The lure of living abroad is one that nearly everyone has felt, at one time or another, whether or not we give into it. And while traveling for a week or two at a time to a new country can be a thrilling experience, it doesn't quite satisfy the same desire as spending years getting to know a place. Chelsea Fagan had always been in love with France, and after a two-week vacation in Paris, decided that she would live there. Five months later, she was all moved in. In Between Two Countries, a collection of her essays on travel, she shares what it means to immigrate intelligently, learn from your host culture, and make it work on a budget. And yes, you can do it, too.
Read Peter's Op-ed on Trump's Immigration Ban in The New York Times The rise of dual citizenship could hardly have been imaginable to a time traveler from a hundred or even fifty years ago. Dual nationality was once considered an offense to nature, an abomination on the order of bigamy. It was the stuff of titanic battles between the United States and European sovereigns. As those conflicts dissipated, dual citizenship continued to be an oddity, a condition that, if not quite freakish, was nonetheless vaguely disreputable, a status one could hold but not advertise. Even today, some Americans mistakenly understand dual citizenship to somehow be “illegal”, when in fact it is completely tolerated. Only recently has the status largely shed the opprobrium to which it was once attached. At Home in Two Countries charts the history of dual citizenship from strong disfavor to general acceptance. The status has touched many; there are few Americans who do not have someone in their past or present who has held the status, if only unknowingly. The history reflects on the course of the state as an institution at the level of the individual. The state was once a jealous institution, justifiably demanding an exclusive relationship with its members. Today, the state lacks both the capacity and the incentive to suppress the status as citizenship becomes more like other forms of membership. Dual citizenship allows many to formalize sentimental attachments. For others, it’s a new way to game the international system. This book explains why dual citizenship was once so reviled, why it is a fact of life after globalization, and why it should be embraced today.
The IPPY Award–winning anthology of poetry, memoir, and essays—“accounts of assimilation and nostalgia, celebration and resistance” (Rick Barot, author of The Galleons). This collection contains contributions from sixty-five writers who were either born and/or raised in the United States by one or more immigrant parent. Their work describes the many contradictions, discoveries and life lessons one experiences when one is neither seen as fully American nor fully foreign. Contributors include Richard Blanco, Tina Chang, Joseph Lagaspi, Li-Young Lee, Timothy Liu, Naomi Shihab Nye, Oliver de la Paz, Ira Sukrungruang, Ocean Vuong, and many other talented writers from throughout the United States. Winner of a Bronze Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Multicultural Nonfiction “When you hold in your DNA two countries—the cultures, the languages, the delicious foods and stories—you embody richness. These writers know on the cellular level many-layered ways to live, to struggle, to love. Here are voices we need to hear, writers we need to read. This is a brilliant, timely book, an antidote to divisiveness.” —Peggy Shumaker, former Alaska State Writer Laureate “The poets and writers in Two-Countries show that one result of our ongoing national experiment is a rich deepening in our literature. We may be in perilous times as a country, but our writers have never been in more ferocious health.” —Rick Barot, author of The Galleons
He was getting more and more anglicized with every passing year and almost felt embarrassed of being the son of his parents. He felt that they were out of tune with life in Britain...' Having survived the horrors of Partition, young lovers, Guru and Sukhi, begin a journey of blissful matrimony. Supporting each other through the various ups and downs of life, they migrate to England,
Five freshly decapitated human heads are thrown onto a crowded dance floor in western Mexico. A Mexican drug cartel dismembers the body of a rival and then stitches his face onto a soccer ball. These are the sorts of grisly tales that dominate the media, infiltrate movies and TV shows, and ultimately shape Americans' perception of Mexico as a dangerous and scary place, overrun by brutal drug lords. Without a doubt, the drug war is real. In the last six years, over 60,000 people have been murdered in narco-related crimes. But, there is far more to Mexico's story than this gruesome narrative would suggest. While thugs have been grabbing the headlines, Mexico has undergone an unprecedented and under-publicized political, economic, and social transformation. In her groundbreaking book, Two Nations Indivisible, Shannon K. O'Neil argues that the United States is making a grave mistake by focusing on the politics of antagonism toward Mexico. Rather, we should wake up to the revolution of prosperity now unfolding there. The news that isn't being reported is that, over the last decade, Mexico has become a real democracy, providing its citizens a greater voice and opportunities to succeed on their own side of the border. Armed with higher levels of education, upwardly-mobile men and women have been working their way out of poverty, building the largest, most stable middle class in Mexico's history. This is the Mexico Americans need to get to know. Now more than ever, the two countries are indivisible. It is past time for the U.S. to forge a new relationship with its southern neighbor. Because in no uncertain terms, our future depends on it.
A Son of Two Countries is a story of struggle for education. Born in 1946 in Rwanda under Belgian colonial rule, the author recounts his early education in Rwanda and later as a refugee in Tanzania. He was naturalized as a Tanzanian citizen in 1980 while doing his undergraduate studies at the University of Dar es Salaam. As he struggled to get education, the author was also grappling with his refugee status, with all the challenges that it entailed. The book gives insights into the contradictions of colonial and post-colonial education, as well as the author’s reflections on education in Tanzania, given his long experience in the education sector in that country. Finally, we get some glimpses into the dual identity of the author as a Tanzanian citizen of Rwandan origin and how this shaped his relationship with the two countries he calls home. As he aptly puts it, “Rwanda gave me my heart; Tanzania gave me my brain. I find it difficult to choose between my heart and my brain”.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 launched a vast, global diaspora, with many Iranians establishing new lives in the United States. In the four decades since, the diaspora has expanded to include not only those who emigrated immediately after the revolution but also their American-born children, more recent immigrants, and people who married into Iranian families, all of whom carry their own stories of trauma, triumph, adversity, and belonging that reflect varied and nuanced perspectives on what it means to be Iranian or Iranian American. The essays in My Shadow Is My Skin are these stories. This collection brings together thirty-two authors, both established and emerging, whose writing captures the diversity of diasporic experiences. Reflecting on the Iranian American experience over the past forty years and shedding new light on themes of identity, duality, and alienation in twenty-first-century America, the authors present personal narratives of immigration, sexuality, marginalization, marriage, and religion that offer an antidote to the news media’s often superficial portrayals of Iran and the people who have a connection to it. My Shadow Is My Skin pulls back the curtain on a community that rarely gets to tell its own story.
Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.
We all have one life. Some of us spend it in one country, but I was fortunate to live, study and work in multiple countries. I was forced to deal with circumstances, good and bad. The key to success is how I handled my challenges. I did it my way and encourage everyone to leave this world better than we met it.
This open access book captures and elaborates on the skill of storytelling as one of the distinct leadership features of Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and the President of the People’s Republic of China. It gathers the stories included in Xi’s speeches on various occasions, where they conveyed the essence of China’s history and culture, its reform and development, and the principles of China’s participating in global governance and cooperating with other countries to build a community of common destiny. The respective stories not only convey abstract and profound concepts of governance in comparatively straightforward language, but also create an immediate emotional connection between the narrator and the listener. In addition to the original stories, extensive additional materials are provided to convey the original context in which each was told, including when and to whom Xi told it, helping readers attain a deeper, intuitive understanding of their relevance.
