Malaya Essays on freedom

Barnes's stirring follow-up to her memoir, Monsoon Mansion, which recounted her childhood in the Philippines, continues her life story by sharing her life in America while undocumented. After arriving in the U.S. at age 16, Barnes learns she is too old to gain citizenship through, as planned, adoption by a family member. While enduring this disappointment and her subsequent depression over being unable to attend college, she cleans houses for $6 per hour, explaining that "cleaning resuscitated what becoming undocumented killed." A few years later, she is still undocumented, but with help from a skilled immigration lawyer has managed to enter college and, while bitterly aware of the divisions between herself and most of her classmates, finds community with fellow undocumented employees at her workplace, a cafe in gentrifying Harlem. The repercussions of living under the threat of arrest and deportation are long-lasting, as poignantly conveyed in an essay addressed to her now-grade school-aged daughter, explaining why she only travels by bike and largely within a two-mile radius: "Your mother can't drive because when all her high school friends were getting permits, she was an undocumented teen with a MetroCard but no ID." Some of the writing can be prosaic, but Barnes's story is unforgettable, and highly relevant to 2019 America. (Nov.)

A collection of essays extends and expands on the themes introduced in the author's highly regarded memoir, Monsoon Mansion (2018).Barnes' first book introduced a gifted writer with a compelling story about her life in the Philippines. After her father left the family, her mother became unstable. The author was adopted by an American family, but the law said she was too old for the necessary paperwork, so she remained an undocumented teenager, working jobs that paid her in cashe.g., cleaning houses, taking care of children, working at a laundry and at a cafe. Her schoolwork promised a pathway out, and she did well, particularly after switching to a journalism major and finding her voice and the stories that only she could tell. Barnes married a fellow graduate student, a white man raised in the South, who was the first in his family to marry a woman of color. Then the couple had a baby girl, a mixed-race child in the South, and questions of belonging and assimilation became exponentially more complicated. "He's well aware of the sadness of this place," the author writes of her husband, "how lonely it must be for mean outsider who married someone who also feels like an outsider." He says that it kills him to know that here, I talk, but without the freedom to speak about topics that interest me." Though childbirth brought emotional trauma and postpartum depression, it also opened the creative floodgates. "My body had given birth to a human, but my body also wanted to expel something more," writes Barnes. "It wanted to flush out the accumulation of hurt and sorrow and fear, three things all immigrants pack with them.My memories let out onto paper and bled onto the page as words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs." Those paragraphs became essays, and those collected here have enough cohesion and continuity that they could almost pass as a second volume of memoir.A sturdy transitional volume that finds Barnes reflecting on her first and anticipating her next. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.