The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 368

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “Assimilation”

Part 4, Chapter 1 Summary

The family become citizens in 1994 and attend a ceremony that remains Nayeri’s “favorite day as an American” (273). She notices Oklahoma’s diverse Asian population for the first time. Nayeri spends her time building a Harvard-caliber resume with the goal of becoming a multilingual corporate lawyer in English and French—not Farsi. She looks down on Oklahoma and little comforts, and she blames Maman for failing her Medical Licensing Exam twice. When Baba calls Nayeri about the birth of a new stepsister, Nayeri is dismissive and pressures Baba to teach the new daughter English.

Nayeri becomes an American Red Cross lifeguard by completing a few swimming tests, and she wins an informal endurance contest by swimming for 97 minutes. Nayeri enters Tae Kwon Do competitions and uses a strenuous diet and exercise routine to drop into a lower weight class. After winning nationals, Nayeri accepts a Dove ice cream bar from her brother and immediately drops the sport.

Nayeri takes seven Advanced Placement classes, including one remote class, one in a different school, one with an afterschool French tutor, and one in the corner of an easier class. She organizes a citywide tutoring program for poor middle-school students. She volunteers at the food bank, and works several jobs. Although she does not receive acceptance into Harvard, she is happy with her Ivy League admission to Princeton.

Part 4, Chapter 2 Summary

In 2017, as Nayeri prepares for her Greece trip, she reluctantly helps a family of recent Christian refugees from Isfahan, Iran. The family includes a woman named Minoo who cares for an ailing husband and two young children. Minoo asks Nayeri for help getting one of her sons into the Arsenal soccer team; Nayeri encourages diligence but also emphasizes schoolwork. At a coffee shop, they compare the “coffin” that Minoo lives in to the cramped arrangement that Nayeri has with Sam, their child, and Sam’s family (285). At her child’s birthday party, Nayeri invites Maman Moti to share her experiences with Minoo, but Maman Moti advises Minoo to learn English and abandon any Iranian ties. Later, Maman tests Minoo’s family on faith and believes that they are too scared to be true Christians.

Nayeri tells Minoo that her daughter will eventually “become English! […] And you shouldn’t be frightened” (291). Nayeri enjoys seeing the children but struggles with completing legal documents for the Camden Council (the local housing authority) and with Minoo’s refusal to take advantage of London’s culture. Nayeri remembers earlier advice that she should except refugees to slowly walk through this process, but she also has nightmares about Minoo being an Iranian agent.

Eventually, they find out that her caseworker never put her on a list for subsidized private housing. Nayeri fights this, but the council insists on its own translator. Later, the council uses Minoo’s husband as an excuse to deny the family a second-floor apartment and pleas on behalf of the children because of their age. It later forbids Nayeri from direct communications because she is a writer even though she never hid her profession.

Part 4, Chapter 3 Summary

Nayeri joins 40 organizations and several hundred women for an International Women’s Day protest on March 8, 2018. Organized by Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu’s organization, Women for Refugee Women, the protest demands the closure of the Yarl’s Wood detention center, which holds refugees and other immigrants for months at a time. After release, the refugees fall into an exploitative underground society of household labor, sex work, and childcare. Shola’s classes focus not on teaching women labor skills, but on awakening them to their own rights and intelligence. Nayeri compares the effects of these courses to her personal awakening from her mother’s teachings and Ralph Waldo Emmerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance.” She believes that the “Capable Immigrant” with no fear of change should be refugees’ aspiration (307).

Nayeri thinks of a time after Elena’s birth where she experienced her own sense of displacement. She travels to Berlin and meets with Syrian refugees: a writer who feels discouraged by his limited electricity; a young man who masks the dehumanizing treatment he endures at the detention center; and another who can’t care for his sick mother because the government denies access to him. She also recalls a trip to Turkey with Philip, where she meets a young Iranian woman who asks how she could acquire a husband like him.

Part 4, Chapter 4 Summary

In 2011, Nayeri is recovering from her divorce from Philip and becoming frustrated over sexist expectations by her mother and American society. She decides to reconnect with her heritage by joining a circle of Iranian medical students at the University of Iowa and falls in love with an American-born Persian who was as “cynical and cruel and insecure” as she was (315). She enjoys their company and learning new Farsi slang. When she invites them over to her place, however, they become upset with her dated sensibilities and a joke about marrying a Javad—the Iranian equivalent to a hipster. She drifts away from the group as she realizes that she is indulging in “new exile theater” (317). Paul of Refugee Support notes that volunteer-refugee romance is dangerous because the connection between passion and freedom overwhelms the volunteer.

