Taiye Selasi Reads “Firstborn Immigrant Daughter”

0:00Taiye Selasi:Hi, it's David Remnick, and I've got some news for you. We're headed to the Tribeca Festival for a special live taping of the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll be doing a one-night-only show at the festival's 25th anniversary. So come out and join us on Wednesday, June 10th at 8.15. Tickets are available now at tribecafilm.com slash audio. That's tribecafilm.com slash audio.

0:31This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales.

1:07Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

1:30This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Taye Selassie read her story, First Born Immigrant Daughter, from the June 8, 2026 fiction issue of the magazine. Selassie is an author and photographer. Her debut novel, Ghana Must Go, a New York Times bestseller, was published in 2013, the year she was named one of the best young British novelists by Granta. Now here's Taeya Selassie.

2:10First Born Immigrant Daughter Dear First Born Immigrant Daughter, First, there are many ways to be an immigrant. Some immigrate to territories, others to tax brackets. There is only one way to be an expat. Say your parents, both doctors, were born in West Africa. When they moved to West London, they were immigrants. If they had been Uber drivers and not doctors, they would have been migrants. If they had been white American doctors, they would have been expats. Migrants travel on boats. Immigrants travel on planes. Expats travel on psychedelics. In London or Lisbon or Brooklyn or Berlin, you are the firstborn daughter of immigrants, not expats.

2:58Second, by firstborn daughter, we do not mean firstborn child, per se. You might have elder brothers, a secondborn twin. Your father might have children from, how shall we put it, children from a previous entanglement. You might not know or yet know of his firstborn. But you are the first human being your mother ever met. and this, dear F.I.D., is key, over whom she felt complete and uncontested dominion. You are the first thing your mother could own. You see, a son will leave, she says, and must. To leave is his mandate, his mission. After all the love that she's poured into him, she pours school fees, a different liquid currency, into you.

3:45A son will leave your mother to love some other woman whom your mother will refer to as a girl. Very likely the daughter of another immigrant mother. But ideally, if your mother is lucky, not the first, not an F.I.D., difficult and defiant like you, but a middle child, mild and compliant. And if they have children, this son and that girl, the dominant grandmother will be the other mother, the horror. No, says your mother, a son can be loved, but not owned, not contained, not controlled. A son becomes a man, and men tend to leave, or else staying too long to let down. A daughter, by contrast, as your mother knows well, born a daughter herself, is a belonging.

4:32She belongs to the family, to the village, to the culture, to the church, to the old country, but to herself? No. Because your mother was a girl once, she was owned too, and though abandoned or betrayed by her owners, She believed them, when they told her, as they liked to do often, that a woman unowned is unloved. Despite her brilliance and her resilience, your mother still believes that a woman is safest in the world as a wife, and that a wife is safest in a marriage as a mother, hence your father, hence her fury, hence you. Point being, when your mother chose your father, if one, she did choose, and we pray that she gave her consent.

5:16And if too, one can be said to have chosen a man when no man was never a choice. If your mother chose your father, she did so in part to be safe, to be claimed, to be owned. As a girl in the old country, she could not own herself. As a woman, she sought out a co-owner. Then, given that a mother could not own a son, her first shot at ownership was you. By firstborn daughter, we mean only this. The first thing your mother could own. Third, if you wish to belong to yourself, you must forgive your mother. She knows not what she does or has done, but we do. Fourth, we know. We know that she pushed, prodded, pressured you incessantly, criticized, nitpicked, corrected you insensitively, valued your performance much more highly than your peace of mind, scarred you, scared you, she scares us all too.

6:17She is sorry, of course, that she made you unhappy and sorrier that the new country made you ungrateful. But she doesn't see why you need a therapist at all, much less one who has something against her. No, your therapist is the problem, your mother pronounces. Gentle parenting, covert narcissism, codependence, she laughs. Politely, you explain, that at first you laughed too. Like all FIDs, you are hyper-independent. But it makes sense in Spanish, where dependencia means addiction, codependence should be called co-addiction. Less politely, she reminds you that she doesn't speak Spanish, as she never had the schooling that you did, or the mothering.

6:59No one poured school fees or study abroad plane tickets or holidays in Malaga and Mérida into her. She speaks accented English and two languages from the old country, neither of which she taught you to speak, and so what? If you learn to speak Spanish or Mandarin or Russian, could you not learn an old country language? Touché! But what she doesn't understand is that your cousin's taunting laughter doesn't haunt you when you mispronounce mucin or mamushka, that no foreign language makes you feel as foreign as your mother's tongue. Besides, she pivots. She seldom drinks wine, unlike you, with your full-bodied this, tannic that.

