How Writing about Immigration Helped Me Find Home

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I first arrived in the United States on February 7, 2001, exactly twenty-two years before the publication date of my immigration thriller Extreme Vetting. From my limited experience living in Romania when its borders were closed, and then when traveling abroad was too expensive, I imagined the Seattle metropolitan area as a different kind of Bucharest. A place where I could fit in. I’d make new friends and devote myself to my software development job, but now with the freedom to shape my own life.

More than two decades later, I know how unrealistic that expectation was. Fitting in was never in the books for me, no matter how much I learned about my adoptive country and how hard I tried to sound like a native. What I initially imagined was just a temporary label—immigrant—given to me by the corporate lawyers applying for my green card, has become my identity. And it took the writing of an immigration thriller for me to accept my otherness.

First, I should explain how I came to write an immigration thriller.

Since the presidential campaign of 2016, “immigrant” has become a dirty word for many American voters. In 2018, I heard the president of the United States at a rally compare immigrants to venomous snakes that should be crushed underfoot. I was heartbroken for days.

Anti-immigrant politicians like Trump prefer to tell a simple story: foreigners come to America to take advantage of our generous taxpayer dollars. These politicians lead their voters to believe that anyone who crosses the border can become a citizen, then bring in their families, even their friends and neighbors if they’re so inclined. The reality is that an immigrant goes through a lengthy and complicated process in order to obtain permanent residence in the US, a required step toward citizenship. And millions are locked out of that byzantine system altogether, with no path to legal status.

Every time I heard simplistic solutions to our immigration problems—build a wall or punish refugees so they won’t seek asylum anymore—I wanted to shout that immigration didn’t work like that. But thousands of op-eds, social media threads, and research papers taught me that facts didn’t change minds in this case. Maybe storytelling could? When I saw the president trying to dehumanize immigrants by comparing us to snakes, I felt the need to affirm our humanity. What’s more human than storytelling? I wanted to tell a story that gives readers a clear sense of how complex and broken our immigration process really is. And I wanted to write a fast and entertaining story, so I decided on a legal thriller, though I usually write speculative fiction.

Extreme Vetting takes place in Seattle, Washington, in 2019. Here’s a quick synopsis. An immigration lawyer fights to keep her client from being deported to the country where his family was murdered many years ago. Then she finds out the killers are coming here—for both of them. Laura, the protagonist, is an immigrant herself, guiding her clients through a Kafkaesque system of ever-changing rules, where overworked judges make life-shattering decisions in minutes. One of the villains is an expert at exploiting this complex system as the ICE chief prosecutor in the region. Another is a black-market data broker obsessed with the genetic superiority of his ancestors.

To write such a story, I had to do a lot of research, even though I’d been through the immigration process twice. I started by focusing on the legal framework, so I interviewed an immigration lawyer extensively. I read news stories about asylum applications and immigration courts. I read books about my characters’ home countries. For Laura’s backstory, I drew from my experience leaving Romania and arriving alone in a foreign country that was too difficult at times to understand. As I wrote the novel, the many ways in which immigrants differ from native citizens became apparent to me like never before. Here are a few examples.

As immigrants, we never fully recover from breaking off with the language, food, and customs we were born with. Most times there are no support structures and no role models for the new life we’re trying to build in our adoptive country. The family we left behind and the family we start here are sometimes half a planet away. We can’t be in two places at once, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel guilty about it. Writing about the cultural heritage of my characters helped me remember my early days in Seattle, when I believed in my freedom to shape my new life, unaware how many aspects had already been decided because I was a foreigner.

The immigrants in my story are parents like me, and we all share the struggle to connect with the popular culture of our American-born children. Parents usually become “kind of cringe” to their growing kids, but making mistakes in your children’s everyday language is a special kind of torment. I have a master of fine arts in creative writing, and I still make mistakes in the language of my adoptive citizenship. Writing my immigrant characters’ lines of dialogue reminded me that we would never sound native in English, no matter how hard we try.

My protagonist uncovers a deadly conspiracy involving ICE, stolen data, and human trafficking. She saves people’s lives. She must keep her daughter and her client’s sons safe from angry killers. By all accounts, she’s a good person. But writing about her bravery and resilience reminded me of the expectations people have of immigrants. We must be hard-working and law-abiding, and if one of us does something wrong, it reflects poorly on all of us. In my thriller, I portrayed Laura and her client Emilio as good immigrants, but I wondered what kind I was.

My first title for the thriller was Where’re You From?, the question immigrants have to answer all our lives, a reminder that we’re never seen as being from here. But Extreme Vetting seemed like a ready-made thriller title, the name coined by our entertainment-minded president for his program of excessive and enhanced scrutiny of immigrants, including naturalized citizens. The prospect of a second term for an administration determined to implement extreme vetting to the fullest made me fear for my family’s future in the US. When life in our country becomes unbearable, we immigrants know better than anyone how hard it is to start anew somewhere else—if that’s the only option.

With the stark differences between immigrants and citizens in mind, I sat down to work on a tagline for my so-called author brand. I remembered the words of a Romanian childhood friend, “Aren’t you tired of always writing in English? Don’t you want to express your ideas in Romanian once in a while?” The truth is, I don’t, because I’m not writing for Romanian readers primarily. I’m writing for Americans, but as an outsider. And then it dawned on me. For people here, I’m a foreign-born author who speaks with an accent and writes about lands that are on the blurry parts of the world map. For people in Romania, I’m someone who left a long time ago and writes in a different language. For everyone, everywhere, I’m someone foreign. That’s when I gave up on trying to fit in. “Storyteller from a foreign land” became my tagline, and I’m grateful for the clarity it offers me.

Accepting my outsider status brought me the freedom I’d been searching for since I first arrived in the United States twenty-two years ago. Once I gave up on trying to fit in, the struggle to change who I was, to assimilate, disappeared. A new space opened up instead, where I could build my own sense of home, the way I needed to. Of course, that’s still a work in progress. But maybe one day I’ll be like Laura, knowing with certainty where home is.

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