What Being the Daughter of Immigrants Taught Me About Writing

I spent the first half of my life basically trying to ignore the fact that my parents were immigrants. I don't think I was alone in feeling that my cultural 'differentness' was not something I waved about with the pride that maybe I should have. Different language, different food, different family - these things, while I didn't denigrate to my english speaking, Protestant faith, Capital C Canadian friends I also didn't celebrate. I tried to ignore those aspects of my life by not really talking about them. I could never really forget them entirely, mind you. After all my name was a big red flag that shouted 'different'. Every time a friend came over and met my limited english speaking parents and knew a pig had just been slaughtered in the barn shouted 'different'. Every time I had to take part in the Portuguese club dances or functions or whatever the community had going said 'different'. To me, the fact that my parents were immigrants was always more of a liability in my younger days never a plus. I never thought about what their being immigrants could actually teach me. What a gift it was to me in becoming who I am today. A writer.

Next week I'll be sitting on my very first writers panel. It's being held at York University and the symposium's title is "Narratives of the Portuguese Diaspora: Emmigration and Identity." The writers panel is supposed to discuss how emmigration has affected our writing. I can certainly talk about my novel, the plot and themes and connect it all to the issues of emmigration specific to the Portuguese experience. But what this topic has really started me thinking about is how being the child of immigrants influenced me in taking the first step toward becoming a writer. The life lessons my parents immigant experience taught me - even if I didn't realize them at the time - they were invaluable and sustained me as I struggled through the last seven years.

So, what are those life lessons? First, and most importantly, ...

Have a Dream
My father and mother were raised during the depression and WWII years in abject poverty under an oppressive dictatorship. They truly had nothing but their family and their dreams to sustain them. My father dreamed of owning his own land one day - being his own boss. That dream sustained him when he was a young married man with a child to raise and no job to be found anywhere. That dream sustained him when faced with the most adverse conditions and experiences when he emmigrated. Experiences I never expect to be faced with but it taught me the importance of holding on to your dreams. I had a dream to write one day. That dream lived inside me until I was ready to ...

Take a Risk
Dreams are a wonderful thing to have but without following through on them - without taking a risk - that's all they are and they will remain just as insubstantial. My father took the biggest risk - leaving his young family and travelling to an unknown world, with an unknown language, to an unknown and harsh geography, with no definite job and no guarantees. My mother left her family - unwillingly. She took the greatest risk of all becaue she was terrified to leave the only home and place she'd ever known.

I took a risk and decided to stop dreaming and start writing. It was exhilerating and terrifying at the same time. But I was only able to continue because my parents taught me to …

Persevere When Faced with Adversity/Rejection
When my father first came here he traveled for the first year from city to city, town to town, from south to north and east to west - literally looking everywhere for a job. He was constantly told "No. I don't need you." "Try again next month." "Can't pay you what I said. Here's half of what I owe you." "Sorry. Thought I needed you but we're cutting back."
He never gave up looking. He persevered.

Reading a letter or email that says "Sorry. Not for me" about the novel you sweated bullets over is peanuts when I remember what my father and mother went through. Which leads directly to the next life lesson my immigrant parents taught me …

Always Work Hard
My dad took any job he could get. Mostly as an itinerant farm labourer for years until he finally got a job as a lumberjack in a remote logging community in Northern Ontario. A dangerous, risky job in horrendous conditions for years (one day I'm going to write about those stories he told me about). Then, finally, after achieving his dream of owning his own farm he still had to put in hours and hours of backbreaking labour while he also worked in an auto factory assembly line and then as a janitor. Four hours of sleep a night for years. Crushing debt for years. But what got him through those years was his never-ending, never-failing work ethic.

It taught me that if you work hard, if you take pride in doing jobs you hate but need to get your dream in the end - if you keep writing and do it well - you earn the respect of others, but mostly you earn something even more important: self-respect.

But it wasn't just about perseverance and hard work. My parents couldn't have survived without a critically important factor …

Join a Community
The Portuguese, like many immigrants who have left their families behind, join with others of their culture for support, for understanding, for comfort especially when faced with so many pressures that quitting and going back home seems like the best solution sometimes. But because you have others to commiserate with, others who share your struggles, it keeps you going for another day, another week, another year.

