Every year, it is an honor to be invited as a judge the Catalyst Awards, hosted by First Gen and Juice, My Tribe Media, and Transfer Nation. The best part is setting aside time to read books that I may not have engaged with, check out podcasts, and realize that there are more First Gens in pop culture than initially meets the eye.

Here are the 2024 Winners!

Best Young Adult Fiction: Study Break by Aashna Avachat

Best Fiction: Oye by Melissa Mogolion

Best Memoir: Everything I Learned, I Learned In A Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin

Best Instagram Account: @becomingadoctora

Best Film: Rob Peace

Best Podcast: U@UCA, “We Were Freshmen, Too”

Best Non-Fiction: Cultura and Cash by Giovanna Gonzalez

Best TV Show: The Brothers Sun, Episode 4

Rising Star, Instagram: @FirstGenGoGlobal

Game Changers

First-Gens For Kamala Event

CAST Connections Audio Tours, Illinois State

HER Campus Media

In a piece published in LitHub Choi asks: “What is the conceit of the immigrant writer? Who is her subject and who is her reader? If English is power, as every immigrant knows, what are her responsibilities for legibility and articulation?” Several weeks after finishing the book, I finally turned to this article which I bookmarked. Reading these questions framed the collection of stories, each featuring a very different set of characters and concerns within the diasporic community. The story about Ji-Won felt like it may have at least considered someone like me as a reader, perhaps for the first time.

The familiarity of Ji-Won can be briefly summarized in the similarities within our biographical profiles including growing up on Long Island, listening to “Gangster’s Paradise,” on Z100 in the 1990s as second generation immigrants and First-Gen kids. While my feelings of affinity stem from recognizing so much of myself in her, the extent to which Ji-Won’s experiences mirror my own also serve as clear boundaries differentiating us. Indeed, reading this piece left me feeling as if I was living within a map of the simplified world, often in the most affirming way, but also sometimes in a space of denial.

This is less of a critical review and more of a series of musings on what it means to see parts of myself in a story. Although I could go on about the limits to representational politics (there are many), it’s hard to deny the power of coming into visibility after living in a state of erasure. As Cathy Park Hong states, “Asians are next in line to disappear.” This vanishing act could come from a number of places. Aspiring towards the American Dream, joining the ranks of racialized hierarchies betraying one’s history to oppress others. Losing a connection to our language. In some cases it may be our native tongue. Becoming unmoored from cultural practices that held our ancestors’ lives together for generations. Clumsily trying to put together a dish we grew up eating. And on and on…

In a landscape where it can be so difficult to see people who look like us on the big screen, small screen, and pages of bestsellers, the bar can be set so low.

So, what does it mean when we find an almost version of ourselves at the fore of a book that won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize?

Let me clarify what I mean by this. Although Ji-Won and I had a remarkably similar upbringing, it is what I consider adjacent at best. We both know what it feels like to travel down the Long Island Expressway (or “LIE”), the main corridor spanning from the city to nearly the end. But unlike the main character, I never lived in Queens, let alone Nassau County, where her family eventually settles after finding some economic prosperity. I grew up in a place that until recently, no one knew and usually laughed off as “the boonies.”

Throughout my life, I sometimes recognize more of myself in the middle aged Korean women who lived out their early childhood and adolescence in places like Oklahoma or a little known suburb in Illinois. That’s because I, similar to them, found myself surrounded by both the foreignness of my family and America at once. Neither here nor there, at home I had my mother who clung onto her Korean identity and customs with a death grip, while trying to figure out what it meant to be from Long Island.

At some point in my early-ish childhood, my parents started attending a Korean church “up the island.” Many families comprising the congregation were from Nassau County. I rubbed shoulders with Ji-Wons. But they too, were alien to me. With a larger Korean and Korean-American community surrounding them, Ji-Won could have looked upon someone like me with scorn.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the main character and my life is the type of First-Gens we are. Her father graduated from Yonsei, one of the top three universities in Korea, whereas mine did not. Ji-Won is the first to attend college in America, whereas I am the first one in my family.

And yet, there are remarkable similarities. The affection that we have for our childhood, troubled by racism. The genuine elementary school teachers who nevertheless, remain somewhat problematic in their liberal values. Our best friends who were our gateway to becoming American and finding a sense of belonging. The inexplicable drive to attend a prestigious university, without our parents prompting us. The angry moms, exhausted by the process of immigration and raising children in a foreign land. Families who found economic success.

By the end of the story, there is a familiar trope: the immigrant, First-Gen child who is driven to succeed to repay her family for their suffering. Pondering the dog-eat-dog nature of college admissions where “someone’s gain at someone’s loss,” Ji-Won reacts with a brush of callousness:

“But so what? That’s just how it was. Life, that is. And anyway, vice versa! Hadn’t she ever been on the receiving end of loss? Wasn’t she the firstborn child of immigrants? Hadn’t she seen her parents fumbling and vulnerable, looking rebuked at registers or weeping in humiliation? And for what? For the very thing she was not about to grasp. Their children’s success.”

It is here in the story that Ji-Won’s character teeters on manifesting a stereotype as “she feels a weight of responsibility toward that striving.” But in the very next line, Choi paints us a character that is ultimately driven by her own agency, rather than filial indebtedness. What is more, Ji-Won can name this feeling: “the thrill of prerogative” and a cognizance that her journey requires a renunciation of who she is and where she came from.

At the close of the story is one final point of divergence between Ji-Won and myself. It’s the degree of self-awareness. Several decades of my life passed before I seriously considered the parts of myself that were lost to America. Particularly, growing up in a well-to-do, rural white part of Long Island. You don’t know what you don’t have, if you never knew what could have been yours.

