Coming to America

5 Historical Novels About the 20th-Century Immigrant Experience

One of the first chapter books I read as a child – Meet Kirsten from the original American Girl series – features a Swedish girl whose family immigrates to Minnesota. As a descendant of immigrants from Finland (Sweden’s Nordic neighbor to the east) who settled in Wisconsin (Minnesota’s Midwestern neighbor to the east) and because my name is similar to the titular character’s, I felt a kinship with this book and fell in love with the American Girl series. I later upgraded my reading to the Dear America and My Name is America middle-grade books, many of which tell immigration stories spanning the last few centuries.

My childhood and young adult reading trajectory consistently included immigrant tales, generally from Europe. I’ve always been fascinated to learn about the histories and circumstances of people from across the globe that have driven them to leave their old lives behind and travel to America, the brightest beacon of freedom in the world. As I’ve become more interested in Asian history over the past few years, many of the books I’ve read include immigration stories from Eastern countries such as Korea and China. Of the following five fictional novels listed here (and one trilogy thrown in for good measure), four of them involve characters from Asia.

1 | The Picture Bride Lee Geum-yi

Translated by An Seonjae

In 1918, 17-year-old Willow agrees to become a picture bride and move from her occupied homeland of Korea, presently under Japanese colonial rule, to the American island of Hawaii with the promise of love and prosperity. She is joined by other Korean and Japanese girls who share the same hopes and dreams. Upon arrival, the girls discover most of the prospective grooms look nothing like the photos they sent, as they are much older and poorer than they presented themselves to be. The young women go through with the weddings despite learning they’ve been lied to. Willow is lucky that her husband is young and handsome as she was assured by the Korean matchmaker, but he is not the wealthy landowner she believed him to be. As Willow and her friends try to settle into their new lives as the wives of plantation workers, the independence movement back in Korea threatens to tear apart the Korean Hawaiian community.

The first three quarters of this book were five stars for me with the last quarter falling flat. A narrator shift at the end felt too jarring and inconsistent with the rest of the book. I would have preferred all the events of the novel to be conveyed from the perspective of the original narrator, Willow. Or rather than first person, the narrative could have been told in third person to facilitate a more seamless transition when the focus shifts from Willow to her daughter. The last section of the book didn’t completely ruin it for me, but I barely recall how it ends because I was so distracted by the change in writing style. The first three quarters of the story is a heartfelt tale of hardship and friendship, betrayal and love. I still rate this book highly. From what I do remember, everything is wrapped up satisfactorily, I just wasn't a fan of the way the author went about it.

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

2 | Brooklyn Colm Tóibín

In post-World War II small-town Ireland, Eilis Lacey feels her young life is going nowhere. When she receives the opportunity to be sponsored by a Catholic priest in America, she decides to take it and sets sail for Brooklyn, New York, leaving her mother and sister behind. She rooms with other Irish girls at a boarding house, finds works in a department store, and starts a relationship with a charming Italian boy. Eilis’s American experience is cut short when a family tragedy back home compels her to return to Ireland. After falling into a new, optimistic routine in her hometown, she must decide whether to stay in Ireland or return to life she made for herself in Brooklyn.

This coming-of-age story, though not without its hardships, is quiet and endearing. Eilis is a conscientious character who aspires for modest happiness and success, making her someone I could root for. I had the sense that regardless of the choice Eilis made, she would live her life to the fullest and never stop dreaming. Though the novel doesn’t involve high-stakes drama, the author kept me engaged and eager to turn the next page.

I watched the 2015 film Brooklyn before I read the book, so I came in with some expectation of how the story would play out. I enjoyed the film and, not surprisingly, enjoyed the book even more. It’s rare that I prefer a movie to the book. If there is a film adaptation, I generally watch it first so I don’t end up hating how it ruined the book. In this case, the film Brooklyn is largely faithful to the novel, so I think it’s watchable regardless of when the book is read.

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

3 | Shanghai Girls Lisa See

Chinese sisters Pearl and May live glamorous lives as calendar girls in 1930s Shanghai until their father gambles away his wealth. To pay back his debts, he sells his daughters off to Chinese American suitors who have traveled from California in search of brides. Before Pearl and May can follow their grooms to America, the Japanese army invades China, causing destruction and chaos in its wake. After a series of perilous situations from encountering Japanese soldiers and witnessing their mother’s brutal death, they make their way to the west coast U.S. immigration station Angel Island, where they face a rigorous entry process due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which was not repealed until 1943). The sisters are eventually reunited with their husbands in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, where they struggle to acclimate themselves to their roles as wives, balancing the old traditions of their in-laws and the Chinese community and the new ways of America.

