After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America

Praise for After the Last Border

Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

The Understanding the World Book of the Year at World Magazine

A Best Social Science Book of the Year at Library Journal

Required reading for anyone trying to understand the challenges of getting to and surviving in the United States in the Trump era . . . What makes this book so different from other works that tell similar stories is the talent and doggedness of Goudeau, who . . . brings an insider’s authority to the page.

—The New York Times Book Review

Thorough reporting combined with a novelistic attention to detail and plot create a work of nonfiction that reads like the best novels. . . . Deeply moving.

—San Francisco Chronicle

A bracingly empathetic portrait of two refugee women’s struggles toward resettlement . . . A masterfully detailed portrait of the refugee experience.

—The Texas Observer

Jessica Goudeau . . . has done what few journalists and fewer policymakers have been able to accomplish: bring the extraordinary tales of two war survivors . . . into the everyday normality of life in the United States. . . . Goudeau approaches these contentious issues as a gifted storyteller and diligent reporter, carefully building a historical backdrop while also following the stories of Mu Naw and Hasna where they lead, without smoothing the rough parts or making the women sentimental archetypes.

—World Magazine

Absolutely breathtaking. A story of the unbelievable resilience of two refugee families, worlds apart, and the desperate humanitarian crisis that brought them to our doorstep.

—Kate Bowler, New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved

"After the Last Border is the rarest of books: a history, and collection of stories, that manages to be both deeply moving and deeply explanatory of a system that’s foundational to our national identity. It feels like the culmination of a decade of work and friendship with refugees who trusted Goudeau enough to tell the stories. It feels like the work of a writer with a PhD and a deep, detailed understanding of the American project. It feels like that because that is precisely who Goudeau is: a person uniquely capable of writing this necessary book."

—Anne Helen Petersen, senior culture writer at BuzzFeed News and author of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

"After the Last Border is a tale of our times and for our times. . . . Goudeau is not merely reporting; she is writing from a place of friendship, care, and heart."

—Kao Kalia Yang, author of Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

LOVELY . . . Jessica Goudeau’s spectacular writing turns the struggles of each family into saga, enabling us to feel their predicaments and their progress as our own. The author does full justice to the sweeping drama of resettling from one side of the globe to the other. This is a captivating book about bravery, dislocation, and human resilience.

—Helen Thorpe, author of The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in America

Profound, electric, and necessary. These two closely observed stories of women who have been duped by the American dream is our universal crisis. Goudeau skillfully blasts open our eyes to the plight of humans treated like cattle on the road to ‘salvation.’

—Sophia Shalmiyev, author of Mother Winter

Goudeau, a gifted listener and writer, [takes] readers deep into the love, faith, loss, and astonishing strength of families who endure horror but never surrender hope. The result is an inspiring work of great beauty and profound humanity. You’ll find yourself unable to put this book down and wishing that every American reads it, too. This is the kind of storytelling about refugee experiences that the world needs now.

—Wendy Pearlman, author of We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria

"A revelatory and compassionate account . . . At a time when it is more important than ever to recognize that closed borders shrink a country’s moral compass, After the Last Border reminds us of the human cost, seen through the heartbreaking stories of Mu Naw and Hasna."

—Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita

"After the Last Border is essential reading for this moment; skillfully weaving in her meticulously researched history of refugee resettlement in the United States, Jessica Goudeau tells a gripping, fast-paced story of trauma, struggle, and the fierce hope of those who cross borders for the sake of their children. Read it with tissues close by."

—Amy Peterson, author of Where Goodness Still Grows: Reclaiming Virtue in an Age of Hypocrisy

"After the Last Border is a powerful testament to the U.S. refugee resettlement system. By illuminating the journey of two families and delineating the history and scope of refugee resettlement in the United States, Goudeau illustrates the perilous journeys refugees undertake, and the critical importance and ethical imperative of the U.S. resettlement program. In this political moment, when embracing those fleeing from war and violence is being replaced by walls and policy barriers designed to keep people out, Ms. Goudeau’s book reminds us of what is at stake, and reminds us that this is not who we have been, and not who we are."

—Russell A. Smith, LMSW, CEO of Refugee Services of Texas

"In After the Last Border, Jessica Goudeau has written a history of refugee resettlement in the United States that is masterful in its sweep and novelistic in its attention to the human details that animate that history. I read it transported, appalled, and inspired by the courage of the refugees whose stories she so vividly tells. After the Last Border should be required reading for any U.S. citizen: it is stories like these that allow us to understand who and what we are as a nation."