Much of Aziz’s experiences in the piece examine the trajectory of his life in the post-9/11 context, coinciding with his life history. Aziz later attends Yale Law School and becomes a foreign policy advisor to Justin Trudeau. But the onset of Islamophobia is a moment of awakening for the writer. For at least one year, the crumbling columns were mainstays on TV screens, re-traumatizing Americans to shore up support for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. In this moment, Aziz finds himself in the whirlwind of that very feedback loop marked by repeated misidentification, shaping his own fluid sense of self.

The prologue opens with Aziz in Israel, facing a young officer, barely eighteen or nineteen years old. Aziz looks him in the face filled with an eerie sense of possibility of what could have been. Someone he might have been a childhood friend within Toronto. Someone who “in an amusing sort of way, resembled my younger self: in an alternative universe, our positions might have been reversed.” It is precisely this disorienting mirroring that cleaves rather than heals. Aziz’s navigation of the world through multiplicities drives much of the narrative.

Early on in the memoir, however, Aziz identifies a paradox. His identity is up for dissection, precisely because he is viewed as “part of the Brown mass gathering at the barbed-wire fence of our democracies.” And while many aspects of Aziz’s existence are so carefully scrutinized according to the dictates of our colonized histories, others are seemingly muted and adrift. Awaiting entry into Jerusalem, Aziz is forced to map out his family’s lineage, complete with where they are from. With sweaty palms, he writes “British India” as his grandfather’s birthplace. Aziz answers that his family is from “Pakistan,” setting off a cascade of racing thoughts as he thinks more of how tenuous his links to his homeland are. A product of a brutal colonial regime violently breaking his connection to his history, a blank page taunts him to document these realities in his own handwriting.

While the book opens up with one of Aziz’s painful realities, much of the narrative is built around mundanity. Whether at Queen’s University as an undergrad, Paris as a study abroad student, Cambridge as a grad student, or Yale Law School, Aziz’s story tracks life as someone from the Global South navigating the Global North. Against the looming threat of being marked as a terrorist, Aziz has no choice but to constantly confront himself and the many masks he wears. He shows how the existential disfigurement born from that sadness of being perennially forced into endless liminality is carved out from macro-level clashes between the East and West. Turning his mastery of hegemonic discourse inside out, Aziz finds his way through the labyrinth of his history severed by imperialism.

Wounds abound but this isn’t a story merely about suffering. Aziz is also the master of creating and maximizing his opportunities. As someone well aware of his position within his family, the toll that immigration took on his parents, and the buried family traumas in his lineage, Aziz is motivated to intellectualize his feelings and make a palpable change. Philosophical inquiry is his tinderbox, bike rides in Cambridge become a lifeline, and heated debates a guide. 

Securing a spot at Yale Law School is very much a culmination of Aziz’s resolve to bring these threads of his life and family history together. Studying foreign policy, and committing to tackling some of the world’s most pressing political problems, while honoring his family’s history is in many ways, one and the same in his story. In all instances, Aziz takes on the task of evolving. Towing his family to a new status, asking pressing questions in the face of geopolitical conflicts all while fully remaining present and vulnerable in his body.

Each step of the way, Aziz reveals something new about humanity, often dazzling in the face of something more insidious. For instance, his arrival in Amerika, the birthplace of intellectual giants such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is seemingly in stark contrast to the scars and bleak realities searing through segregated New Haven neighborhoods. But it’s the combination of ambition, hope, and curiosity that Aziz finds his freedom.

****

Brown Boy, by Omar Aziz is a Catalyst Awards nominee in the “Best Memoir” category. For more information on the book, visit Simon and Schuster. To learn more about Catalyst Award nominations, visit First Gen and Juice.

Before I write more about the books that I reviewed, here is the full list of nominees in nine categories and winners.

I like to think of this list of nominees as a one-stop shop for some of the best First-Gen cultural productions of the moment. And I can’t wait to delve into the other books, films, and TV shows listed here!

**Winner in each category.

FICTION

The House of Eve by Sadeqa Johnson

**The Do Over by Suzanne Park

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

FICTION- YOUNG ADULT

Ander & Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa

**Brighter Than The Sun by Daniel Aleman

She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

First-Year Orientation Edited by Lauren Gibaldi and Eric Smith

FILM

**Blue Beetle

A Million Miles Away

Wildflower

Marisol

FILM- DOCUMENTARY

First Voice Generation

**I Will Soar

INSTAGRAM

First Gen UCSF

**Foos in Medicine

Grad Life Grind

The Squeeze

MEMOIR

**First-Gen by Alejandra Campoverdi

Crying in the Bathroom by Erica L. Sánchez

The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts

Brown Boy by Omer Aziz

The Golden Ticket by Irena Smith

NON-FICTION

The Latinx Guide to Graduate School by Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales

**Know That You Are Worthy Edited by Adam J. Rodriguez

Rising Class by Jennifer Miller

PODCAST

THESIS, season two, “Keeping the Hustle”

How To Be First, episode 1

Que Pasa HSIs, Student Perspectives on Servingess

Good School: Community College students

Investigate the complexities of higher education, season 1, episode 1, Feb. 14th

**Writing On My Mind, episode 52

TELEVISION

Primo (Amazon Prime), season 1, episode 4

Tiny Beautiful Things (Hulu), episode 5

Abbott Elementary (ABC), season 2, episode 21

**Reservation Dogs (HULU), season 3, episode 9

Power Book II (STARZ), season 3, episode 4