, I did devote much of my revision process to fleshing out my secondary characters beyond the biographical elements they share with my family. The rough-around-the-edges grandmother of my novel—who is not modeled after anyone in my family—embodies some of their stories, and so it felt important to show the tenderness beneath her tough exterior. Though this impulse originated from my anxiety that certain relatives would think I was likening them to people who can be real assholes, deepening my secondary characters was also a craft decision that served my novel. Outside of hurt feelings, another danger with borrowing from life is that “authenticity” can be a crutch that prevents us from doing the difficult work of assessing our craft choices. Extremely rude for my anxiety to be productive!

For Joseph Han, author of Nuclear Family, language barriers set a boundary between him and his family during the writing process. Nuclear Family follows a Korean American family living in Hawai’i as they face the fallout of their eldest son’s attempt to run across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea. Han told me, “There are only a few members of my family who can speak or read English, so for most of the writing of my novel we didn’t discuss what I was up to!” For a central storyline inspired by his aunt’s mother—who was separated from her siblings in the northern peninsula during the Korean War—Han interviewed his aunt and asked her permission to share the story in his writing.

Like me, Han felt an urgency to honor his family’s stories, to protect them from being lost. “These older generation Korean people who have directly experienced separation from their loved ones are passing away,” Han said. His aunt was supportive of him fictionalizing their experiences, reminding him that “as the only writer in my family … I had a gift and responsibility to hold and remember our lives.”

For Jonathan Escoffery, author of If I Survive You, this kind of disclosure was a no-go during the writing stage. If I Survive You is a linked story collection about a Jamaican family living between homes and cultures in Miami. “If I’d worried what family and friends’ responses might be while writing this book, I never would’ve finished writing it,” he told me. “I didn’t want to put that kind of power in the hands of others.”

That’s sort of where I landed, too—I only began openly discussing the biographical elements of my novel with my family once the book was nearing the proofs stage. This was a decision borne of both procrastination and the intention of setting a boundary. Letting people dictate what you write about is a slippery slope; I wanted these conversations to happen in a controlled environment, when the book was nearly set in stone. I soft-launched these talks months earlier by occasionally mentioning a family detail I’d included in my novel to see if this elicited a dramatic emotional reaction. When no one objected or demanded to see what I’d written, I read that as tacit permission. But even that word, permission, implies a kind of trespass.

These things may not have happened to me, but I am living in the aftermath. I am the aftermath.

Escoffery muscled through these issues by telling himself that “no one in my family would ever read this book, no matter how well received it might be. I see now that my assumption was foolish.” Unlike Escoffery, I’m operating under the assumption that my family will read my novel and am banking on the hope that the differences between them and my characters will be a source of comfort rather than offense. But ultimately, their reactions are out of my hands. As Escoffery points out, “you can’t make logical arguments” around other people’s hurt feelings. This is true of anything we write, but there is an extra layer of complication around telling stories that are mine but also not mine. These things may not have happened to me, but I am living in the aftermath. I am the aftermath.

Not inflecting my characters with my family history would have saved me a lot of anxiety and dread. But it would have resulted in a novel that didn’t faithfully grapple with the questions that consumed me. All-Night Pharmacy would have a lot less heart. I’m also of the mindset that if the writing feels comfortable, I’m doing it wrong. In the words of my novel’s most chaotic character, Debbie, “If you’re not asking yourself, Am I about to ruin my life? at least once a day, you’re not living a life at all.” Translating the immigrant experience into fiction isn’t as risky as, say, taking mystery pills with two dudes who claim to be disgraced Icelandic princes, but my adrenal glands don’t recognize the difference.

Not that I do it for the thrill. I’m a notorious weenie who finds the rollercoasters at Disneyland too scary. I do it for the same reason as Joseph Han: “In the same way we respect and care for our elders and loved ones, writing is a form of witness and stewardship. We become caretakers of stories, our writing as vessels for their passage so they may find and reach those who need to hear them and listen.”