—Louisa Hall, author of Speak

"Jessica Goudeau’s reporting and storytelling in After the Last Border are extraordinary, giving her the abilities to grab ahold of the reader and make them see connections between policies and people. This is nonfiction that reads as dramatic and grand as the best fiction. You cannot read this book and remain unchanged."

—Pamela Colloff, The New York Times Magazine staff writer and ProPublica senior reporter

A richly detailed account of the resettlement experiences of two women granted refugee status in the US. . . . Her excellent interview skills and obvious empathy for her subjects make the family portraits utterly engrossing, and the history sections provide essential context. This moving and insightful dual portrait makes an impassioned case for humane immigration and refugee policy.

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

In a detailed text that moves smoothly around in time, Goudeau effectively humanizes the worldwide refugee crisis while calling much-needed attention to a badly broken American immigration system. Sharp, provocative, timely reading.

—Kirkus Reviews

It’s obvious that Goudeau was able to gain the two women’s trust . . . Their histories emerge through alternating chapters broken up by excerpts that provide social and political background about American refugee resettlement from the nineteenth century to the present day. These profiles are sympathetic and ultimately profoundly moving.

—Booklist

Penguin Books

AFTER THE LAST BORDER

Jessica Goudeau has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Los Angeles Times, among other places, and is a former columnist for Catapult. She produced projects for Teen Vogue (Ask a Syrian Girl) and A Line Birds Cannot See, a documentary about a young girl who crossed the border into the United States on her own. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Texas and served as a Mellon Writing Fellow and interim Writing Center director at Southwestern University. Goudeau has spent more than a decade working with refugees in Austin, Texas, and is the cofounder of Hill Tribers, a nonprofit that provided supplemental income for Burmese refugee artisans for seven years.

Penguin Reading Group Discussion Guide available online at penguinrandomhouse.com

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020

Published in Penguin Books 2021

Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Goudeau

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN 9780525559153 (paperback)

the library of congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Goudeau, Jessica, author.

Title: After the last border : two families and the story of refuge in America / Jessica Goudeau.

Description: New York : Viking, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019033736 (print) | LCCN 2019033737 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525559139 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525559146 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Women immigrants—Texas—Austin—History. | Immigrant families—Texas—Austin—History. | American Dream. | Emigration and immigration—Government policy—United States—History.

Classification: LCC E184.A1 G66 2020 (print) | LCC E184.A1 (ebook) | DDC 362.83/98120976431—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033736

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033737

Cover design and illustration by Colin Webber

All names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r2

To Mu Naw, Hasna, their family and friends scattered around the world, and the refugee resettlement community in Austin—with all my love.

Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky?

Where should plants sleep after the last breath of air?

—MAHMOUD DARWISH, EARTH PRESSES AGAINST US (TRANSLATED BY MUNIR AKASH AND CAROLYN FORCHÉ)

The world has got very good—very skilled and very adept, really—at spotting these great mass abuses of populations. But only from a distance of about 40 years. Up close it’s different. . . . The thing about it is that it is happening—now, to real people. And the world—including and especially the world that could help—can’t quite get the thing in focus. . . . This is a question of moral right and international responsibility—and one from which neither the United States nor the rest of the industrial countries should be permitted to look away.

—EDITORIAL ABOUT THE INDOCHINESE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS, . . . AND REFUGEES, THE WASHINGTON POST, JUNE 22, 1979

Contents

Author’s Note

Character Maps

Prologue: MU NAW (MYANMAR/THAILAND BORDER, 1989)

PART 1

Chapter 1: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, APRIL 2007)

Chapter 2: US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1945–1951

Chapter 3: HASNA (DARAA, SYRIA, MARCH 2011)

Chapter 4: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, APRIL 2007)

Chapter 5: HASNA (DARAA, SYRIA, MARCH 2011)

Chapter 6: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, APRIL 2007)

Chapter 7: HASNA (DARAA, SYRIA, MARCH 2011)

Chapter 8: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, MAY–AUGUST 2007)

Chapter 9: HASNA (DARAA, SYRIA, MARCH 2011)

Chapter 10: US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1880–1945

Chapter 11: HASNA (DARAA, SYRIA, MARCH–APRIL 2011)

