Come On In Read online

  This exceptional and powerful anthology explores the joys, heartbreaks and triumphs of immigration, with stories by critically acclaimed and bestselling YA authors who are shaped by the journeys they and their families have taken from home—and to find home.

  WELCOME

  From some of the most exciting bestselling and up-and-coming YA authors writing today...journey from Ecuador to New York City and Argentina to Utah...from Australia to Harlem and India to New Jersey...from Fiji, America, Mexico and more... Come On In.

  With characters who face random traffic stops, TSA detention, customs anxiety, and the daunting and inspiring journey to new lands...who camp with their extended families, dance at weddings, keep diaries, teach ESL...who give up their rooms for displaced family, decide their own answer to the question “where are you from?” and so much more... Come On In illuminates fifteen of the myriad facets of the immigrant experience, from authors who have been shaped by the journeys they and their families have taken from home—and to find home.

  The immigrant story is not one story.

  It is a collection.

  What do I leave behind and what do I take with me? I am being told to divide myself into pieces and choose which parts of me are the most important.

  —Nafiza Azad

  “But where are you really from?”

  —Misa Sugiura

  Travel bans really put a damper on festive occasions.

  —Sara Farizan

  I know something big is about to happen. And I can’t wait.

  —Sona Charaipotra

  “It’s so easy for you. You can come and go. You never have to worry.”

  —Lilliam Rivera

  She calls herself whatever she wants to, because she doesn’t believe in borders or other people naming her.

  —Isabel Quintero

  We’re leaving everything we know behind. Everyone thinks we are so lucky. Are we?

  —Varsha Bajaj

  Without more questions, he stamped her passport and smiled. “Come on in,” he said.

  —Yamile Saied Méndez

  Come On In

  15 Stories About Immigration and Finding Home

  Edited by Adi Alsaid

  Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  ALL THE COLORS OF GOODBYE by Nafiza Azad

  DEDICATION

  STORY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE WEDDING by Sara Farizan

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WHERE I’M FROM by Misa Sugiura

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SALVATION AND THE SEA by Lilliam Rivera

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  VOLVIÉNDOME by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE TRIP by Sona Charaipotra

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE CURANDERA AND THE ALCHEMIST by Maria E. Andreu

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A BIGGER TENT by Maurene Goo

  DEDICATION

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FIRST WORDS by Varsha Bajaj

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FAMILY OVER EVERYTHING by Yamile Saied Méndez

  DEDICATION

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WHEN I WAS WHITE by Justine Larbalestier

  DEDICATION

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FROM GOLDEN STATE by Isabel Quintero

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HARD TO SAY by Sharon Morse

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CONFESSIONS OF AN ECUADORKIAN by Zoraida Córdova

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FLEEING, LEAVING, MOVING by Adi Alsaid

  STORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  EPIGRAPH

  They came in by the dozens

  Walking or crawling

  Some were bright-eyed,

  some were dead on their feet

  And they came from Zimbabwe,

  or from soviet Georgia

  East Saint Louis, or from Paris,

  or they lived across the street

  But they came, and when they

  finally made it here

  It was the least that we could do

  to make our welcome clear

  —“Color in Your Cheeks,” the Mountain Goats

  ALL THE COLORS OF GOODBYE

  Nafiza Azad

  DEDICATION

  To Ishraaz, the brother I left behind.

  I love you.

  I say goodbye to the hibiscus first.

  I planted them with my amma on my seventh birthday. Three red hibiscus plants, two orange, four pink, and one yellow. They have been my responsibility ever since. I water them, I count the buds and wait for them to bloom. Once they do, I tell the flowers my secrets and all the prickles in my heart.

  Now I have to leave, and I don’t know who will look after them when I am gone.

  * * *

  This morning my abbu returned with a thick brown envelope from the post office in town. When he opened it, his eyes widened first with disbelief and then with joy. He told us we are leaving. That we are moving to another country. He said that home will be a different shape, color, and feeling from now on. Why would the idea of leaving make him so happy?

  * * *

  A grove of mango trees grows by the road just a little distance from our house. This grove is filled with large boulders and smaller stones that my grandfather placed between the roots of the trees. When the wind rushes through this grove, it sings a strange, mournful tune. I say goodbye to the song and to the stones.

  * * *

  Five months ago, there was a military coup in the capital city. The prime minister, in the midst of celebrating his first year in office with chai and cookies, was deposed, and someone called George Speight announced himself captain. The radio shot bulletins into the air. The media, international and local, went into a frenzy. Some people looted the capital city. Others augured the coming of The End. We, on the other side of the island, some three hundred kilometers from the capital city, found ourselves on a break from school. Suddenly Fiji was no longer safe.

