Everyone has a journey with their language languages are the way we see this world. They are deeply connected to stories about family, travels, and living across countries, which then shape our identities. But what is our relationship with the languages we speak or write in? And how do we write about languages that matter to us?

The immigrant experience has deeply influenced American culture, shaping myths that underscore the “New World” ideal. These myths, explored by historians and writers alike, offer both factual and humanized insights into immigrant life. While American modernism often idealized Asian languages through a limited Orientalist lens, the global prevalence of English has prompted innovative bilingualism in Asian American literature. Asian diasporic writers now experiment with English, blending languages to capture complex identities and bridge the cultural divides between their past and present. This sets a foundation for works like Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Tsai, a biracial, queer, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein.

All too often, migrant literature is thoughtlessly redistributed within the ranks of postcolonial literature based on the author’s country of origin or current residence. These hasty groupings have a detrimental effect on the genre of migrant literature that oversimplifies its complex nature. Descriptors like “in-between”, “shifting” or “rootless” aren’t viewed as limitations by authors or critics, but as vital elements of the genre itself. It is important to establish separate criteria in order to differentiate migrant literature from its peer of postcolonial literature and to distinguish it as a fundamental genre within the world literature sphere. Tsai’s Unwieldy Creatures, which incorporates both Mandarin and Indonesian words, emphasizes this inherent value of dual linguistic and cultural perspectives, underlining migrant literature as distinct from national or strictly postcolonial categories.

In Postcolonial Asylum, David Farrier emphasizes how refugee literature and art, though often overlooked, contribute uniquely to postcolonial theory’s scope, particularly its “extraterritorial” approach. Even in, Why I Write in English, to tell the stories of her family in China without the threat of censorship, Yang Huang had to look beyond Mandarin.

When writing fiction in this genre, what ends up being rewritten are histories. Its meaning lies in its action. It is an endeavour a migrant writer undertakes because they need to get something out or set something right or understand something confusing.

With retelling, as is the case with Tsai’s Frankenstein, we have an endpoint even though we might not know where we are going when we embark. Memory is a sticky, windy ball of all the paths we’ve walked rolled up together. Creative or imaginative literature has the power to reflect complex and ambiguous realities that make it a far more plausible representation of human feelings and understandings than many of the branches of scientific research. With migration writing experiences, above all topics, the levels of ambivalence, hybridization and plurality, of shifting identities and transnationalism are perhaps greater than in many other aspects of life.

Tsai’s reimagining of Frankenstein explores the psychological and social tensions of “otherness” in a society that views non-conforming identities as “alien,” merging themes of both cultural and personal hybridity. This act of retelling serves as a sanctuary exercise, where migrant writers aim to make sense of fragmented histories, identity, and belonging.

Immigrant novels and fictional literature often explore themes of social marginalization and the national landscape through the eyes of recent arrivals, blending American literary styles like realism and naturalism. These works highlight urban life, social reform, and linguistic diversity, capturing the “hybrid” cultural identities of immigrants who balance the pressures of assimilation with a search for roots. In postcolonial theory, this concept of “hybridity” describes the unique, in-between space migrants inhabit as they navigate complex cultural identities.

Stuart Hall reminds us that identity is not about being but about becoming. It is a process, never finished, always unfolding within representation. For queer and biracial migrants, this means resisting the imposition of fixed categories. Paul Gilroy’s concept of diasporic consciousness, especially his distinction between “routes” and “roots,” underscores this resistance—emphasizing movement, circulation, and hybridization over essentialist belonging.

In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the protagonist writes letters to a mother who cannot read them, an act that is both tender and defiant. Language becomes a space of refusal, of indirect address. This reverberates Rey Chow’s notion of “coercive mimeticism”: the pressure on racialised subjects to perform legible versions of themselves for a dominant gaze. But Vuong performs opacity instead.

Similarly, in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, queer longing is rendered in the quiet grammar of domestic life. Desire travels through misrecognition. It is this refusal to “be” one thing that makes the narrative powerful.

Chicana author Gloria E. Anzaldúa, a major figure in the fields of Third World Feminism, Postcolonial Feminism, and Latino philosophy explained the author’s existential sense of obligation to write multilingual literature. An often-quoted passage, from her collection of stories and essays entitled Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, states:

“Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue – my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence“.

In other poignant examples, multilingual novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie display phrases in Igbo with translations, as in her early works Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is an example of Chicano literature that leaves Spanish words and phrases untranslated (though italicized) throughout the text.

Giroux defines literacy as the active engagement in reclaiming one’s voice, history, and future. A writer’s native language should be actively incorporated into the writing process, for the use of the native language allows individuals to discuss their experiences authentically and retain cultural ties.

To sum it up, a quote by David Santos aptly concludes;

“In addition to being Other (as all immigrants are), being queer places me even further on the outside. Unlike many Black immigrants to the United States and Europe, my reasons for emigrating were not economic, nor was I a refugee. Being gay and “out” in The Bahamas means facing strong social and religious stigmas, the potential loss of a job, family, social status, and most of all, loss of dignity. Yet, having arrived in gay-friendlier countries, I still find myself an outsider. Being queer means that even among fellow immigrants, I don’t belong. I am Other to the other Others”.

To write as a queer, biracial immigrant is to write from contradiction. It is to write from a place that is always in motion, and always becoming. It is to occupy, in Bhabha’s terms, a Third Space of enunciation, where meaning is made in transit, not at arrival. Asians in America, particularly as their population grew, became symbolic “outsiders” often characterized as economically beneficial yet culturally “foreign,” reminiscent of Tsai’s portrayal of characters who do not fit neatly into binary identities. These characters’ visibility disrupts societal ideals of purity and belonging, just as immigrants challenge a singular national identity, which Tsai critiques by exposing the violence in reducing complex beings to simplistic, digestible categories. The novel thus becomes a study of race, identity, and the painful demands of assimilation and belonging.

References:

·  Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.

·  Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.

·  Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.

·  Chow, R. (2002). The Protestant ethnic and the spirit of capitalism. Columbia University Press.

·  Chuh, K. (2003). Imagine otherwise: On Asian Americanist critique. Duke University Press.

·  Eng, D. L., & Han, S. (2000). A dialogue on racial melancholia. In D. L. Eng & D. Kazanjian (Eds.), Loss: The politics of mourning (pp. 343–371). University of California Press.

·  Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press.

·  Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 222–237). Lawrence & Wishart.

·  Nguyen, V. T. (2016). Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war. Harvard University Press.

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Sanandita Chakraborty is currently pursuing her MA in Gender Studies, with an academic background in history. Her research interests include feminist media theory, postcolonial critique, and alternative epistemologies. She has published in peer-reviewed and student-led journals and continues to write at the cusp of the personal and the political.