Chapter 12: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, SEPTEMBER 2007)

Chapter 13: HASNA (DARAA, SYRIA/RAMTHA, JORDAN, APRIL–JULY 2011)

Chapter 14: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, OCTOBER 2007–APRIL 2008)

PART 2

Chapter 15: HASNA (RAMTHA, JORDAN, DECEMBER 2012–FEBRUARY 2013)

Chapter 16: US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1950–1963

Chapter 17: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, APRIL 2008–MARCH 2009)

Chapter 18: HASNA (RAMTHA AND IRBED, JORDAN, FEBRUARY–DECEMBER 2013)

Chapter 19: US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1965–1980

Chapter 20: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, OCTOBER 2011)

Chapter 21: HASNA (IRBED, JORDAN, DECEMBER 2013–JULY 2016)

PART 3

Chapter 22: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, AUGUST 2014, JANUARY 2015)

Chapter 23: US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1980–2006

Chapter 24: HASNA (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, JULY 2016)

Chapter 25: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, MAY 2015)

Chapter 26: US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 2008–2015

Chapter 27: HASNA (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 2016)

Chapter 28: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, MARCH 2016)

Chapter 29: US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 2015–2018

Chapter 30: HASNA (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, JANUARY–JULY 2017)

Epilogue: MU NAW (AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, JANUARY 2016)

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Further Reading

Index

Author’s Note

This book tells the stories of two women resettled through the refugee resettlement program to the United States. Mu Naw arrived in 2007, at the beginning of the program for refugees from Myanmar, one of the most successful and widely supported resettlement initiatives in US history. Hasna al-Salam arrived in 2016, with the first wave of Syrian refugees, during one of the greatest moments of upheaval since the establishment of the federal resettlement program.

I gathered the details of these stories through intensive interviews every two weeks or so over a period of two years; in addition, I had been friends with Mu Naw for almost a decade when I began writing the book. The Afterword provides a more in-depth look at our interview process and my methods in writing their narratives. At their request and with their direct input, some identifying details, including names, have been changed to protect Mu Naw, Hasna, and their relatives and friends, many of whom are still in danger currently.

This book is also the story of the American resettlement program itself, from its roots in the immigration debates at the end of the nineteenth century to its dismantling in 2019 at the hands of the government branch that once promoted and protected it. Refugee policy is not a single, monolithic piece of legislation, but a series of programs and practices shaped by one of the most powerful forces in the American republic: the will of the people. Too often we focus on the opportunities the US provides immigrants in the land of the American Dream, and not on how our mercurial national moods lead to small and large policy shifts that radically affect real people. Americans’ national fight for identity—the wrangling about who we once were, how we will define ourselves for each generation, and who we want to become—is the single greatest determiner of who we accept for resettlement.

After years of friendship with refugees and countless hours of research into one of the most remarkable, if imperfect, federal programs, I have come to believe that refugee resettlement is a bellwether of our country’s moral center—how we respond to the greatest humanitarian crises of our time reveals our nation’s soul.

CHARACTER MAPS

Prologue

MU NAW

MYANMAR/THAILAND BORDER, 1989

Mu Naw is five and she is running. Thick wet grass rises higher than her chubby thighs and she lifts her legs as if she is marching, almost jumping to keep up with the frantic adults. Her mouth is silent, but her body makes noises because she hasn’t learned yet how to run and hide well in the woods. Her mother is carrying her baby sister; her toddler brother is with her aunt. Mu Naw struggles valiantly, pushes back tall plants, breathes hard, but she cannot keep up. Her young uncle swings her up onto his shoulders and she wraps her arms under his neck, lays her cheek on his head to keep it out of the way of slapping branches, and holds on.

They run for three days. On the back trails in the mountains, they encounter another family. They are wary at first, but soon realize they are prey hunted by the same predators. They run together. There is safety in numbers. They pool what knowledge they have. Someone heard there are openings at a refugee camp across the river in Thailand. They set off in that direction.

At night, in the darkness, in hushed voices, they share their stories.

Mu Naw overhears her young uncle whispering to another man about what happened; he had waited until his sister, Mu Naw’s beautiful aunt, was out of earshot to speak. Mu Naw’s beautiful aunt is married. She caught the eye of a soldier in the Tatmadaw; not just any soldier, a dangerous soldier with burnished stars on his green sleeve.

