What Does It Mean To Be First Generation?
by Laura Lambert
First, let’s state the obvious: no universal first-generation experience exists. Countless factors compel people to leave their country of origin — and each person’s experience in America is shaped by the communities that welcome or reject them. Sometimes, there is a backdrop of poverty or persecution. Sometimes, there is the present danger of being undocumented. Often, there is some level of disillusionment. And almost always, there is a dance between two cultures, between the past and present, between here and there, and, for many, between generations.
I’ve watched that dance play out in my life. My mother arrived in Southern California from Seoul in the 1970s to marry my father, who is white. She knew few other Koreans and struggled with language, cooking, and cultural expectations. As she built a family and career, and the Korean American community grew, those initial struggles gave way to more personal tensions about identity and an ever-evolving sense of self and home.
Those tensions are the through-line across these nine YA books, each touching on the first-generation experience.
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All My Rage
Available from:Bestselling author Sabaa Tahir knows what it’s like to grow up Pakistani in the predominantly White, isolated California desert. Her lived experience is exactly why her coming-of-age novel, All My Rage, rings true. In the book, Salahudin and Noor, two Muslim-American high school seniors, are best friends — and possibly more. The narrative weaves together their emotional, familial, and cultural struggles in the small desert town of Juniper and those of the previous generation who came to the US from Pakistan. As Tahir told Time, “So many of us who feel marginalized, we hold all this anger inside, and we can’t express it without potentially serious consequences.” But in this contemporary YA novel, Tahir expresses the full range of emotion to great effect.
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Free Radicals
Available from:Free Radicals is the debut offering from author Lila Riesen, the daughter of Afghan and Australian immigrants who was raised in the US. In the book, 16-year-old Mafi Shahin — the daughter of an Afghan dad and a White American mom — fancies herself a kind of karmic avenger known as the Ghost, who rights the wrongs that take place at her high school. But underneath the quasi-superhero narrative is something much weightier — the history her family left behind in Afghanistan. Kirkus calls the book “a smart, powerful, poignant tale of identity, freedom, and family.”
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Frankly in Love
Available from:On the one hand, bestselling author David Yoon’s debut title, Frankly in Love, is a fresh, funny — and punny — take on the YA rom-com. On the other hand, it’s a spot-on exploration of the generational tensions that emerge when you fall for someone outside your parent’s cultural expectations. Frank Li is a second-generation Korean American high school senior whose love interest is — you guessed it — white. Unsurprisingly, Frank’s first-generation Korean parents don’t approve. Frank teams up with a childhood friend, Joy Song, who faces a similar dilemma, and together they hatch a plan to satisfy their parents while secretly pursuing their own interests. Each must confront their identities and uncover their values as the story unfolds.
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Perfectly Parvin
Available from:Perfectly Parvin is a hilarious, heartfelt high school romance with a wonderfully diverse cast of characters. But Olivia Abtahi’s debut novel also explores self, culture, and family. Fourteen-year-old Parvin Mohammadi wants nothing more than to get a popular boy to ask her to homecoming to blunt the humiliation of being dumped by someone else. But as she tries to mold herself into someone she’s not, she must confront all the nuances of being Iranian and American.
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Home Is Not a Country
Available from:In Home Is Not a Country, 14-year-old Nima is caught between two worlds like many first-generation immigrants. In her case, Sudan and post-9/11 suburban America. Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo tells Nima’s story in verse, with a touch of magical realism. The result is a richly imagined yet unsettling place to be, full of related tensions — Nima’s absent father, single mother, poverty, Islamophobia, and violence.
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I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
Available from:It’s all right there in the title — 15-year-old Julia Reyes isn’t who her first-generation, working-class Mexican parents want her to be. She’s decidedly not perfect. And everyone thought her older sister, Olga, was — until Olga died in an accident. As the family grapples with grief and discovers more about Olga, Julia embarks on a path to find herself and speak her truth.
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The Sun Is Also A Star
Available from:In The Sun Is Also a Star, Natasha, an aspiring scientist, and Daniel, an aspiring Korean American poet, meet on the streets of New York City. But it’s Natasha’s last day — her family is scheduled to be deported to Jamaica. As the love story unfolds between the two teens, the complexities of their backstories emerge — the heavy expectations of Daniel’s Korean parents and the tenuousness of Natasha’s existence in the US. Yoon writes, “For most immigrants, moving to the new country is an act of faith. Even if you've heard stories of safety, opportunity, and prosperity, it's still a leap to remove yourself from your own language, people, and country. Your own history. What if the stories weren't true? What if you couldn't adapt? What if you weren't wanted in the new country?” Kirkus calls the novel “an authentic romance that’s also a meditation on family, immigration, and fate.”
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Americanized
Available from:Simply put, Sara Saedi’s memoir is about what it took for one Iranian girl to become an American citizen. Saedi was two years old when her family fled Iran shortly after the Iranian Revolution. Thanks to a series of mishaps, it took nearly 18 years for Saedi to get her green card and several more before she became a citizen, even though her parents “did everything right.” Much of this funny, poignant book explores what it’s like managing the roller coaster of adolescence — acne, boys, sex — with the anxiety of being undocumented hanging over you.
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Living Beyond Borders
Available from:What does it mean to grow up Mexican in America? This anthology gives you 20 different answers to that question as short stories, personal essays, comics, and poems from a distinctly YA point of view. Margarita Longoria, who edited the anthology, wanted to highlight the complexity and beauty in Mexican culture to counteract the narratives put forth by anti-immigration politicians in the US. As she told Publishers Weekly, it was a way for “one little person to fight back through something she knows: books.”
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