The number of people who have left their homeland, either by necessity or choice, has reached its highest level since World War II. As the numbers continue to grow, the process of settling in new environments, both friendly and unfriendly, has never been more challenging. What happens to families and individuals who forsake all that is familiar? What is it like to try to make a home in unfamiliar territory and language? How long does it take before a new country feels like home? The Christian Science Monitor is bringing together contemporary novelists and memoirists who have tackled these challenges in their work. Writer and educator Grace Talusan immigrated to the United States from the Philippines as a child, and she recounts that experience—and other aftershocks of trauma—in her forthcoming memoir The Body Papers, which won the 2017 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Ha Jin, recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his 1999 novel Waiting, immigrated to the United States from China as an adult and is currently a professor in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University. His most recent novel is The Boat Rocker, which Kirkus called “laugh-out-loud funny while being as illuminating as ever.” And Marjan Kamali, whose family immigrated to the United States from Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution, addresses generational attitudes toward tradition and assimilation in her novel Together Tea, a Massachusetts Book Award finalist. Their conversation will be moderated by the Monitor’s Simon Montlake. Sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