Mu Naw remembers a man with stars on his sleeve. From her uncle’s whispers, she learns those stars probably mean he was a general in the Tatmadaw, the Myanmar Armed Forces. The villagers are Karen, one of the many ethnic minorities that the Burmese junta is targeting on a variety of fronts. All over the country, everyone who is Karen—or Kachin, Karenni, Rohingya, Chin, or many of the other groups of people who are not ethnically Burmese—will run. Or they will think about running. Or they will wish they had been able to run. They will pour into camps in Malaysia and India and Thailand, depending on how the vicious scythe of war cuts through their villages and cities. When the scythe sliced through Mu Naw’s village, that general held it.

Mu Naw understands from her uncle’s tone that the stars on the general’s sleeve mean her aunt could not refuse. If she told him she loved her husband, if she said politely, with her eyes down respectfully and her teeth bared in an uncomfortable smile, that she would rather not—she and all of her relatives had better run the second he turned his back.

Her aunt turned him down. Now Mu Naw and her family are running. They love Mu Naw’s beautiful young aunt more than they love their village. Leaving is safer for now, but true safety does not exist in Myanmar.

Mu Naw’s country is in free fall, a state of bewildering, breathtaking conflict. It feels as if everyone is fighting everyone. Families like Mu Naw’s—a Buddhist woman married to a Christian man, neither of whom wanted to fight—are caught in the crossfire from every side.

Fleeing is hard on the children; they must be carried and cajoled and whispered to. It is hard on Mu Naw’s aging female relatives, all referred to as grandmother with the deference and love she gives to all older women. It is hard on the young adults, jumping like rabbits at every sound in the forests, aching with fear for the children and the grandmothers, bearing the weight of packs bound in woven cloth with everything they can carry.

It is hard on Mu Naw’s father. Years ago, his right leg was blown off by a land mine, and though his body has adjusted to the makeshift crutch he fashioned then from a branch, his back and arms ache as he pushes through the damp, sticky branches that cling to him and pull at him. Once, when they stop to rest, he tells Mu Naw that the forest where he walked into a land mine was the same as this one, that she should stay close to him. As they walk again, she can see that sameness wears on him, warns him. He speaks sharply to his wife all day, but not to Mu Naw. At night, he is silent.

Mu Naw’s mother, terrified for her children and for herself, turns her anger on her husband. The sight of his blown-off leg depresses her. Her abrasive tone sets everyone else on edge. One of the grandmothers chides her gently, but Mu Naw’s mother only snaps back. The other grandmothers murmur among themselves—they do not approve of a woman who is so angry, who speaks her mind to her elders.

Mu Naw is unaware of the whispered conversations curling through the camp. She tucks herself next to her father, who leans back against a tree with his amputated leg stretched out. He strokes her hair behind her ear, and she sleeps, mouth open, her small body weighed down with exhaustion.

Her parents’ tension is her country’s war in miniature. Mu Naw does not know it yet, but her family has already shattered. Like broken glass in a frame, the cracks spread, deepen, divide, but the glass stays in place. For now.

The next day, Mu Naw crossed her first border.

PART 1

Chapter 1

MU NAW

AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, APRIL 2007

Mu Naw stood on the landing above the airport baggage claim–area at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and wished she had on different shoes. She shifted the plastic International Organization for Migration bag from her left shoulder to her right and grabbed her daughter’s hand. There were two escalators leading down; she and her husband, Saw Ku, had instinctively paused, not sure which one to take. People passed them on the right and left, confidently moving through space as Mu Naw never had. Mu Naw’s shoes, the black rubber slide-on sandals everyone used in Mae La camp, felt dusty, undignified. She was proud of her skirt and shirt—these were her nicest clothes. They were red and handwoven in the traditional Karen style, a long straight skirt with braided fringes brushing the top of her feet, a tunic with a diamond-shaped hole she slipped her head into. She looked at her daughter Naw Wah, who was two, in her pink Karen dress, and her other daughter, Pah Poe, who was five, in a turquoise one. Even Saw Ku, holding Pah Poe’s hand, had a green tunic that he wore with jeans. In the tiny airplane bathroom, Mu Naw had rebraided the girls’ hair, and Saw Ku had slicked his hair down with water from the tinny sink.

