Cast Adrift: Navigating my Immigrant Identity after 7 Years in America

A Bangladeshi immigrant reflects on 7 years in the US – feeling caught between cultures & facing the nuances of ESL prose after reading literary works.

Seven years into this American chapter, I find myself occupying a strange, liminal territory. It's a space carved out between the life I left in Bangladesh and the one I've been building here, a zone where the clear demarcations of identity start to blur. The cultural coordinates I arrived with feel increasingly distant; values and perspectives that once felt foundational no longer resonate with the same certainty. Yet, the perspectives forged purely on this soil remain subtly alien, observed rather than fully inhabited.

There was a period, earnest and perhaps naive, where the goal felt simpler: to become a "good American." To assimilate, contribute, understand the nuances. But that desire now bumps against a persistent feeling – the quiet, nagging sense of never quite being enough. Not American in the way someone born here is, carrying assumptions and histories absorbed like oxygen. It’s not a dramatic crisis, more a low-grade ache, a realization that the final stitch integrating me fully into this tapestry might always remain elusive. It’s a bummer, honestly, letting go of that earlier, simpler ambition.

Compounding this is a more recent awareness, something centered on language. English, my second tongue, never felt like a significant barrier before. Functionally, it served. Reading widely, even consuming genre fiction like Sanderson or Kuang, felt comfortable, the language a vehicle rather than an obstacle. But lately, diving into the work shared by authors on Discord servers, exploring the essays and stories on Substack, has unveiled a kind of chasm. It’s in the prose itself – a texture, a precision, a way of wielding sentences that feels just beyond my current grasp.

I suspect it’s the nature of the work I'm encountering now, much of it shaded toward the literary or upmarket. There's an undeniable craft there I now covet, perhaps partly because, yes, it looks cool. It feels sophisticated, capable of carrying a different kind of weight. My own efforts in writing have focused on the architecture – plot structure, character arcs, the solid bones of story. I've put in the hours there. But the very weave of the language, the stylistic choices that give prose its unique energy and voice – that's the territory I haven't charted with the same diligence.

So I'm left here, suspended. Not quite the person who left Dhaka seven years ago, yet distinct from those who have only known this American landscape. And now, this parallel awareness regarding language – seeing the potential in prose that I admire but cannot yet replicate. It feels like another facet of this in-betweenness. Perhaps exploring that stylistic gap, digging into the nuances of prose, is the next step. Not just as a writerly pursuit, but as another way of navigating this hyphenated existence, trying to find a voice that feels true to this specific, slightly adrift, point in the journey.