7:40Say what you will, but she isn't an addict, a dependent, so how can you be co-dependent? When you explain that some addictions aren't to substances, but instead to online shopping, shit-stirring, little white-lying, exploding into anger in the middle of an otherwise polite conversation, she explodes. Your mother speaks the language of the bone-tired provider, the culturally oppressed alpha, the captain, commands. You speak the language of the sailor intellectual, questions, and she doesn't understand. If you love her, then you will obey her, and if you obey her, then she will love you. See? Simple.

8:19She can't understand why you can't understand. Fifth, we know. If she is mentally unwell, she refuses to seek treatment, living perched on the verge of rage or tears, clinging blindly to the belief that all her suffering will cease when you cease to expect her apology. You Google diagnoses, anxiety, depression, borderline, bipolar 1, bipolar 2, the woes of a brown woman in a white man's world. Will the DSM-6 include WBWWMW? No. Your mother doesn't practice non-violent communication. She doesn't know how to hold space. But what she does know is how to survive in a racist capitalist patriarchy as a non-white woman without a trust fund.

9:06And this, we insist, dear FID, makes your mother a conquering hero. What is John Quincy Adams said to have said? I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet. His only daughter, Louisa, died in infancy, tragically. We shall never know his vision for a girl. Your mother, heroically, became a warrior and a frontierswoman and explorer, a pioneer, but you are no Henry Adams. An FID may become a poet, yes, but she must become a corporate lawyer first. Sixth, we know. When the mothers of your friends from the new country coup, all I want is for my daughter to be happy, You laugh.

9:49Your mother doesn't want her daughter to be happy. Your mother wants her daughter to be impressive. And you tried all. We know how hard you worked to earn the woman's approval, if not her affection or affirmation, with those accolades. Your academic achievements in primary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate schools were legendary. Legion. For years you amassed them, all the trophies from the spelling bees, the sports matches, the recitals, the debate team competitions, as if they were chips at some Vegas casino which you could one day trade in for her love. But when you brought them to the counter, your hands overspilling, you discovered that this freight ton of chips was insufficient, enough to buy her approval in public, yes, but not what you craved, her affection in private.

10:35Strangers say, bursting, your mother must be proud of you. Must she? Your mother says tersely, well done. She loves to hear others praise your tireless efforts, but never says, rest, you must be tired. Come. She has no time for your tiredness. If you want to know what tired is, then look at her childhood, then look at her marriage, then immigrate from the working class to the upper middle class and just under a decade, then tell her you're tired. No, rest is for the lazy, the Caucasian adolescent, the indolent, the indulgent, until the age of thirty. Then rest is for beauty, and beauty is for mating.

11:15After thirty, rest is important. Your mother, suddenly, is alarmed by your exhaustion. Why must you work quite so hard, stay so late? Yawning holes in your soul. You can hide from your suitors, but not static wrinkles. Seventh, we know. Your mother finds you beautiful, but only when you're thinner, when your hips are not looking so fleshy, so full, or only when you're fatter, when your buttocks are fuller, a steak wouldn't kill you, you're all skin and bones. Your food is the problem, your mother pronounces. Quinoa? Spirulina? Nooch? She laughs. As she is not eating these foods, you point out, she need not pronounce their names.

11:57Then the problem is the food that you don't eat, she pivots. What kind of immigrant doesn't eat white rice? It is your food that makes you anxious. Not her fretting, or fuming, or guilting, or exploding over nothing at all. Not her ever-running commentary, as if she were a sportscaster reporting the score of your body mass index. Not her aggressively passive questions about your boyfriends, or lack of boyfriends, or lack of babies, or lack of love, or lack of REM sleep. It is not your mother but your food that makes you anxious, says your mother, and the anxiety that makes you fleshy or not fleshy enough.

12:37These men in the new country may like starving beauties, but men where she's from, where you're from, prefer curves. It's a shame, she adds, sighing, that you can't see your beauty. In those earrings that she bought, you are beautiful. Never mind that those earrings are not to your taste. Your mother does not believe in your taste. Eighth, we know. If this warrior went to university and let us pause to acknowledge what a feat this was then for a woman, there were countless male students, most likely double the number of female ones in her graduating class. That student body demographics might limit the options is a difficult concept for your mother to grasp.