She had heard from friends at the camp that she would get a black sweater and new shoes on the bus to Bangkok. There had been no shoes and no sweaters, though Mu Naw had looked behind the bus seats to make sure. She was too shy to ask the UN workers at the time, but she had not stopped worrying about her rubber sandals in every airport, afraid they seemed shameful to the IOM worker guiding them, that the lack of new shoes meant that she had missed some important step everyone else knew that she did not.

Now the IOM worker was gone. That was another piece of information they had heard in the camp, this one accurate: They would know they were boarding their last flight because the IOM worker would not go with them. Mu Naw had barely known the woman, but now felt bereft without her.

That woman had been certain and knowledgeable, guiding them through their travels by reading the long lists of names on huge signs overhead in each airport and then translating them into their native dialect, Karen, from Bangkok to Los Angeles. Mu Naw could read several things in English already, but she could not understand why the large A22 meant you were on a flight to Dubai, and A23 meant you were going to Hong Kong, but A24 meant Los Angeles. It was one of thousands of things Mu Naw did not grasp.

Mu Naw’s entire life had been spent with people who looked like her. Occasionally, a white UN worker or volunteer came to the camp, but that was it. Everywhere she turned were people with different eyes, ears, hair, noses, clothes, skin, mouths, purses, hats, hijabs, necklaces, bracelets, wallets, suitcases, books, food, water bottles, headphones, scarves, pillows, sweaters, shoes. Even when her eyes were down to shield her from the onslaught of strange sights, the languages assaulted her ears, snatches in tones she had never heard, musical, guttural, loving, rude. The smells of perfume, food, sweat, air-conditioning kept her from breathing in deeply.

Now, in Austin, standing in her last airport at the top of two escalators going down, she wished desperately for one brief minute that they were back in Mae La camp. She wished the IOM woman were still with them. She wished she had her new sweater and shoes.

They had only seen an escalator a handful of times, most of them in airports within the last twenty-four hours. She turned and gazed blankly at her husband for a minute. Saw Ku walked to the escalator on the left, almost running into a white businessman pulling a suitcase behind him. Mu Naw fell into place behind him. She stumbled for a minute, eyes down to keep her balance, clutching the rail that made her hand move slightly faster than the stairs on which she stood. She made sure Naw Wah’s tiny feet were centered in the metal striped step. When she finally reached the bottom of the stairs, anxiously avoiding the steps submerging into each other, Mu Naw took a firm step with Naw Wah over the line that ended the escalator, then looked up. She didn’t have time to worry; a man was already greeting them in Karen, standing beside a tall white woman with a wide smile.

Are you Saw Ku and Mu Naw? We’re here to take you to your new home! Welcome to Texas!

Mu Naw’s face broke into a relieved grin.

The white woman and Karen man helped Mu Naw and Saw Ku get their bags from the revolving circle that spewed luggage out of a large metal mouth. Their bags were easy to spot: multicolored plastic zip-up bags they had purchased from a store in the refugee camp. Just a few days before, Mu Naw had approached a hut where the owner had opened the front wall to form a makeshift storefront. Rusted shelves held snacks and sodas, soap and toothbrushes and combs, rubber sandals in dusty plastic sacks, and a rotating inventory of whatever items he could sell. The store owner’s children watched, squatting in the front of the store, their cheeks white with thanaka to protect them from the sun. Mu Naw tried not to smile too broadly when she walked up and asked the store owner respectfully for the Western bags. He turned and rummaged through the back of his hut, his children looking on solemnly. He handed her two, asking her where she was going.

Taxi! We are going to go live in Taxi! He nodded in response, as if he knew exactly where Taxi was. It would be years before she would realize the difference between the yellow cars you could hail on the street and the state where she lived, or laugh at the fact that she had confused the two.

Mu Naw held the bags proudly slung on her shoulder back through camp, deftly jumping along the uneven packed dirt paths, up the hill lined with huts on large bamboo stilts, past the concrete bathroom area with the trickle of water where everyone—women on one side and men on the other—bathed discreetly, covering themselves with longyi while they washed. Her neighbors eyed her. A few friends waved. The large square bags were a symbol of the trip she was taking, of her new status in the world. She had seen others walking with those bags before they disappeared from the camp forever.

