A Houston garage, a day of chores, a seventeen-year-old shifting a stepfather’s boxes to the curb. Then a box that is not his: lid torn, a peppery smell coming out of it, and inside, under a few Russian horoscope pamphlets, a magazine she has seen exactly once before, when her mother showed it to her as a modelling portfolio. She finds the dog-eared page. Her mother’s photograph takes up a quarter of it, with a line of text beside it. Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova puts that scene in its prologue and then makes you wait two hundred and fifty pages to reach it, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the book is engineered.
Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter and the Word It Takes for a Title
The title is a quotation, and not a kind one.
By Suvorova’s account, ungrateful is what the second stepfather calls her, what the third calls her, and what her mother reaches for whenever she asks a question. It is also the thing she is most afraid of being. The book’s real subject is therefore not immigration or abuse, both of which it handles at length, but the debt a child is told she has run up by being saved. Be grateful for the citizenship. For the house. For the man who paid for it. And for the border officer who waved the car through.
What makes Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova worth a group’s evening is that it never argues this point directly. It builds it and then stands back.
What the Comedy Is Doing
Nobody warns you that a book carrying this content warning will be funny, and Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova is, repeatedly.
A hamster is accidentally killed; the mother drives to the pet shop, holds the dying animal up to the manager, and demands an exchange on the grounds that the hamster was defective. A teenage daughter’s grandmother cleans a grazed knee with urine, on the principle that one should not depend on modern medicine. A geography teacher hands a frightened ninth-grader a study binder for a district competition, and the girl discovers, only after winning five medals, that the binder was the answer key; the teacher’s argument is that every other child in the room was born holding an advantage and this one is hers.
None of these is comic relief. Each is evidence about improvisation, poverty and what people will do for a child when the official channels are closed, and each works the way the best scenes in Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova work: funny first, and then not.
Where Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter Stops Short
Three reservations about Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova, and a group will land on the second one.
The husband is a function rather than a person. He is patient, available, and asks precisely the question each adult-timeline chapter requires. The marriage is clearly what made the book writable, which may be exactly why it goes unexamined.
The mother’s reasoning is withheld. We are given her history, including a massacre in a mafia-run casino that she survived by hiding in a freezer and that was never reported because the place was illegal. Then the explanations stop. Why she turned down the tuition money the father offered, and what made her cut her own mother out of her life, are raised and left where they fall.
The last fifty pages state the thesis out loud. After three hundred pages of showing, the closing chapters move into paragraphs beginning I am angry at. The argument is sound. It is also the only stretch where a different book briefly takes the microphone.
And one quieter thing. The author’s note lists twenty-five pseudonyms, which is scrupulous and also tells you that nearly every adult outside the family required protecting, a fact the book itself never pauses on.
For the Group
Open Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova on the word in its title, because every reader at the table will have met a version of it. Ask whether gratitude can be owed, and to whom, and whether anyone has ever used it on them to end an argument.
Then the comparison the book sets up and refuses to spell out. A school friend’s family, undocumented longer and for the same reasons, clean houses and mow lawns; the friend drives her brothers to school with no licence because she speaks the best English and will be in the least trouble. Her father is taken over a traffic infringement and, fourteen years later, lives as close to the border as he can get from the wrong side of it. The narrator’s mother, undocumented, held a desk job. Suvorova never says the word. Ask the room to say it. Then ask what else the law was doing, because the legislation around brokered marriage, including the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, arrives in these pages years too late to matter to anyone in them.
Then the hardest hour. A seventeen-year custody case, running the whole length of a child’s childhood, that turned on a mother’s immigration status rather than on documented violence or documented drug use. A disclosure made at eleven and suppressed by the adults who heard it. A police report filed at nineteen and dropped for want of evidence a decade old. Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova is blunt that the worst thing was not the abuse but the not being believed, and a group should sit with the distinction rather than smoothing it.
Finally, the ending, which some readers will find a failure of nerve and others the most honest page in the book: estrangement, chosen, with no reconciliation scene and no indictment either. She records what she did and what it cost her and does not ask to be agreed with. Readers who have made that choice themselves will defend it. Readers who have not, often cannot.
Content notes, and they are not short. A stepfather sexually abuses the narrator as a child; this is told in the child’s own limited vocabulary, without graphic detail, over several chapters. An adult hears the disclosure and suppresses it. A rape happens off the page while a small child is shut in a closet. There is strangulation, hair-dragging, and a woman imprisoned in her own home. A teenager is struck and then called a liar. A four-year-old is left overnight. A seven-year-old is made to raise a toddler. There is self-harm, including a girl asking a friend to cut her. There is one overdose. Two terminations are coerced and described obliquely. A mother drives drunk with a child in the car. There is cocaine, an unnamed eating disorder, racist speech within the family, immigration detention, deportation, and a pet’s death on the page.
More for the group: The House of My Mother by Shari Franke is the companion read on a daughter testifying about a living parent. Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno is the pick if the question of who gets believed is what your room wants to argue. Real Americans by Rachel Khong suits a group drawn to belonging and class across generations. And Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo works if the women of an immigrant family talking over each other is the texture you are after.
After the Last Page
The grandmother. Three months at a time, a visa at a time, for twenty years, and the only adult in the book who is never ambiguous. She disapproves of American trees, American lawns and American children, she is rude about the money, and she is the one who taught a child to read in a language she herself could not speak.
What stays from Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova is not the catalogue in the garage, which is only the hinge. It is the accounting underneath it: that a woman gave up a great deal to get her daughter here, that the daughter was handed the bill, and that both of those things can be true without cancelling each other out. Bring it to a group that can hold two ideas at once, and give it a long evening.