  Even though nothing has changed on our side of the island, even though there has been no violence or looting here, people insist that things are no longer the same. They talk about the government and its supposed bias toward the natives of our country. They say that it is time to leave. My father cloaks his eagerness to be away and calls it a concern for my future. My mother is silent—as she always is—in front of my father. I do not want a future if it dawns in a place I do not know, but no one listens to me.

  My cousins and I, drunk on the sunshine and the sugarcane, can’t see what the trouble is. Our lives were unaffected by the coup, by the political riots, by everything outside our village—until my father brought home the brown envelope that will change everything.

  * * *

  My room is not very big. The bed, leaning against one wall, faces the door while the other two walls have screened and louvered windows that somehow provide no barrier to the mosquitoes. The faded curtains wage daily war with the unrelenting sun that makes the obnoxiously blue carpet on the floor even brighter. The walls are a gentle pink. Tube lights overhead provide light and death to moths. My broken-down wardr
obe is beside the door. My precious cosmetics (if you must know, one tube of half-used pink lipstick, a tube of lip gloss, baby powder, and a comb) lie on what serves as a vanity table. The mirror is not attached, and I often think it is going to complete its slide onto the floor and lose the little lease it has on life. My shalwar kameez have the place of honor and hang from hangers, flaunting their grace and their glory. In a little green tub I keep under my bed are all the clothes I wear at home. I have a bookshelf crammed with secondhand books, books borrowed, and books received as gifts. The walls contain posters of Bollywood actors I might have crushes on. The back of the door is decorated with lipstick kisses. This room has held all my corners and filled me with myself. It grew as I did and blooms as I do. When the setting sun paints the walls orange and shadows emerge from under the bed to hide the damp on my cheeks, I whisper a goodbye to my room.

  * * *

  I have an older brother I don’t really know how to talk to. I also have six first cousins I grew up with. Their parents live in two different wings of my grandmother’s house, which is two hundred meters away from mine. Three cousins per family, four girls and two boys. Our names rhyme and our thoughts are collective. We have fought each other and fought for each other. We have whispered secrets about our changing bodies, assuring ourselves that we are normal. We know each other like other people know themselves. The spaces between us are thick with memories.

  Two hours after I found out, I tell my cousins about the brown paper envelope, about my father’s words, about leaving. They are quiet. We sit on the cool rocks under the mango trees in the grove my grandfather built. The wind makes music out of the day. Perhaps they, like me, cannot understand what leaving means. Perhaps, they cannot comprehend, either, the nature of distance and what it will do to us. I don’t know how to be myself without them. Do they know how to be themselves without me?

  My eldest cousin is angry. “Do you know how big your goodbye is?” She spits out the question. Pauses. Then answers it herself. “It is the size of forever.”

  “Then I won’t say goodbye,” I reply stubbornly. It is not as if I am leaving because I want to.

  “Some goodbyes do not need to be spoken,” she replies.

  “You will come back, won’t you?” my youngest cousin asks anxiously. She’s only seven. There are ten years between us.

  Even if I do come back, the home right now and the people right now will no longer be as they are. As I change, so will they and so will this place. When I leave, I will lose this place and these people. I will lose myself. Who will I be without the mountains, the mango trees, and the hibiscus around me? I do not want to know.

  * * *

  At the bottom of the garden in front of my house is a field. In the far-right corner of this field are a breadfruit tree, a well, a saijan bhaji tree, and my mother’s precious collection of chilli plants. When the chillies are ripe, every breath feels like a storm. My grandmother and I harvest the chillies because, for some reason, she and I are not affected by the heat that makes everyone else cry. Our fingers pluck the red, yellow, orange, and green fruit without burning for days afterwards. I stand in that green corner that is bordered on two sides by sugarcane fields and smell the deep brown of the soil in which the chilli plants grow. The water in the well reflects the afternoon sky. I pick a ripe breadfruit hanging heavily on the branch and leave my goodbye stamped on the soft bark of the saijan tree.

  * * *

  Our family of four sits around cups of chai during teatime. The silence is full of the things we don’t know how to say to each other. The afternoon outside tempts with its golden light and a breeze that will make silk of your hair. I can feel my father’s gaze on me like little weights on my skin but I am too busy looking at my brother, memorizing him, learning all of him in the smile he no longer smiles and the sadness that has found a recent home in his star-bright eyes.