The camp where she had lived in Thailand, Mae La, was supposed to be a temporary stop. After the infiltration of Laotian and Hmong refugees on the eastern border of Thailand in the 1970s and 1980s, the country had very little patience for the refugees arriving from Myanmar on the western border. Thailand had remained stable in spite of war in Vietnam, genocide in Cambodia, unrest in Laos, persecution of Hmong people wherever they lived in the region. The longest-running civil war in the world was not the problem of the Thai people. They designated land where those who crossed illegally into the country could live in ramshackle huts, packed together like pickled fish in a can. Mu Naw had not spent her entire life in the camp; she was unusual among her generation for that. Many of them could barely remember life in Myanmar and most left the camp only by sneaking out and avoiding roads with Thai police or military officials. Leaving the camp was illegal, and capture usually meant being returned to Myanmar. They lived cheek by jowl together, until rumors spread through the camp that doors were being opened for them in other countries. UN officers interviewed them, suddenly interested in their stories, verifying again and again that they were refugees—of course they were, why would anyone live here if they could live anywhere else? More officials came, from Canada and Sweden and Australia and the United States. Mu Naw stood outside the community center beside the dirt road, jostled by what felt like half the camp, when the first two groups of Karen people boarded rickety buses, everything they took with them in their coveted colorful bags. Everyone wanted to wave good-bye, to witness them actually leaving. Mu Naw waved and teared up when one woman wailed, watching her daughter and young grandson wave good-bye through the bus window. But she also felt a rush of excitement as the bus wheeled away in a whirl of dust and exhaust.

Their empty huts were now fair game—daughters-in-law living in one room with their husbands’ entire family moved happily into an abandoned hut down the row. But Mu Naw didn’t even try. She knew as soon as she saw the first group leave that she and Saw Ku would go. There was no life in this camp.

When it was her turn, she and Saw Ku were chosen to be among the first groups to resettle in the United States from Mae La. Her Buddhist mother called it luck; her Christian mother-in-law praised God’s hand in the UN selection process. Mu Naw thought perhaps it was a bit of both. There were thousands of people in Mae La camp who would give anything to be her, walking purposefully past her neighbors with bright plastic bags on her arm.

—

When they rounded the corner on the baggage carousel, Mu Naw was surprised that the bags that had felt foreign and new just days before now seemed intimately familiar, as if they had been with her all of her life. In her IOM sack, tucked inside her own woven bag, she had her passport and her daughters’ passports and the important documents they brought with them. In the checked bags, they had packed what was left: T-shirts, tunics, and two pairs of jeans for Saw Ku, woven tunics and skirts for Mu Naw and the girls, a few extra for them to wear as they grew. There were albums with pictures of each of their relatives, a jar of thanaka for the girls’ faces, cream for Mu Naw’s skin, a few clips for their hair, underwear and combs and toothbrushes. And that was it. There was nothing else to take.

Seeing their bags, Mu Naw felt a pang for the box of letters she had left behind. Two days before she left, she found a tree near enough to her hut that she could find it again someday but far enough away where it would not be disturbed by her neighbors. She had dug a small hole in the hard clay dirt and placed a tin box near the roots of the tree. In it were all of the letters she and Saw Ku had written to each other over the months when they first admitted they liked each other when they were fifteen, saying on paper what they were too shy to express out loud. She had thought about taking the box, but she was not sure what would happen in their new place. This camp seemed more constant, more real than the fantastical new life she would lead in America.

As she watched the white woman and Karen man talking to Saw Ku about the bags, at the end of an exhausting journey that spanned endless, monotonous hours, Mu Naw suddenly knew with a deep certainty she had made the wrong choice. She had thought she would go back with her daughters to dig up the letters in a few years. The idea of ever returning now seemed impossible; the English that had been a novelty spoken only by UN workers now engulfed her. The loss hit her in a powerful wave of grief. She could close her eyes and see the sun shining through the expansive green leaves of the tree, feel the muggy air on her skin, the claylike dirt beneath her sandals. It was perfectly clear in her mind but the tree was on the other side of the world, standing vigil over the teenage love she had shared with her husband; the tin box would rust, the letters disintegrate. Her daughters would never read them. She moved forward numbly, feet shuffling on the cold linoleum.

