When Truth Follows Fiction
Ask Me No Questions was inspired by real events in the aftermath of 9/11, when Muslim men over the age of eighteen were ordered to register with the government. One day, I opened the NY Times to read of illegal immigrant families who had panicked and fled to Canada, only to find themselves unable to apply for asylum, detained and threatened with deportation.
The story hit me on two fronts: it immediately brought back an old childhood memory of being stopped by the Canadian police on a foggy night, just north of the border. My own father, though a naturalized American citizen, was always terrified of crossing borders and going through the immigration check at an airport. It's as if he never quite believed that his citizenship was permanent -- he always feared it would be taken away from him. At the same time, I also could not stop thinking of the teenagers I had interviewed for my prior young adult book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers, a number of whom had spent much of their childhoods in America, believing this was their home and future.
That day I sat down and wrote the first two chapters. I read them a week later--to a largely South Asian audience--and when I finished, you could hear a pin drop. I saw one man wiping a tear from his eye. The moment of fleeing I had described touches every immigrant's greatest fear. And it is not about being Muslim. It is about the condition of migration, never quite sure if you belong. My Jewish grandmother lived as an illegal in Europe, working in a laundry in Germany before she could get a visa to America. My husband's aunt survived the Holocaust with a false identity in Holland as an Indonesian nanny while her husband worked in the Resistance.
In the next ten weeks, the novel burned out of me -- from my own memories, the teenagers I had spoken to, the news I read, and the outrage I felt.
Yet truth has a way of stalking us, even as we invent.
After the book was finished, I opened the newspaper again -- only to see a new headline: a Bangladeshi teenage girl was being detained as suspected terrorist. These "real" sisters were deported back to Bangladesh -- the younger sister stranded in a country she barely knows. When I sent my book to Nina Bernstein, the NY Times reporter who had broken the story, she called me up to say, "You have no idea how close to the truth this book is. That story is out there. Those teenagers are out there." She sent the book to this girl, in hopes that she'd taken some comfort in knowing that someone had put down her experience -- in fiction -- but in truth, too.
The story hit me on two fronts: it immediately brought back an old childhood memory of being stopped by the Canadian police on a foggy night, just north of the border. My own father, though a naturalized American citizen, was always terrified of crossing borders and going through the immigration check at an airport. It's as if he never quite believed that his citizenship was permanent -- he always feared it would be taken away from him. At the same time, I also could not stop thinking of the teenagers I had interviewed for my prior young adult book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers, a number of whom had spent much of their childhoods in America, believing this was their home and future.
That day I sat down and wrote the first two chapters. I read them a week later--to a largely South Asian audience--and when I finished, you could hear a pin drop. I saw one man wiping a tear from his eye. The moment of fleeing I had described touches every immigrant's greatest fear. And it is not about being Muslim. It is about the condition of migration, never quite sure if you belong. My Jewish grandmother lived as an illegal in Europe, working in a laundry in Germany before she could get a visa to America. My husband's aunt survived the Holocaust with a false identity in Holland as an Indonesian nanny while her husband worked in the Resistance.
In the next ten weeks, the novel burned out of me -- from my own memories, the teenagers I had spoken to, the news I read, and the outrage I felt.
Yet truth has a way of stalking us, even as we invent.
After the book was finished, I opened the newspaper again -- only to see a new headline: a Bangladeshi teenage girl was being detained as suspected terrorist. These "real" sisters were deported back to Bangladesh -- the younger sister stranded in a country she barely knows. When I sent my book to Nina Bernstein, the NY Times reporter who had broken the story, she called me up to say, "You have no idea how close to the truth this book is. That story is out there. Those teenagers are out there." She sent the book to this girl, in hopes that she'd taken some comfort in knowing that someone had put down her experience -- in fiction -- but in truth, too.
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