This would have been a solid 5-star book for me if it weren’t for two factors: 1.) The novel ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger. The characters don’t obtain resolution until the sequel, Dreams of Joy and 2.) An assault scene, though not overly graphic in nature, was so traumatic and hard to read that I had to skim several paragraphs and keep reading the next hundred or so pages to avoid dwelling on it. I’ve read many books that include rape scenes but this one is the most horrifying. I appreciate the author’s handling of the character’s healing process, especially given that this was the unfortunate fate for as many as 80,000 women in the city of Nanking alone when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, but the assault was a bit too disturbing for me. That scene aside, both sisters’ personal journeys are engaging. Full of sorrows and the occasional joy, Pearl and May persevere through every obstacle they face, each one threatening more and more to tear their relationship apart. Their full character arcs are not achieved until the end of Dreams of Joy, so I would highly recommend reading it subsequently to Shanghai Girls. The sequel doesn’t make this list, however, because its focus is on Pearl and her daughter returning to China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s rather than on the immigrant experience in America. My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

4 | Things We Lost to the Water Eric Nguyen

Huong and her two sons arrive in New Orleans in 1979 as refugees of the Vietnam War, separated from her husband as they fled. For many years she remains hopeful that the family will one day be reunited but eventually comes to accept she will never see her husband again. As her sons grow up, they find different ways of coping with the absence of their father and reconciling their Vietnamese identity with their new lives in the United States. Huong and her sons take different paths that lead them farther and farther away from one another until the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina brings them back together.

I don't usually give much consideration to book titles but I thought this one was quite poignant as the wording is unique and the water imagery is interspersed throughout the novel. Among the three alternating points of view, I was mostly interested in Huong’s story, not so much in her sons’ personal journeys. I was thoroughly invested in the ups and downs of her life from escaping Vietnam with her sons while carrying an unborn baby, but unwittingly leaving her husband behind, to struggling to raise her children alone with limited resources in a foreign country only to watch them drifting away from her as they grow older. Despite the hardships the three have faced together – or maybe because of them – it takes a natural disaster to make them realize the value of family as this story of loss ends on a hopeful note of reconciliation.

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

5 | Snow Falling on Cedars David Guterson

This novel follows the lives of two first-generation Japanese Americans who become embroiled in a murder trial on an isolated island off Puget Sound in 1954. Kabuo Miyamoto and his wife Hatsue are American born, so they do not have immigration experiences, though the author delves into the backstories of how their parents arrived in the U.S. and tried to carve out a life for themselves and their children. In flashback scenes, Kabuo, Hatsue, their families, and the rest of the Japanese community are sent away to internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into World War II. Having since returned to the island, Kabuo gets involved in a land dispute with fellow fisherman Carl Heine over an agreement their fathers made before the war. After Carl’s body turns up drowned under suspicious circumstances, Kabuo is charged with his murder and must stand trial in a close-knit community still troubled by the events of the war.

I only gave this book three stars due to the author’s bizarre obsession with defining every character by their sex life (or lack thereof), saturating the pages with irrelevant details I’d rather not know. Otherwise, this could have been a four- or five-star book for me. I was invested in the mystery of the present-day murder trial as well as the flashbacks detailing Kabuo and Hatsue’s family histories and struggles to assimilate with American culture. At the time, having recently watched the film The Last Samurai, I was intrigued to read the brief account of Kabuo’s great-grandfather, a samurai, dying in battle in a final stand against the Meiji Restoration of Japan which sought to destroy the samurai way of life. I found the novel compelling because the trial surrounding the murder of Carl Heine isn’t a complete farce orchestrated to convict a blameless minority. While there is some level of discrimination and anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of the second world war, the evidence genuinely seems to point to Kabuo Miyamoto. As a reader, I understood there was obviously more to the incident than the initial presentation of information. However, it is not a forgone conclusion that Kabuo is innocent. Ultimately, the story restores a measure of faith in humanity – that people can overcome prejudice and emotional wounds to do what is morally right.

My Goodreads Rating: 3 Stars

Ellis Island Trilogy

1 | Ellis Island 2 | City of Hope 3 | Land of Dreams

It would seem remiss to not mention a series of books referred to as the Ellis Island trilogy since if fits perfectly with this theme of coming to America. I read the first book, Ellis Island, mostly for its setting during the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s. This book has a similar premise as Brooklyn: An Irish woman must choose between her new life in New York City and her old life back in Ireland. The two subsequent novels follow the heroine Ellie Hogan as she builds her life in 1930s New York and 1940s Hollywood. I preferred the first book for the storyline in Ireland and found myself less interested in the characters in the second and third books, but all three were relatively enjoyable.

My Goodread Ratings:

Ellis Island: 4 Stars

City of Hope: 3 Stars

Land of Dreams: 3 Stars