These stories were written in English by writers who emigrated to the United States. Why do these writers choose to express themselves in a language other than their native tongue? There are as many reasons as there are writers. When writing is a major part of life, coming to a new country and learning to write in its language is, for many writers, necessary to feeling at home in the world in which they now live. Other writers, such as Thomas Palakeel of India, write in English to keep their own culture alive in the midst of Westernization: "Freedom was not free. We paid and paid as the big world came crashing into our small world like a Burlington Northern freight train...I feared that in the flood of cultural debris, we would be made invisible." Bharati Mukherjee states that "I, being fresh off the jet, want to get away from a lot of the mythologies that were so genderist, that were created to reinforce patriarchy or the class system," while Mikhail Iossel, states that "...the last thing a nostalgia-besotted, half-mad-with-grief émigré writer needs is dealing with his life, the sum total of his losses to date, in a language which, instead of distancing him from his past and bringing this damned past to some kind of proverbial closure, keeps further stirring it up, rehashing it...If you're trying to get over an unfaithful lover, it makes no sense to keep her photo in your wallet!" But whatever the reason, these writers, by adding their voices to the great song of ourselves that is our literary heritage, enrich us all.

Contents:

• Not for Sale by Judith Ortiz Cofer
• Grandma's Tales by Andrew Lahm
• Happiness by Bharati Mukherjee
• Born Again by Andrei Codrescu
• The Book of the Dead by Edwidge Danticat
• Saboteur by Ha Jin
• Homage by Stella Pope Duarte
• Every Hunter Wants to Know by Mikhail Iossel
• Fatemeh by Nahid Rachlin
• Chocolate War by Thomas Palakeel
• The Documentarian by Jaime Manrique
• The Winter Hibiscus by Minfong Ho
• This World by Samrat Upadhyay
• Sisters by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
• Joe by Julia Alvarez
• excerpt from Mother Tongues and Other Untravellings by Kyoko Uchida
• Distance by Simon Ortiz