Jane Hills: Reflections on Fictions of Home

In summer 2019, I attended my fourth Literature Cambridge study course . . . for me, a most poignant experience. Our theme was Fictions of Home, and ranged from Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Dickens’ David Copperfield, through Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, to an agonizing collection of personal reflections on the everyday indignities suffered by asylum seekers in Britain. We ended our studies with Pulitzer Prize Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s collection of short stories, The Refugees (2017), set mainly in California, with several stories taking place in San Jose, my own hometown.

I was drawn to Fictions of Home because I have worked with refugees and undocumented immigrants from south of the border for the past 20 years, helping these newcomers to resettle in San Jose and to make new family homes in America. As an immigrant, I too have created a new home in America, living here for over 40 years, with the past 26 years as an American citizen. I was therefore intrigued to see how our authors would treat this theme of home. How would they define home; what does it take to create a new home and what might this gradually reveal about their characters’ development and moral growth? I knew that Literature Cambridge would give me ample opportunity to explore these ideas; to learn more about the works themselves; and to share thematic insights with my fellow participants. I was not disappointed.

Being an immigrant and a newcomer is a schizophrenic experience: You are neither one thing or another. Do you belong here; or do you belong there? Where is your home?  How do you make a new home? What do you keep from the old days; what do you discard? I was intrigued to see David Copperfield faced with a similar dilemma, struggling to create his own personal home space after he is ousted by the evil Murdstones.  We see David creating a ‘home’ with Steerforth and his classmates in the dormitory at Salem House and with the Peggottys in their upturned boat on the beach, and with Dora in their little cottage. What did these different home situations tell us about David’s character and his moral development?  Who is the true David, and how is this revealed to us? 

But for me, the most meaningful discussions about home came at the end of the week with a study of our refugee texts. I was frequently moved to tears by the harrowing, first-hand testimonies of asylum seekers in Britain as retold in Refugee Tales I and II. Here, a suffocating sense of injustice prevails, with newcomers struggling to create even minimal homes under the continuous threat of indefinite detention. These are true stories of people who have suffered unimaginable human rights abuses in their own countries, have made perilous escapes, and who are then given no chance whatsoever to build new homes in Britain. I witness similar situations in California, working with migrants detained at the border who are forced to live in sub-human conditions, making their homes under bridges and fly-overs, living under tarpaulins surrounded by cardboard boxes. Families detained in the US have been torn apart, separated from their children, many forced to live in cages. Those who make it over the border up to San Jose live twilight lives, dreading a knock on the door in the middle of the night, announcing the arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Finally, we studied Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short stories The Refugees, examining Vietnamese experiences after the American-Vietnamese war, with several stories exploring refugee newcomers creating new lives and new homes in America. In his deceptively sparse short stories, Nguyen captures poignant details of former boat people attacked by pirates; second generation children becoming Americanized and disregarding their heritage; educated refugees forced to take menial employment in order to make ends meet; and families operating neighbourhood convenience stores. These stories offer a somewhat ambivalent view of US resettlement and of America as the land of milk and honey.

I thoroughly enjoyed my week with Literature Cambridge exploring Fictions of Home. It gave me invaluable time to study literary texts in detail, to learn from academic experts, to develop my ideas and to share insights with my fellow participants. I now want to continue my studies by learning more about other refugee and immigrant writers, to understand better how they cope with their own unique issues of self-identity and of creating meaningful homes in foreign lands.

Jane Hills, US and UK

The works we studied on Fictions of Home were:

• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (written 1798; published 1817)
• Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• Katherine Mansfield, short stories (1920s)
• Viet Nguyen, The Refugees (2017)
• Viet Nguyen, ed., The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018)
• David Herd and Anna Pincus, eds., Refugee Tales I and II (2016, 2017)