13:21This is how she refers to heterosexual men, as the options, though never as optional. All she wants, she says, is for you to find love, as if love were a thing in hiding. A low-lit mesqueria with an unmarked door. In fact, she wants other things also. One, that the love be a man, not a woman, who loves to flatter your mother. Two, that the love, if not a great love, then a good-for-now love, lead to childbirth and quickly. She's being honest, she says in her wounded bird voice, not unhelpful, as you say in yours, and it's true. She honestly doesn't care if you carry regret, just as long as you bear her a grandbaby.

14:05What you think but don't say is that to have this grandbaby, you will have to have sex with a man. The same kind of man, lo, the same kind of sex that she once so doggedly scorned, or has she forgotten? For years your mother spoke of men as if they, like sea wasps, could kill you on contact. As if brushing past some boy in a secondary school corridor might inseminate you spontaneously and dishonor her irreparably. What we now call sex-shaming, you knew, as an adolescent, as your mother's only language, only logic, for desire. This, we understand, has to do with the church, by which we mean a schema, not a structure.

14:45Church, for your mother, is less spiritual than social. A container, a social and cultural container, like a hot yoga studio for new country mothers, or a luxury artisanal grocery store. a space where women wear identical clothing, enjoy identical righteousness, repeat identical phrases. By the grace of God, for your mother and her church, trust the process, for theirs. A sari, or a mumu, or a bubu, in her temple, lululemon, or lily Pulitzer, in theirs. But the pressure to conform is the same in both containers, with certain women serving as the archetype. and it is these women, like the popular girls of your youth, whose approval all the congregants crave.

15:29Nota bene, if your immigrant mother was ever unmarried when you were, say, older than ten years of age, you will have witnessed her wooing not men, but these women, all wives, by the grace of God. The single immigrant mother is an anomaly, an impossibility, torn between two irreconcilable desires. One, to be rescued by men who require sex. Two, to be revered by churchwomen who revile it. The elders especially, dry-boned, bad-breathed. They take pleasure in judgment instead. And the options, single, solvent, straight, pick two. The new country is no country for second husbands. Better to return to the old where the devil is known.

16:15Ninth, we know. If desiring a man was a distraction at best, and a disgrace at worst, for decades, then when were you meant to learn about men? Who was meant to teach you? Your absent-minded or absentee father? Your tactless or tactile uncles? Your cousins? Non-immigrants find it confusing that non-relatives can be cousins. They think blood is thicker than water. We know love is thicker than blood. Your aunties? You can't remember seeing, as a child or an adolescent, one happily married auntie. Comfortably, conveniently, but contentedly? No, unsafe, all your aunties were unsoft. They taught you their secrets, to candy and onion, to fold fabric into wearable origami, to braid, to laugh in the face of want of all sorts, to dance in the wake of woe of all kinds, but to trust, to yield, to repair without delay, to disagree without damage, to hear without defense, to fold care into truth, and truth into trust, and trust into love?

17:23No. Your mother insists that she gives great advice. You insist that she gives only warnings. Ages 15 to 30, warning, you might get pregnant. Age 30 plus, warning, you might never get pregnant. Everything that you know about relationships you learned from the exclusively stable marriages that you saw on TV and the exclusively unstable marriages that you saw in foreign and independent films. The former seemed to rely on a laugh track for survival, while the latter, like smoking, looked toxic and chic. Now you have guidance, the podcasts, the memes, the self-help book summarized in Instagram carousels, to help you make sense of the messes you've made, but your mother remains utterly baffled.

18:12You were always so good at things, math, music, manners, why are you so bad at mating? she asks in sincerity, confounded and offended, almost angrily offended that her belonging belongs to no man. Last, no judgment, we know, we do. Our gentle suggestion, just one, is that you begin to distinguish between two sorts of lovers. We call them the slipper and the shoe. The shoe is a lover who is fit for your journey. The slipper for your indoor comfort alone. Few people meet or need more than two shoes. Some, alas, never know one. One day, you may find, to your delighted surprise, dear FID, the shoe that fits.

