I Was Undocumented for 21 Years. This Is Why I Tell My Story

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For 21 years, I was undocumented. While I am an American citizen now, this fact still remains the boldest and most dangerous thing I can say out loud.
The danger of being undocumented, of course—greatly heightened by President Donald Trump's administration—is of deportation. When my family entered this country, my parents warned me of the possible consequences. 'If you tell anyone you're illegal, they'll report you to Homeland Security,' they'd say. I was four years old.
There's an existential power that deportation holds over the undocumented community. It is another form of death, never to see your loved ones again from home. That's how it felt for me—too young to remember my birth country of Brazil. It's no wonder The Wonderful Wizard of Oz transfixed me as the first book in English I stayed up late to read; it made an image of what deportation might be like: a sudden and violent transport to an unknown realm (or so I'd been told about Brazil, compared to Queens, N.Y., since I could barely remember it when parents came to America) where one's only mission is to return home.
Though I claimed no citizenship in the U.S. at the time, I found citizenship in literature. Literature is an easy place to make a home, and my schoolteachers and librarians invited me out of Oz and onto the American prairie, the English drawing room, and to poetry. They directed me toward Homer, Emily Dickinson, and Audre Lorde. They assigned writing, too; for poetry is never solely to be read. They showed me that part of literature's generosity is that one may try a hand in creating it, in joining the great conversation that crisscrosses generations, cultures, languages, and people—the glorious and the meek. As I became a poet, literature—and the power of the language—continued to be my most stable home.
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Growing up, I wanted to be like Jack Gilbert, Elizabeth Bishop, even Adrienne Rich, poets who I imagined bore traits I perceived as quintessentially American: so cheerful, I thought, in their privileges that they had to conjure their artistic melancholy. So, at the writing table, I pretended my fears were not mine, but of a stranger; and that I was a typical Asian American, whose problems were 'merely' bigotry and, say, filial piety. Problems that I too confronted but felt safer to discuss on the page than my status. Generations of immigrant writers had demonstrated how one writes on such troubles, and it would be expected of me, since I look like an Asian American. Instead of writing about my whole undocumented self, I pretended I was an actor of heroines, like Joan Chen and Gong Li. Someone who surely had no legal problems to obscure from my classmates.
But dishonesty of this nature does not yield good art—at least, not truthful art. And my poems were skittish, little creatures. Like blindfolded sheep, they bumped around the fields of my page, grazing, stumbling, and ultimately beset by the wolves that were my bewildered classmates, who were keen enough readers to notice that these poems weren't quite working, but without the context to understand why.
And how could they? A lifetime of pretending I was just another American meant that when I tried to speak honestly, I couldn't actually do it. Ostensibly, I had much to write about. I could've written about how my father had designed hydroelectric dams in Brazil and then labored at a laundromat in New York City. Or how both my parents survived civil war and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Or how, in the U.S., my mother sought refuge in Dami Mission, a doomsday cult that prophesied a mass rapture to heaven. But these were all unavailable to me; I couldn't write about any of it. I first needed to feel secure to tell my story.
Perhaps it is surprising to learn that even as a naturalized citizen, I remain wary to this day. My green card arrived when I was 27. Yet I did not travel abroad for another seven years, and that was to Canada. The outside world had become forbidden fruit—and an object of dread.
My writing, however, was impatient to change. The year I received my green card, Irish poet and professor Eamon Grennan counseled me. He said: 'Esther, lay bare the narrative field.'
What he meant was, tell the story. Tell my story.
Slowly, I did. My first decent poems imagined parts of my mother's life. What I guessed about her feelings. I wrote about being her daughter. I described my father's voyage from Hong Kong to Brazil by way of Africa. I wrote about Queens. Eventually, I wrote about my own experience of being undocumented. I followed Grennan's advice: I laid bare the narrative field. My first book, titled Cold Thief Place, reads like a memoir in poems. A memoir was not necessarily my intention, but the book does tell the stories of how my mother frog-leaped from marriage to marriage to defect from China. Of how I muddled through my own marriage, which made me eligible to apply for a green card. Of how two signs, 'European only' and 'Black only,' at a post office in South Africa baffled my father.
Telling stories allowed for another discovery: just as I fell in love with the raw, fickleness of the English sentence, its straightforward subject-predicate structure began to enchant me, too. I like a brutally direct poem, with unembroidered language and simple, but elegant, syntax. Such a structure means I cannot hide or delay the revelation of things that are painful but true. I laugh when one of my poems emerges especially dark. It's dark because I was truthful. Sometimes, there is no solace.
Unlike African American poets, we undocumented poets do not hold centuries of literary tradition, with great names like Phillis Wheatley, Lawrence Dunbar, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Among the general population, we cannot identify who is undocumented or a citizen—it is taboo to ask casually what an immigrant's visa status is, or it should be taboo to ask about such private, life-determining matters. Like the LGBTQIA+ community, we undocumented may or may not be 'out' about our status.
Happily, though, there is a 'we.' In 2015, three poets formed the Undocupoets, an organization that I now co-run, with two other formerly undocumented poets, Janine Joseph and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Our organization awards three $500 fellowships each year to other undocumented poets and raises awareness within and without the literary world. As of this writing, Janine has published two books of poems, most recently Decade of the Brain, and Marcelo has published a book of poems and a memoir, titled Children of the Land. My first book, titled Cold Thief Place, came out in March. So this is a young tradition.
Our other work is ensuring that undocumented people and citizens know of this tradition. We don't wish to pass as simply American, as if we do not hold a uniquely American story. Rather, we wish to help archive undocumented art, because we are a fundamental part of this country's history. And we wish to let undocumented writers know that they too are part of a we (if they wish); and that our community is larger than we think. We are vocal; we are present.
Contact us at [e-mail].