What pops into your head at the word “immigrant?” Aine Greaney’s new book, Green Card and Other Essays, is a compelling collection of essays about her personal journey that made me understand in new ways the challenges all immigrants face. Within these stories, Greaney also shines light on longings we all share.

Imagine a time – the 1980s – when an American congressman sponsored an immigrant reform law that issued ten thousand visas issued to residents of  thirty-six nations. In Greaney’s essay “America the Story,” we learn that 40% of those visas went to the Irish who faced 20% unemployment at home. Granted one of those visas, Greaney arrived at JFK with a bit of luggage, $200, and the name of a couple she didn’t know who would meet her at the bus station in Albany, NY and host her for an undetermined amount of time.

Brave? Crazy? Hopeful? Scared? Aine considers all these as she worked in restaurants, furthered her education and career and stood in line with people from around the world  to keep her immigration status in order, and ultimately, become a U.S. citizen.

In these deeply personal (yet often funny) stories, Greaney touches upon themes of belonging, home, and family. It surprised me how I, a born and bred American, felt some sense of some of the struggles that Aine Greaney faced and continues to face.

Her story, “Sanctuary,” about returning to the States after her mother’s death, told in a haunting second-person voice, gave words to the same emotions I felt returning from Massachusetts to Oklahoma after my father, then my mother died. I was left, as we all are, to sort out how we go on in this world that, for us, is forever changed. “What My Father Did on St. Patrick’s Day” brought to mind my father’s own actions and words every time I returned from Oklahoma to visit. Each of these essays in this slim volume drew a personal response because, I believe, of our common humanity.

“Since landing in the U.S.,” Greaney writes, “I have lived in eleven houses and apartments. Some were a stopover, where I stayed for barely a year. Others were for much longer than that. I know none of them felt like home.  But then, pre-emigration, neither did any of those places where, as a student or a working singleton, I had lived in Ireland.” Further on, she concludes, “Perhaps there is no story. There are only my American-accented words on a page. There is the holy mystery of mutation, the bio-miracle in which one thing becomes another, in which the foreign turns familiar.”

GreenCards and Other Essays is available via the publisher at www.universaltable.org  or Amazon. More details on this and Aine’s other books at Aine Greaney’s website.

Top Photograph: Irish Memorial (Beth Clary)

Book Cover photo: Ken Elrott