This literature course focuses on the experiences of first-generation (im)migrants. We will analyze narratives and study how people use them to metabolize new realities and create meaning in the face of loss, alienation, and the demands of cultural assimilation. What rituals of mourning are possible? How can new relationships help us heal and find our role in a new place? What does it mean to hold two places within ourselves, and still be our whole selves? Our readings will include both fiction and nonfiction. Some of the texts we may study include novels such as Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could be Different, memoirs such as Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans, the graphic memoir The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, and the psychological text Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han.