Let’s write Immigrant Characters

Hey friends. We have come to the last part of the series on writing immigrant characters.

In

part 1,

we explored research as a decision-making tool and honed in on some vital details about our immigrant characters.

In

part 2,

we explored the “heavier” topic of politics and how that affects our characters lives and the beliefs they form.

Today, we’ll dive into some of the day-to-day details of immigrant life. These details don’t just apply to immigrants, however; they persist throughout the generations and you might discover them in your own lives. Thinking about these things for your characters will help flesh them out and bring interesting nuance to your writing.

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Food

Food is fun. Food is probably the first thing we think about when considering other cultures. Even if a person has completely lost touch with their family’s culture—no matter how much they grumble about restaurants being “white-washed”—food is the fastest way back.

A lot of the considerations that we discussed in previous posts apply to your immigrant character’s relationship to cultural food. It’s a spectrum. Did they or their parents choose to adopt their new country’s cuisine? To rally around food as a stabilizer in their new environment? To experiment with both? Are they any good at cooking (they might not be, in which case preparing their own food would prove difficult)? Are there other possibilities you can come up with?

As always, there is no right or wrong answer. You make these decisions based on what kind of story you want to write and what kinds of immigrant characters you are writing about.

Familial Terms

Language is something else that comes to mind when we think about immigration. Arriving in a new country means learning a whole new language—or, at the very least, learning a different dialect, different phrases, different social cues. With the difficulty of assimilation, and with little opportunity to practice, it’s easy to lose the home language. But the terminology that lasts through generations are family terms.

Grandparents are often referred to in the home language, so are aunts and uncles and older siblings. Again, how you incorporate familial terms into your immigrant characters daily life depends on their view on assimilation. You might have them use familial terms at home but not in public, or parents might latch on to their new culture’s terminology. Whatever you choose, make sure it corresponds with the choices you have made before now.

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Either rich or poor

Immigration is an expensive journey.

Imagine that you are preparing to leave your home for good and travel to a new place. You will need to:

• Pack the belongings that you can feasibly carry with you
• Quit your job (or leave your farm) with the understanding that you might not be able to earn another coin for many month
• Have enough usable wealth to last you those several months
• Travel to the coast (or to the airport) with your belongings and family members
• Pay for food and lodging on the passage to the new country
• Go through the immigration system
• Find a new job, housing, buy food and clothes and whatever else you and your family need

For this reason, people who immigrant to a new place either come with a fortune or spend their hard-earned coins long before they find stability in their new home. Even those who are abandoning their home for a “better life” need usable cash to get them to accomplish all of these steps. Today, it’s a lot easier to travel, but even then, airplane tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars… the costs pile up. And at the end of our trips, we can count on returning to a familiar place of residence.

Considering this aspect of immigrant life may be the most important in your writing for it impacts the character’s beliefs about themselves and their place in the world. Do they feel that they have to fight for everything they have, or do they approach things with confidence? How do they react to the pressures in their new environment? How do these beliefs affect their specific circumstances?

Remember to focus on the details that you came up with for your specific character. I hope by now your immigrant character has taken on a life of their own, and the tips I gave you here serve as added nuance.

So we’re at the end of our exploration of immigrant characters. I hope you have enjoyed this series and learned some important things on human movement, motivation, and the impact of choices on the development of characters. Let me know in the comments of any discoveries you made throughout this process.