  You see, the people who decide who gets to go say he is too old to be considered a dependent of the family, as if age determines the bond a person has with their relatives. The government of this new country we are moving to won’t let him come with us, so my parents decided that he is old enough to be left alone. I wonder what conversation my parents had with my brother. I wonder what words they used to let him know that we are leaving. That he is not coming with us. I asked my father why we are going if my brother can’t come with us. My father had no answer, so he told me not to be impertinent.

  * * *

  Our days have become finite. The sun rises daily anyway. Except for one day when it rains. I seize the chance and say goodbye to the silver raindrops dancing on the ground under the mango trees. For a while, I try to dance along with them, but their grace pronounces my lack of it so I stop and let the warm rain wash me through. Perhaps I cry, but the rain keeps its secrets.

  Because it is raining, the blue mountains on the horizon gain waterfalls. I sit on a rock under a tree and squint into the distance. When I was younger, I wished to climb these mountains and see the waterfalls. Perhaps I will someday. Probably I won’t. Just in case the future isn’t kind, I say goodbye to the mountains and their waterfalls too.

  * * *

  My ammi gives me a suitcase and tells me to start packing. I have to fit seventeen years of my life into one suitcase. I stare at her, but she won’t look at me. She won’t listen to me. No one will.

  I don’t have many things, but they are still too many for this one suitcase. What do I leave behind and what do I take with me? I am being told to divide myself into pieces and choose which parts of me are the most important. My heart will remain behind. It has told me its decision, and I cannot convince it otherwise. I will leave, a hollow version of myself.

  The walls of the place I call my own are now a collection of empty spaces where things used to be. Shelves have been emptied and closets are now a spectacle of hangers and little else. All rooms except the one used by my brother are affected by our upcoming excision from this land.

  I drift in the empty spaces like a ghost-to-be, learning how to haunt a house. A house that will now belong to my brother. A house in exchange for a family. I wonder if my brother feels like the trade is worth it.

  * * *

  One crisp dusk when the skies are a red befitting my mood, I say goodbye to the azaan that comes from the east where the masjid is. After night eases into all corners previously owned by light, the people at the mandir start their puja. The music of the sitar and the accompanying voices raised in prayer fill the air. I stand outside in the garden, alone for once, and the frogs skirt the area I stand in as if they too know the state of my heart. I look up at the sky. I don’t have a camera to capture the heavens heavy with stars, so I look my fill and try to impress the image into my heart. I know there will be other skies and other stars, but nothing will ever compare to these.

  * * *

  Even though I am still here, close enough to touch, a new distance breathes itself into existence between me and my cousins. They do things without including me. They share secrets without telling me. I have been pushed out even though I am still here. Even when I am still a branch of the tree. They have cut me off and set me free, even though I don’t want to be cut off or free.

  * * *

  The night before we leave, we are invited for dinner at my grandmother’s house. My aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents are all there. Our neighbors are there. Everyone from the village is there. First, second, and third cousins are there. The adults talk about our good fortune and how we are lucky to be leaving. They wish us happiness and pray for our health in the new country that belongs even less to us than this one does. My great-grandparents were brought to this country, and they chose to stay here. They clung to this land, mixing their blood and their sweat with the soil, wanting to belong to it and wanting it to belong to them.

  I sit ensconced among my cousins, turbulent and stormy. I am one gale away from being a hurricane, but my eldest cousin
has her arm around me. She squeezes my shoulders and reminds me to be respectful in front of people who have sheltered us at our worst and held us up at our best.

  * * *

  I spend the night with my cousins. The adults leave us alone. The mosquito netting around the bed gleams ghostly in the dark. An hour after midnight, my cousins and I slip out of the room in which we are to sleep and onto the veranda wrapped around the house. We can hear the beat of the lali, urgent in the thin night air, coming from the direction of the Fijian koro. My second-eldest cousin lights a candle and sets it on the floor. We sit around it, a circle of island witches, browned limbs and bright eyes. No one speaks for a moment, but I feel their gazes on me. The purpose for which we are gathered thrums unspoken between us. They are readying themselves to finish saying the goodbye that sits warm on all our tongues.

  My youngest cousin cries, gasping sobs that rise in the honeyed air of the hot night. My eyes sting in response, and I bite my lip. Our faces are illuminated by the flickering flame of the candle. My eldest cousin whispers a story then, about the time we were chased by angry hornets. Someone speaks about the time we were almost carried away by the sudden flood that made a river out of a drain. A guffaw suddenly breaks loose, and we are a cacophony, caught somewhere between laughter and tears. This is their goodbye to me. I will myself to remember each detail of this last night.

  * * *

  The next morning, I skip breakfast to visit my house one last time. I touch the green cement walls and kiss the hibiscus plants. I plant a tear in the soil and hope it grows up to be a wish that will bring me back.