Drop Dead Diva, Deportation, and a Dream

Click here to watch the clip at mylifetime.com.

Drop Dead Diva, an original Lifetime program, is a scripted show about a young fashion model named Deb who dies in a car accident and comes back to life as Jane, an older, wiser, plumper attorney. The latest episode had a storyline about Jane's assistant, Terry (played by comedian Margret Cho), whose cousin, a young man that she and her mother raised from infancy, is arrested on a minor charge, found guilty of a misdemeanor, and ordered to return to South Korea, although he has lived in the U.S. his entire life and, until his arrest, did not know he was an illegal immigrant.

Because this is an uplifting show about human experience, the storyline has a happy ending when Jane, the young man's defender, finds a loophole discovering that her client's biological father was a North Korean and argues asylum. But reality is not as kind as prime time programming. In our real court system this young man would have been deported, or--if he had the means--been held in a detention center for an unknown amount of time as he fought for asylum. In our real court system, immigration hearings are never so neatly and happily tied up.

It is sad to think how many real stories begin much like this fictionalized one, but end very differently. There are infants and children brought into this country every day, without say or explanation. My own mother was brought into the country illegally as an infant by her parents, and she never understood why her father would leave her behind in L.A. every time he took her younger sister and brothers to visit family in Baja California. (She began to believe she wasn’t his daughter.) These things do happen, but unfortunately they happen to people who don’t have the luck of fictional T.V. characters who can afford high class lawyers. No, the real world is much much harsher.

Perhaps the result of Drop Dead Diva’s immigration storyline is unbelievable, but it is good to see a prime time show presenting a story on immigrant rights through a recurring character (Cho) that the audience has connected with. And also, that the story focused on a Korean American family because we are all connected in these stories.

If you are interested in immigrant rights for children of immigrants you can check out the Dream Act and sign a petition here, or get active here.

Publishing News

This month, I am excited to share the unbelievable news that I have poems published in the fall issues of two fantastic journals:

The Los Angeles Review Issue 6-"Photograph of a Secret"

PALABRA Issue 5-"El Capitan of Isla Negra"

Both of these poems are examples of my attempts at magical realism, and are inspired by South American writers Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and the colors, language, and images of that rich continent.

Now back to my other work. This week I am conducting an interview with Kaliso Mwanza, an immigrant from Zambia. His story of struggle and triumph is incredibly inspiring considering he escaped a life-threatening situation in Zambia only to find himself in an impossible one, nameless and without representation inside U.S. detention centers.

More on Kaliso and Lito Aquino: Part II, to come soon.

Angel Island

I wrote my first immigration persona poem while at Antioch. I had started researching poems written inside U.S. detention centers: Japanese internment camps, Guantanamo Bay, and Angel Island. I first learned about Angel Island during my undergrad. I was taking a combination class from both the Asian American Studies and Latino American Studies departments on immigration. There were two professors, and they took turns lecturing on their area of expertise. One day the Asian American professor was lecturing on the immigration of the Chinese, the discriminatory ordinances they had to endure, and The Chinese Exclusion Act that barred entry to immigrants based on their Chinese background. And he said in passing, "You know that's when they started writing poems on the walls at Angel Island."

Angel Island has been considered the Ellis Island of the west, but as Ellis welcomed, as it says on the Statue of Liberty "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," Angel Island's main purpose was to keep Asian immigrants, namely the Chinese, out. One of the only ways a Chinese immigrant could enter the country is if he could prove citizenship through relatives already living in the country. The only way to prove such things was to endure hours of interrogation. This created "paper sons:" boys and men who claimed citizenship through false papers. Individuals were held at Angel Island from anywhere from two days to two years.

In 1970, thirty years after the detention headquarters was closed, a park ranger discovered characters etched into the walls of the old living quarters. As immigrant hopefuls were detained at Angel Island waiting to find out their fate, it seems they began to scribe poems about their journey, about Angel Island, about their heartache and hope, on the walls of their barracks.




Back at Antioch I started to research more into this topic. I read the book Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. And as I worked Jenny Factor, one of my mentors at Antioch, suggested I try writing my own poem in response to what I was reading, and that's how this project first began.

An interview from Island:

"My family pushed me to come. They wanted me to make a better living. They couldn't send my older brother because he was too old to match the age of my uncle's paper son. I studied (coaching papers) for a whole summer at school. It included many, many generations. I had to remember everyone's name, the birthday, and if they passed away, when. And you had to know the different points of the village, what it looked like. I remember I had an English cap that we picked up in Hong Kong and inside the cap, my father hid some coaching notes, so that once in a while, I could refresh my memory. But I never had a chance to look at them, because you're among people all the time and you don't trust anyone. There was no private place where I could be alone to study them. One time, they were playing catch with my cap and they didn't understand why I was so upset. I was scared." --Mr. Wong, age 12 in 1933.

From my poem “Boy in an English Cap”*

Father hid coaching notes
inside grey lining of an English cap.
I wear it on board President Lincoln
to shield from harsh ocean winds.
I pray it will land in good fortune.
Papers nestling above thoughts;
head aches under the weight
of an English cap, secrets it carries.
English key to a riddle
I do not understand. Father says
it will unlock my future in distant
golden lands.

*Poems I hope to publish at a later time will only appear on this blog in portions.

The Beginning

This morning at about 3:30am I woke up from a restless summer sleep with an idea. Over the last two years I've been working on an MFA in poetry. In that time, I've written a lot of poems about a lot of different things, but have not had one idea that I would want to work on for a book. But tonight something may have come to me. I have written a couple of poems about immigration, detention, and internment. Some of them are persona poems taken from stories, or interviews I read in books. But what if I was the one doing the interviewing? Would people be interested in telling me their stories? Imagine the kind of stories that are out there? Imagine how similar and yet completely unique each story would be. This is The Immigration Project.

My idea for this blog to gain interest in what I'm doing, and by gaining interest perhaps some people will be willing to tell their story, and perhaps even allow it to become a piece of poetry. Immigration is not a new topic in this country, but it continues to make headlines as if it is new. My hope is that by people telling their stories, people from all ethnic and religious backgrounds, we can gain some understanding of each other. At least that's the idea that came to me at 3:30 in the morning on a hot and restless night.