After the Last Border

Description

The story of two refugee families and their hope and resilience as they fight to survive and belong in America

The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees has been central to America’s identity for centuries–yet America has periodically turned its back at the times of greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the twenty-first century American dream, having won the “golden ticket” to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.

Mu Naw, a Christian from Myanmar struggling to put down roots with her family, was accepted after decades in a refugee camp at a time when America was at its most open to displaced families; and Hasna, a Muslim from Syria, agrees to relocate as a last resort for the safety of her family–only to be cruelly separated from her children by a sudden ban on refugees from Muslim countries. Writer and activist Jessica Goudeau tracks the human impacts of America’s ever-shifting refugee policy as both women narrowly escape from their home countries and begin the arduous but lifesaving process of resettling in Austin, Texas–a city that would show them the best and worst of what
America has to offer.

After the Last Border situates a dramatic, character-driven story within a larger history–the evolution of modern refugee resettlement in the United States, beginning with World War II and ending with current closed-door policies–revealing not just how America’s changing attitudes toward refugees has influenced policies and laws, but also the profound effect on human lives.WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE

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.” –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 shrinks 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 US 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 US 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 US 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, New York Times Magazine staff writer & 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)
 
“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.” —BooklistJessica Goudeau has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, 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 US 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 years working with refugees in Austin, TX and is the cofounder of Hill Tribers, a nonprofit that provided supplemental income for Burmese refugee artisans for seven years.

 
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 off gathering firewood 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 any 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; the grandmothers have joints and bent bones that slow them down. 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 snaps at his wife all day, but not at 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 toward the low fire. 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.

That was the day Mu Naw crossed her first border.

US

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