The Books I Wish I Had as an Undocumented Child

Katya Suvorova is the author of Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter: A Memoir From the Child of a Mail-Order Bride, out this week from Alcove Press. Below, she discusses three books she wishes she had as an undocumented child.

Growing up undocumented was a lonely experience, spent fearing a traffic stop or trusting the wrong person could lead to being deported or separated from my family. I sometimes didn’t believe we would survive the situations we were in, and I didn’t know any adults who had grown up undocumented.

I wish I had gotten to read stories from adults who had been where I was, but I was far too afraid to go to my librarian and ask, “Do you have any books about undocumented kids like me?”

As an adult, I have found books about undocumented experiences to be deeply healing. If I could go back in time, I would give myself three of my favorite memoirs about undocumented childhoods:

The first is Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country. The memoir is told from her POV as an undocumented Chinese immigrant growing up in New York in the 90s and early 2000s. This book was a balm to my heart. While reading, I was struck by how Qian Julie’s description of the all-consuming stress of being undocumented was so similar to my own memories. I have every available format of this memoir because it is so profoundly meaningful to me.

Before Beautiful Country, I didn’t know we could talk about our undocumented childhoods, even after we got our documents. It had felt too taboo. But after reading it, I started searching for more undocumented stories and came across Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card by Sara Saedi. Sara’s book about her Iranian family is a hilarious and emotional recounting of her childhood and helped me see my own experiences through a more comedic lens, which helped me process and recontextualize difficult parts of my childhood.

There are now many more undocumented stories, but one I deeply wish I could have given my teenage self is The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande. I found Reyna’s nuanced exploration of her strained relationship with her father to be a masterful depiction of how undocumented immigration can shape the very foundation of what family means.

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