Week 2 – Migration, Diaspora, and Resilience. (May 8 to 14)
Every journey begins before the boat, before the border, before the leaving. It begins in the place that became unsafe, or unlivable, or simply somewhere a future could no longer be imagined – or somewhere a different future called. Migration is not a single event. It is a long unfolding – a negotiation between what was carried and what must be let go, a tension between the experiences held in the body and the experiences required to survive.
Asian, Arab, and Pacific Islander communities have crossed oceans under colonial flags and fled wars that others started. They have arrived in countries that did not want them, and yet – having navigated exclusion laws, xenophobia, occupation, and displacement across centuries – they have kept thriving.
What diaspora produces is not grief alone. It produces literature, music, ceremony, and coalition. It produces people who carry two worlds, with a complex relationship to both.
Voices of the Crossing
Ocean Vuong arrived in the United States as a refugee from Vietnam at age two, raised in Hartford, Connecticut, by a mother who could not read in any language. His debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter written to that mother: the defining act of diaspora made visible. Vuong writes from inside the wound of intergenerational trauma, bravely allowing it to be uncomfortably honest..
The Korean American poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong grew up in Los Angeles as the daughter of Korean immigrants, navigating the particular invisibility the United States reserves for those it calls the model minority. Her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning names what diaspora does to the interior life: the shame, the cognitive dissonance, the rage that fits nowhere in the dominant story of either culture. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and Time 100 honoree, Hong writes from inside the heart, mind, and body of what it means to be “othered” in both worlds.
Tusiata Avia is a poet and performer of Samoan and Aotearoa (New Zealand European) descent, born in Christchurch during the era of Dawn Raids, violent government sweeps targeting Pacific Islander communities that New Zealand has since formally apologized for. Avia’s spoken word performances from her book of poems, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt has toured from Moscow to Off Broadway. Her collection The Savage Coloniser won New Zealand’s highest poetry prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, making Avia the first Pacific woman in the award’s 53-year history to claim it.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian American poet born in Seattle and raised across the Arab world before the Gulf War displaced her family back to the United States. Her grandfather was the poet laureate of Jordan; she grew up watching him write with a fountain pen at the breakfast table.. Her 2024 collection Something About Living won the National Book Award for Poetry. At the ceremony she wore a Palestinian thobe and dedicated the prize to Palestinians living and lost. Their work, Something About Living or Kaan and Her Sisters supports The Institute for Middle East Understanding in its work of making Arab voices heard.
“Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, ‘it’s been an honor to serve my country.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Reflection: What has been carried across generations in your own family, spoken or unspoken, that shapes who you are today? What would it look like for your congregation to move beyond solidarity from a distance into genuine relationship with immigrant and diaspora communities?
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