Beyond borders
Shanthi Sekaran’s second novel, “Lucky Boy,” was released at the start of the year, days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president. She began writing the book, an affecting and exceptional tale of American immigration, in 2010, when she had the “luxury” of examining the issue slowly and deeply, she says.
Now the book exists in a more fraught context. “Lucky Boy” was recently released in paperback (G.P. Putnam’s Sons; $16) — on the same day that the Trump administration announced an end (albeit not definitive) to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a.k.a. DACA.
The story, set primarily in Berkeley, alternates chapters between the lives of two women. Soli is a young Mexican immigrant who becomes pregnant during her journey across the border to the U.S. Kavya, like Sekaran, is a first-generation Indian American immigrant born in Sacramento and living in Berkeley after graduating from UC Berkeley. As Kavya and her husband struggle to conceive a child, Soli’s baby forces the two stories to collide.
Sekaran spoke about her book by phone from her home in North Berkeley. Her answers have been edited for length. Q: Unlike many books about immigration, yours looks at two very different immigrant experiences in relation to one another. What was your thought process in framing the novel in this way? A: I made Kavya Indian because I usually make my characters Indian. But as I began to develop my story, I started to see that this was a story not just about Soli, and not just about immigrants from Mexico and so on. It was a story about how different categories of immigrants experience America differently — how this is influenced by the types of visas they’re given or not given, and how those early categories kind of play out into multiple generations of family. Q: You say you usually make your characters Indian. Often in writing, there is an assumption that the default mode of a character is white. Is that something that you have had to consciously combat? A: My earliest memories of having to combat that was when I was in my master’s program. I had a professor tell me that if I was going to have an Indian character, I would have to really talk about the fact that they were Indian and really explore their Indian identity in the story. And my viewpoint was, I didn’t want to have a whole sort of treatise on their Indianness. I just wanted an Indian character going through the motions of the story instead of a white one. Q: You’ve said that immigration is the “ultimate story.” Why? A: If you look at the seven basic plot types that we talk about in kinds of writing, immigration can fit into all of those — fighting the beast, the hero’s journey, comedy, tragedy. Immigration works its way into all of these motifs. I think it also speaks to the fact that migration is not just the act of crossing a geographical border. Migration happens to us consistently throughout our lives. Motherhood is a type of migration. Getting married is a type of migration. We migrate constantly throughout our lives, and I think when we look at migration in political terms, we really otherize it. We don’t realize that we constantly are migrating — that these immigrants that we cast as the “other” are actually doing something that your standard American does very frequently throughout their lives.
Q: At one point Kavya acknowledges that even for people like her, a documented immigrant born of means, there still is a prevailing sense to own things quietly. Tell me about including that bit that seems to unify Kavya and Soli’s experiences. A: She says something like, the surest sign of an immigrant is an American flag on the door. And what I was thinking of when I wrote that was, right after 9/11, my parents slapped an American flag sticker right on their car. I was like a 22-year-old, and I was like, why are you doing that? I was getting political. I was talking to them about kneejerk patriotism and that sort of thing. And they were like, “Look, we don’t want our windows smashed in (laughs), so we’re putting this American flag on our car.” So I think there is a pervading and sometimes almost undetectable sense of apprehension in a lot of immigrants, that despite their success, everything they’ve worked for — there’s always this underlying sense that it could be taken away. Q: In the novel, you write of this story as one about mothers and “a law that grew from the deepest roots of their being.” Were there political implications you meant to invoke here? A: Looking back, I wanted to demonstrate that everything political is also deeply personal. Every immigration statistic, every immigrant that we count walking over the border is actually a person. I think we forget that. I think there are a few schools of thought on this, and one school of thought is that you can’t think too personally. You have to think about policy. There’s that policy viewpoint, and there’s the viewpoint that I subscribe to, which is that these stories of individuals are absolutely integral to the understanding of policy, to the understanding of what we’re going to do for the people living in this country. Q: Would your approach be different if you wrote this book in 2017? A: The book would definitely be different. I don’t know that I could write this book because I feel like my mind is just too crowded with everything we’re dealing with politically, especially in relation to undocumented immigrants. Q: What’s your view on the future of legislation surrounding immigration? A: I feel almost like Trump and his cronies have a sort of big bucket list of bigotry that they’re just checking off. Like they all got together over white wine spritzers one night and made this bucket list of all the things they’d love to accomplish over the next four years, and the obliteration of DACA is one of those. And what people are doing now in response is what they’ve done with every sort bigoted and small-minded policy that Trump has tried to enact. We’re calling our senators, we’re demonstrating, we’re protesting. And we’re making our voices heard.