The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

Arriving at the Hotel Barba in Mentana, Italy, Maman takes the children to see the sights, enrolls them in the only English homeschool near them, and arranges leftover sandwiches for meals. Nayeri catches up on fifth grade studies. Boredom lingers over their 16-month stay with nothing to do but eat and gossip with the few people who shared languages. A Romanian couple becomes the talk of the hostel after the wife, who receives gifts from her working husband, flees with a younger man. The authorities return them to the camp where they uncomfortably resume their relationship, the husband heartbroken. An Afghan grandmother with whom Nayeri gossips gets caught building a shower seat. The hotel accuses the grandmother of wasting water, but the refugees support her. Eventually, Maman secures an American sponsor, and the family travels to Oklahoma. 

In 2011, Nayeri returns to Hotel Barba with her first husband, Phillip, and discovers that it is now the upscale Hotel Belvedere. Visiting her former room, Nayeri shifts between nostalgia and contempt at how the renovations have “tarted up” the place (111). Her pleasant but unfulfilling marriage reminds her of the Romanian couple and how their “primary sin” was to stop waiting for help and leave on their own (112). She also notes how fiction allows her to express these memories. The owner tells her that she can return to discover more about the location’s past.

Living in London in 2017, Nayeri learns about LM Village, a resort in Greece that the charity Refugee Support. The resort has been refashioned into a reform-minded camp that gives tenants a sense of dignity, such as a store where they can trade points for groceries and volunteers who don’t look for approval. Cofounder Paul Hutchings tells Nayeri about challenges like useless donations and micromanaging grant makers. This makes Nayeri recall her own experiences of carelessly stuffing groceries as a teenager and working in a soup kitchen with hands-off financial employees.

Just before her flight to the Greek resort, Nayeri receives a call from Maman Moti. A child bride in an arranged marriage, Maman Moti and her daughter fled Iran before the revolution, and while not technically a refugee, she adopted many mistrustful tendencies like believing that her neighbors want to drive her out. Nayeri’s relationship with her is tense due to Maman Moti’s old-fashioned attitudes and refusal to either sponsor the family’s asylum or speak to Nayeri for seven years after her divorce. All the same, Nayeri agrees to leave her daughter, Elena, with Moman Moti during the trip. 

Nayeri arrives at LM Village, where its original festive color scheme is now dilapidated. She dreads being there and recognizes the struggle a child has with leaving her backpack in her room. She notes that no refugee likes returning to that transitory environment and that children refuse to leave their possessions. However, Nayeri also feels that she must expose these refugee traumas to an increasingly hostile United States and Europe as well as understand her own “story and identity” for Elena’s sake (132).

Nayeri visits Amina from Aleppo, Syria, the wife of a furniture maker. The two repainted their well-maintained room in bright colors, which will be comforting for the children. There are also copious amounts of stuffed bears in this and other rooms—well-meaning donations from those who don’t understand that bears are routinely slaughtered in Iran and that refugees should receive more practical gifts. Amina’s husband, Mustafa, needs an expensive keratin injection treatment to save his eyes.

Nayeri then visits Shiva, a Syrian speech therapist with a large family of adult children. They do nothing to maintain the room and insist on giving Nayeri generous portions of their dinner despite their situation. LM Village’s commander, dedicated but prone to favoritism and clashes, also attends the dinner. Nayeri grapples with both guilt in accepting food the family needs and the internalization of “all the biases that were once used against me” (39). Nayeri and Paul then travel to Katsikas, where they discuss the concept of shame, the demand for cellphone service among modern refugees, and a proposed Trump administration plan to replace food-stamp benefits with a universal prepackaged box.