19:04Until that fine day, a slipper will do, but only for indoor use. Here, indoor use includes sex, yes, ideally good sex, sex that makes you feel sexy, but also, not limited to, binge-watching Netflix, forwarding memes, sharing music recommendations. We would urge you to pick a slipper who excels at food and beverage, the Peter Pan with a penchant for Kyoto, the anaphile man-child who plays the cajon, but an FID seldom picks slippers. As with stocking stuffers, say, or secret Santa gifts, you sort of take whatever turns up. A colleague of a friend, an unsuitable axe, a one-night stand run long. But eventually you will have to identify what is happening, and here you must not self-delude.

19:50The function of this lover is not to be a partner, start a family, build a future, support your work out in the world. The sole function of a slipper, like a childhood home, is to comfort a grown-up indoors. Just a word here about childhood homes. It is quite possible that you do not have one. But your new country friends speak of theirs with an affection and an entitlement that together unnerve you. This is my house, they'll draw on arrival. I'll leave your shoes on, a touch-smug falsetto, the tone that you use when speaking of your shih tzu, your mother of your standardized test scores. The childhood home for these friends is a church of its own, if not a birthplace as such, then a birthright.

20:39The residence of the mother, but the dowry of the daughter. Half museum, half mutual fund. This is because, like all new country capitalists, their mothers believe in passing the baton. Your mother does too, but has mandated that you must rerun her leg of the relay. It builds character and work ethic, she says. Stop whining. She did it barefoot. You're running in spikes. You have never considered, nor been invited to consider, the home in which you grew up as yours. It was your mother's house always, a dictatorship, your little bedroom a sanctuary city. If your mother continues to reside in that house, the city has likely been ceded.

21:21It is a guest room for family from the old country now, or a hoarder's paradise, or both. If your mother moved out, then she did so in chaos, as one flees a war, saving none of your keepsakes. Gone, macrame bracelets, handwritten letters, hardcover journals with little gold blocks. Unlike mothers from the new country, your mother does not believe that childhood itself is an old country. Now, critically deficient in hugs, hot chocolate, framed family photos, and encouraging magnets, you delight in the comfort that you find in the company of underwhelming lovers. And fair enough. Enjoy your slipper lovers until they wear thin, we say, just enjoy them indoors.

22:04They, warm, soft, a wee bit weak, can't accompany you out into the world. The minute you try to walk any meaningful distance, their souls will go soggy, your feet will go cold. First discomfort, then disappointment, then dismay, then disdain, will dim your delight just like that. Alas, such lovers can soothe certain wounds in your soul, but only temporarily, only superficially. To soothe is not to heal a wound, a heart, a bone. For that you must walk. Start walking alone. A shoe will appear as you go, fear not, but first you will walk, as you must, on your own. First you will walk to your mother and say, what you gave me was all that you had.

22:53What you gave me was not all I needed at all. What you gave me was all that you knew. For a moment you will sit with your mother, insisting, rest, you must be tired, come. With a featherweight kiss to that warrior forehead, you will whisper, well done. Then, dear firstborn immigrant daughter, it will suffice that you know that you are, Not first, just born Not immigrant, just child Not owned, just loved Not hers, just yours

23:38That was Tayeh Selassie reading her story First Born Immigrant Daughter. This is her first story in The New Yorker. For more New Yorker fiction audio, try the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, where we invite writers to choose stories from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month, Han Ong reads The Fugitive by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. You can find that and other New Yorker podcasts in your podcast app. If you're a New Yorker subscriber, you get access to all episodes of The Writer's Voice ad-free, and to everything else we publish, award-winning journalism, criticism, fiction, and poetry, plus games and cartoons.

24:13For an early look at new fiction, poems, and exclusive author interviews, sign up for the weekly Books and Fiction newsletter at newyorker.com slash fiction. This episode of The Writer's Voice was produced by John LeMay. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening.

24:36We are in uncharted territory.

24:39Taiye Selasi:Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to The New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. And I hope you'll join us for The New Yorker Radio Hour. On the tranquil shores of Amelia Island, Florida, salt air, sunshine, and gentle sea breezes invite you to enjoy the luxury of letting go.

25:16Wander pristine beaches, breathe deeper on quiet nature trails, or simply get lost in the charm of a downtown stroll. Discover the Northeast Florida getaway where every day feels a little different and completely your own. Find your Unwind at AmeliaIsland.com Most people don't realize how much of their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions pulling details about you from public records and the internet, then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers.

25:59It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to$5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring or just a VPN. Aura gives you all of it together at the same price competitors charge for just one service.

26:41Start your free trial today at aura.com slash safer. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash safer.

26:54PRX