Monday Matter: Ichi-go ichi-e, my mother's clothes and a giveaway winner
Your weekly Foreign Bodies roundup
Every Monday, we’ll send readers of immigrant mental health newsletter Foreign Bodies a story (or six) we recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz.
First things first
A little housekeeping
We have a giveaway winner! 🎁
Congrats to Aditi M. of San Francisco for winning a copy of Korean American Min Jin Lee’s bestselling generational saga, Pachinko! Aditi is an independent journalist and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco. She's reported from India for The Wall Street Journal on sexual violence and women's issues in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape, on health and education, and at the intersection of women's rights and technology. Since 2016, she's been a roving health and education reporter in the United States. She was most recently an Education Journalism Fellow with The Teacher Project at Columbia Journalism School. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Writers Grotto, a nonprofit, member-based community of writers and narrative artists from across the Bay Area.
She loves cooking, early mornings, gutsy ideas and postcards, as much as she loves words and stories.
Getting your package all ready for delivery, Aditi! 📦
Thread: Have you had “The Talk” with your parents? 🧵
ICYMI, our latest thread: Have you brought up your mental health with your immigrant parents or other family members? How did it go? If it didn’t go so well, where did you turn for emotional support?
Resource(s) of the week
Something helpful and interesting and cool
Words Without Borders: A nonprofit digital magazine for international literature which has translated more than 2,500 pieces of literature from 137 countries and 116 languages.
My Therapist Says: A new column from Medium wellness pub, Elemental. Keep it on your radar and consider pitching your own experience. | Read the first piece: It's OK to Stew in Your Sadness by Caroline Moss.
Read this!
Stories we’re loving
What I Learned By Wearing My Mother’s Clothes (Mia Sato, Catapult): A lovely essay from Japanese American writer Mia Sato about unexpectedly finding refuge in her mother’s apparel. “She didn’t understand what it was like being me, how small the margin of error felt as a minority. Like most everyone else around us, my mother was white—unlike my dad, who was Japanese; unlike me, who was a bit of both but also somehow distinct.” Read here.
Nowhere Is Home (Porochista Khakpour + Alexander Chee, Bitch Media): In this refreshingly vulnerable conversation on roots, writing and exile, acclaimed immigrant writers Khakpour and Chee reflect on how travel shapes their writing. “Between birth and age 6, we moved from Rhode Island to South Korea to Truk, Guam, Kauai, and Maine. A loop out from New England to Asia and the Pacific and back,” writes Chee. “I was no exile, but the world felt like some-thing passing by me. The idea that I belonged to someplace besides that sense of movement was—is—very hard for me to get used to.” Read here.
What My Mental Health Taught Me - Finances and Jobs Are Not All You’re Worth (Misam Merza, Expert By Experience): As refugees, Merza watched her father struggle to provide for the family with no real financial prosperity. Instead, he grew sick. “Although many of us have mastered the ability to work on autopilot mode out of sheer necessity and fear of losing the string of stability we hold onto, it has done nothing but perpetuate the notion that our health does not matter and our revenue is where our worth lies.” Here’s to unlearning that notion. Read here. | Also relevant: Issue 9!
How the Japanese Concept of Ichigo Ichie Can Tune You in to Your Life (Héctor García, Forge): “Pronounced ichigo ichie, its meaning is something like this: What we are experiencing right now will never happen again. We must value each moment like a beautiful treasure. We must become moment hunters.” Read here.
In the news
Relevant news coverage that doesn’t really fall under our larger mission to de-stigmatize through personal storytelling, but is still essential reading for anyone who wants to stay up-to-date on immigrant and refugee mental health and well-being.
Opinion: Psychology’s Bias Toward Rich Western Societies Limits Findings (Dorsa Amir, Undark): An insightful look at bias in behavior research from evolutionary anthropologist Dorsa Amir. “To understand why industrialization might be an influential force in the development of behavior, it’s important to understand its legacy in the human story.” Read here.
Atlanta’s Role in Mental Health (The Carter Center): Coverage of a panel discussion on Atlanta’s role in the global mental health revolution, put on by The Carter Center, the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, the Georgia Global Health Alliance and the Center for Victims of Torture. The Carter Center has been instrumental in the movement to de-stigmatize mental illness around the world and improve access to care. In 2010, for example, Liberia had just one psychiatrist and no national plan to protect the mentally ill. A partnership with The Carter Center and Liberia’s Ministry of Health led to more than 250 trained mental health clinicians—and the country’s first mental health legislation. Watch the webcast here.
Hogg Foundation awards $329,800 to El Paso-area organizations to aid accurate census count (Molly Smith, El Paso Times): The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health recently awarded $329,830 in grants to 2020 census count initiatives in El Paso County and other West Texas counties. The grants will go towards an effort to encourage Hispanic community health workers to ensure all residents are counted. According to the El Paso Times, residents who aren’t counted in the census tend to receive fewer federal funds tied to services like housing, education, health care and transportation. And historically, immigrants and non-English speakers are among the most difficult to count. Read here.
+1
One sorta unrelated story on my mind
CW: Domestic abuse | Whatever Happened to ______ ? (Anonymous, Longreads): “Don’t let anyone make this story into a romanticized and gentle slide into domesticity. As for so many women, the silencing was not gentle at all.” This is the best essay I’ve read in a while. Read here.
Bookshelf
Books and collections I’m currently reading (plus reader-recommended works!)
Just read: Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays, a compilation of 16 essays that form a kind of memoir without adhering to congruent chronology. Reading this collection felt like watching someone I love falter between reality and fiction, reality’s pull a blunt reminder of past trauma. “Again and again, he invents a new, fictional version of himself, only to be banished back to his own singular existence,” Fergus McIntosh wrote for The New Yorker in 2018. “The return to reality stings, but it is accompanied, each time, by a revelation.”
Starting soon: Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which just screams like an evocative, fun read. And I really need a fun, evocative read right now, lol. From Penguin Random House: Daisy Jones & The Six is “a gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous breakup.”
Reader rec from Keerthana Velappan: We Have Always Been Here by queer Muslim writer Samra Habib, who grew up in Pakistan and later fled to Canada amid threats from Islamic extremists. “The men in her life wanted to police her, the women in her life had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved.” (Penguin Random House)
Remember, we always have tons of wonderful stories and resources available at foreignbodies.net.
Love to see it
Shout-outs, thank-yous and more
Much love to Bethany and María for the Twitter love <3
The latest issue of Vesna Jaksic Lowe’s lovely newsletter Immigrant Strong is out! As usual, Vesna highlights some excellent writing by immigrants and refugees. We spy Malaka Gharib!
Sending all the good vibes to reader and Carter Fellow Stephanie Foo, whose book The Unmaking is officially on its way to publishers. Foo’s upcoming work details her personal experience with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, an under-researched psychological condition born from repeated trauma over months or years.
Bestselling Scottish writer Sara Sheridan recently shared this thread of seriously impressive immigrant womxn who left a mark on her country. Check it out:
And to start your week off right, a few words from Native American novelist Louise Erdrich, whose books I’m definitely going to be reserving at my local library this year.
That’s it for now.
Did you absolutely hate this? Open to criticism and suggestions. See ya later!
Love,
Fiza