In the present, Nayeri compliments a Bulgarian housekeeper on her newlywed daughter’s dress and dancing but accidentally embarrasses the housekeeper. A counselor tells Nayeri that she is trying too hard to impress the housekeeper. Nayeri recalls times where immigrants in crowds touched her in ways that may have been common in their home countries but register as harassment in the West. Assimilation is a strange process wherein natives expect immigrants to adopt their mannerisms, and in turn the natives will be allowed to enjoy the aspects of the natives’ culture the natives deem suitable. Immigrants in turn police their own actions, such as criticism of Jewish writer Philip Roth, some of whose characters could appear anti-Semitic. In contrast to these manipulative social forms, assimilation should truly be about building an emotional connection to a land and country. Nayeri remembers a time when a pastor tells her that they have a letter from Baba. When the pastor learns that he’s wrong, his shame over the broken promise impresses Nayeri more than if she had received the letter.

Part 4 Analysis

Nayeri examines “shame, past selves, and the chameleon life” as she grapples with her assimilation and meets others in the same process (267). She begins her quest to enter an Ivy League school, revealing an ultracompetitive past self. Rather than pursue volunteer work and activities for their own sake, she calculates which ones will be most impressive for the highly competitive admissions process. She does not pursue swimming competitions despite her training because wealthy girls have an advantage in training and resources. She works herself to the point of collapse to meet her desired weight class in Tae Kwon Do, and although she quits as soon as she meets her goal, she learns the lesson that it takes three weeks to form a habit and transform “into anything you are pretending to be” (281). She also regularly watched the inspirational football movie Rudy, where a man with special needs becomes high-achieving in an unexpected area.

Nayeri uses the sexism and mediocrity around her to motivate herself. She resolves to win a swimming contest after seeing one of the boys grope a girl. The guidance counselor doesn’t encourage her goals, her teachers criticize her for making mug coasters even when she was acing the class, and the rug dealer turned away future purchases after her large initial output.

However, Princeton and Harvard prove disappointing: Christian fundamentalism pervades these schools as much as in Oklahoma, and Nayeri finds that people treat Philip’s career as more important despite her greater achievements. She now sees these efforts as an attempt to be perfect for Western audiences and vows to end her “immigrant inferiority complex” (311). But while Nayeri enjoys their company, she is too far ahead of her new friends in the assimilation process. Her understanding of Iranian culture is too outdated, and her attitudes remain Western. For example, she plays a Farsi rap song, recorded outside of Iran, that mocks the Gashte-Ershad to someone who knows the consequences too well. Nayeri sees herself as a chameleon, leaning on her Western and Iranian identities when convenient. She doesn’t see herself as bad as her American-born Iranian boyfriend, who hangs out with various groups but does not understand their experiences, but she distances herself from the Iranian group once she realizes that she’s living vicariously through them.

The situation with Minoo exposes both how Nayeri’s family views assimilation and the attitude of British authorities. Maman thinks the Christian refugees are lying about their faith even though their experience is similar to her own. Maman Moti disapproves of any connection with other refugees, and even while Nayeri grapples with it, this is a common attitude among refuges. Nayeri also notes that Maman still dotes on Maman Moti despite her academic achievements.

As in the Netherlands, Nayeri sees the English local council’s actions as bureaucratic and intentionally obtuse, even feeling that other refugees would shun her if they knew what happened in some interviews. As Nayeri sees it, the United Kingdom Independence Party’s (UKIP) anti-immigrant slogan “Integration, not multiculturalism” reflects a fear of change, and immigrants are more likely to respond with “posturing” than a true assimilation (296). The path of true assimilation is different for everyone, and she uses several literary and religious sources to explain this process. Saint Augustine’s Confessions includes a section where he does not want his conversion to be too swift, reflecting how true change is nonlinear and, like Cartesian foundationalism, may involve foundational elements of character. According to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, however, a rapid conversion is just as valid as it is the product of something for which the mind has unconsciously prepared. Nayeri compares this to Charles Baxter’s writing advice that the truest stories focus on a transformative “axis-tilt” (298).

Nayeri then considers when her own transformation began. It may have happened before she left Iran when she first saw her teacher without the hijab or decided to focus on education. She also argues the importance of her mother’s influence on her becoming a feminist as well as her reading of Ralph Waldo Emmerson’s “Self-Reliance”, which extols transition that turns “all riches into poverty, all reputation to shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside” (307). Emerson’s work changes her negative view of her transitory periods in life. Nayeri observes the exploited immigrants on International Women’s Day who fight against a system that forces them into society’s underbelly, where they live under constant deportation threats. Immigrants instinctively try to please native citizens, but Nayeri believes capability and self-agency are more important.