—

The car ride from the airport to their new home was a dizzying, exhilarating experience. They had walked on a crosswalk where cars paused politely. The white woman led them around to the side of a dark van and showed them how to buckle their children into the car seats. The children slept, mouths open in exhaustion. They skimmed the smooth highway into town, the lights and buildings whizzing past at a rate that left her dazed. Mu Naw gripped the armrest, body hunched against the window in an effort not to throw up or cry or succumb to the powerful emotion she could not name that pressed down on her. She had only ridden in a car a handful of times in her life and it was nothing like this, the flight of an efficient machine through an electric landscape she had never imagined existed.

They parked their car in a circle of light under a street lamp at an apartment complex with iron gates that were open. The air smelled like asphalt and clean laundry. The white woman and the Karen man took their bags and led them to an apartment on the first floor with a faint hint of cigarette smoke.

The lock on the door stuck for a minute, but then they got it open and walked into a living room with a brown couch and a chair, some empty shelves, a tall floor lamp leaning slightly to the side. There was a table in the small kitchen, appliances on the counters, a refrigerator that whirred gently. In one bedroom was a large master bed with a red and white comforter. The other bedroom held two twin beds covered in white comforters. The sheets were already on the beds; the woman showed Saw Ku how to lock the door and put up the brass chain that would keep everyone out. She made him try several times, watching until he got it. The children slumped on the couch, staring at their father opening and closing the door and fastening the chain.

Finally, they started to leave, the Karen man translating for the white woman that a church group had gathered all of this furniture for them, that everything was theirs to keep, that the refrigerator had some food in it. He added that the group had prayed over the apartment, a fact that pleased Mu Naw. They smiled warmly and Mu Naw tried to speak her new language, her thank you a bit garbled, but the woman understood and, after an awkward second of jostling, they hugged. Mu Naw barely came up to the woman’s shoulder. The Karen translator repeated his invitation—they would come eat dinner with him later that week. After they left, Saw Ku hastily locked and chained the door. No one mentioned when someone would be back to get them. They didn’t think to ask.

They looked at each other and smiled. This was it. They were here. They dug through the bags for squashed, wrinkled pajamas; when Mu Naw unfolded them, the scent of wood smoke, clay floor, dried bamboo rushed past her. They brushed their teeth in the bathroom where the water ran inside the house any time they wanted. They tucked the girls into the large queen bed between them, a little unit of four.

As she crawled into the bed beside Naw Wah, Mu Naw imagined getting ready to sleep in their small hut in Mae La camp, laying out the mats, pulling the mosquito netting away from the wall, fastening it around them. The leaves in the trees outside would rustle; their neighbors’ conversations would seep muffled through bamboo walls until the thick night settled around them. The rice mat would smell pleasantly like earth; it would be flat and cool.

This new bed was soft. The sheets were stiff and held the crisp wrinkles that Mu Naw would later know meant they had been unfolded from a package. The blanket was thick. The blinds above the headboard gapped slightly at the bottom and the light from a street lamp shone through the meager tree outside her window, forming shadows when the wind blew that made her jump. The white noise of the nearby highway was a motorized river, the constant stream disrupted by horns or loud engines. She could hear voices outside the apartment speaking in a language that did not sound like English, voices that spiked into an argument in the middle of the night. She lifted her head to see if Saw Ku was awake; he lifted his head too. He silently reached over their girls and took her hand.

Chapter 2

US REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT, 1945–1951

A profound public awakening following World War II shaped American refugee resettlement policies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. US lawmakers, with the unprecedented support of constituents across the country who were horrified by the scale of the Holocaust, worked with the global community in shaping international agencies and programs, legislation and conventions, that would remain in place for generations. And all of it happened within a handful of years. The pace of the change was extraordinary.

World War II left more than 10 million displaced people in Europe alone. On June 25, 1948, President Harry S. Truman and the US Congress passed the Displaced Persons (DP) Act, a landmark bill that provided special visas allowing about four hundred thousand European refugees to find new lives in the United States over a four-year period. At the time, the US immigration system was controlled by quotas; only a certain number of visas were available each year for people arriving from a handful of designated countries, which were almost entirely European. During the war, the government launched a few ad hoc policies that allowed some Jewish refugees and others fleeing the Nazi occupation to come to the United States, but there was nothing on the scale of the DP Act. It was one of the earliest instances of the American government’s officially recognizing refugees’ unique circumstances as victims of war and creating a separate immigration policy—not yet a program—to bring many of them to this country.

Before the act was passed, in his State of the Union on January 6, 1947, President Truman praised the way