Beginner s Guide to America and 5 other works that illuminate the US immigrant experience
Written by Chantal Da Silva, CNN
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Imagine searching for traces of Americanness as an immigrant first arriving in the US, and four name tags seen in the airport stop you in your tracks.
This was true for author Roya Hakakian, who was 19 when her Persian Jewish family fled Iran in the 1980s. In her new book Beginner s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Misinformed, Hakakian paints a picture of what it s like to leave everything you know behind and try to build a life in the US including those earliest moments in airport customs, when she was almost too taken aback by what the agents were wearing to notice their scrutinizing questions.