Émigré

Author: Genève Chao

Publisher: Tinfish (2018)

Émigré is the same in English as in French, but this is a book of differences. Chao writes in Guernsey French, English and American English, while bringing in stories of plantation workers in Hawai'i. This multi-vocal book is at once playful and earnest, revealing the complications of deracination by way of its words. Words mean something, but they are also miniature allegories for departure and (at least imagined) return. Émigré is about islands and the words that emigration obliges us to make into islands.