Writers understand the importance of communities and I, for one, knew that I needed the support and understanding of fellow writers if I was going to survive this journey.
But, ultimately, what I learned the most from my parents and their immigrant experience and what I carry over to my writing and through my writing is this …

Family is the Most Important Thing
No matter what you do, never let your dreams and the work that is involved in realizing those dreams, take precedence over your family. Even though I knew my parents worked abnormally hard at what they did - even though I sometimes resented having to help with so many tasks and didn't always have a parent to take me to the park or have vacations like my friends did - I always knew and felt that my parents were working so hard for me and my brother. Yes, it was their dream but we were also their dream and everything they did was for ultimately for us.

So, like a lot of things, you come to realizations much later than you should in life. Today I know I am a writer because my immigrant parents taught me to have a dream, take a risk, peresevere, work hard, join a community and put your family first. They taught me well.

Obrigado, Mae and Pai!

On Writing What You Know and Cultural Heritage

I just finished reading the Giller nominated Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa. Mr. De Sa is a fabulous Toronto author of Portuguese descent and since I haven't found many novels about the Portuguese-Canadian immigrant experience (and since my own book was inspired by the 2006 immigration crackdown on illegal Portuguese workers here in Canada) I was really looking forward to reading it.

I was not disappointed.

Barnacle Love is such a beautifully written book. I read it in one evening straight. Even though it's about a particular Portuguese-Canadian immigrant and second-generation family experience the book touches on so many universal themes of family obligation, love, entanglement, despair, hopes, dreams that make all families so uniquely screwed up that no matter your heritage there would be something there for any reader to connect with.

But because I am a second-generation Portuguese-Canadian I read so much in those pages that I intrinsically understood, so many characters that I recognized from my own childhood, so many experiences that I remember so vividly it enraptured me. Not many of my Canadian friends, for example, can identify with the fascination and horror when your Dad slaughters a pig in your garage. Ya, that experience is seared into my memory and Mr. De Sa captured the sights, smells and behaviours so vividly it felt like he'd been in my small, rural farm in southern Ontario instead of four hours away in big city Toronto. Suffice to say that the book really, really resonated with me.

And that's why writing about 'what you know' is about so much more than just making you as a writer feel comfortable about your story or your characters. As I was growing up - heck, even now still - it was so rare to find stories with characters that reflected my personal cultural background, my immigrant family experience. It made me feel like stories about people like us just weren't that interesting. Nobody was writing about us (that I'm aware of)twenty years ago. Mr. De Sa proved through Barnacle Love that's not the case anymore. Maybe it's because we have to wait a certain amount of time - the second-generation is now getting to the age where we can look back at the experience and see it more clearly. It's taken a while - for me, anyway - to recognize that Portuguese-Canadians have a unique, interesting history that should be shared. And we all, regardless of our background, have common human experience and feelings that we can understand regardless of where we come from.

And I really want more books with Portuguese-Canadian characters out there - especially for young adults. I guess that's one of the reasons I wrote Illegally Blonde. I hear so often that the children of Portuguese immigrants aren't moving into postsecondary education as fast or with as many numbers as other immigrant groups. Why?? I don't know why there aren't more Portuguese-Canadian authors (or Portuguese-American authors for that matter)out there right now. There is so much rich history and stories to be mined! It's not that I think all writers with a particular heritage need to write about that heritage. But, boy, if there's a story there why not?? Books reflect society and we have such a multicultural society here why isn't there more diversity in the books out there?? Yes, it's getting better but, boy, it can sure improve a lot more.

While I'm not only going to be writing about characters that come from the same cultural background as I do my whole life I do know that my heritage helped me with writing and selling Illegally Blonde. I'd written other books before this one but, for some reason, Illegally Blonde - about a young girl of Portuguese heritage who is forced to leave Canada and recognize that who she is and where she comes from plays a huge role in who she will eventually become - was the first book of mine that captured a lot of agent and editor interest. It will be the first book I have published (I certainly hope it won't be the last!) And while the story is certainly fiction (I've never been deported so I only hope I capture the feelings of my protagonist well enough to be believeable!)I hope there is enough there in terms of my understanding of the Portuguese setting, the protagonists family and the conflicting feelings that a second-generation daughter of immigrant parents continually has with her family to make it a little bit more believeable for the reader. I've experienced that weird mixture of love and respect mingled with anger and frustration for parents who have one foot planted in their old country and one in their new while both of yours are so firmly rooted in the new.

While there are many, many other stories I want to tell that may not touch on families and the immigrant experience, I have a feeling that I will always have a special connection with characters who inhabit that experience. And, if I've done a good enough job maybe, just maybe, that little bit of understanding and experience that I do have will make the story feel a little more real.