The narrative shifts to the story of the village residents Farzaneh, her husband Majid, and their young children, Sarah and Shirin. They fled Iran in 2017 after Farzaneh’s extremist brother in the Revolutionary Guard deemed her a heretic. They entered Turkey, where they encountered a series of unreliable smugglers who abandon their group at set points. The final smuggler would only provide a raft and instruct one of the refugees on how to operate it. It took three tries to reach European waters. The raft sputtered out in Turkish waters during the first attempt, and a fellow refugee told the family to pose as Syrian Kurds to expedite their prison release. The second attempt failed after a passenger didn’t put their phone on airplane mode. The border guard took one of Farzaneh’s children from her as they boarded the boat—a traumatic experience that renders Shirin mute for 90 days. Farzaneh took the baby back and carried her up the ladder on her back. During the third attempt, English guards caught them and took them into the refugee camp in Mytilene, nicknamed “The Hell of Moria” for its squalid conditions (147). Despite a promise that it would only take 10 days to leave, the family ended up staying for 90 days.

Nayeri meets Sarah playing soccer, and the child invites her into her Isobox home (a structure made from a repurposed steel shipping container), where Majid and Farzaneh tell Nayeri their story. Majid now has a scar from a fight at the Moria camp, where most of the 450 refugees from 10 countries arrive. Nayeri also works at the refugee store. The store is lax about stealing, but it strictly adheres to the points system and restricts shopping to one family at a time. Most camp residents immediately spend their points, and Nayeri feels guilty about bagging items before a customer is ready and thanking a couple in Farsi, revealing that she listens in on their conversations. Nayeri considers the turmoil that pregnant women face in these conditions. She becomes a welcome face at the camp as she listens to residents who seem relieved to talk to someone who will believe them.

The memoir cuts to the narrative of two of the camp residents: Valid and Taraa. Before fleeing his home country, Valid was a government clerk in Afghanistan’s Parwan Province with his young wife, Taraa, and three boys. He remained with the government after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 but became the target of militants during the 2004 elections. After receiving death threats, he drove his family through the dangerous Shibar Pass towards Bamyan Province. However, just as they realized that the Taliban tampered with the car, the tires broke off, sending the car tumbling down the cliff. Taraa suffered severe injuries that left her in a wheelchair. Of their three sons, only the youngest, Pooya, survived.

The family remained in Afghanistan, where Valid clashed with the Taliban and Taraa gave birth to a son and daughter. One day, militants shot Taraa during an assassination attempt, nearly killing her. The family moved to Iran and lived in hiding for several years. After receiving a threatening letter, they traveled to Turkey and made the Aegean Sea passage to Moria. The now 16-year-old Pooya joined a bad crowd at the camp, but Valid is too old to challenge him. He only wants a location where he “could fry eggplant in turmeric and care for his broken wife” (157).

Nayeri listens to Majid’s complaints about the camp, which provides limited medical support and only a day of school to appease inspectors. Even then, Katsikas is better than Moria with its overflowing toilets and ethnic gang violence that Majid blames on “layabout boys without families” who shouldn’t be in danger in home countries (160). Majid asks her how to expedite the process, a common question, and Nayeri says to teach his daughters English.

Nayeri meets Darius, who takes her to a male social club. He tells her how his courting of an Afghan girl at the Moria camp triggered an ethnic fight. Nayeri also meets Hamid, a man who has spent a year in Katsikas and regularly engages in self-harm. She warns him that these behaviors make him less sympathetic to Westerners who want feelgood stories of rescued “luminaries” (162). As she talks to the affable men, Nayeri asks why people should condemn young men who emigrate for economic opportunities.

Nayeri then visits a gathering of older women who are baking cake and noodles. She meets Hajira, a literature teacher and widow who is younger than Nayeri yet appears much older and has grown children. Hajira recently married a man in the camp, reminding Nayeri of Paul’s complaint about receiving a wedding dress as a donation. In addition, a teacher, Davood, provides non-sanctioned lessons.

In another Isobox, Nayeri meets Taraa and Valid, who tell their story. Taraa shows Nayeri her scars. Hajira begs Nayeri to take their nine-year-old son, Naser, back to England. Nayeri finds the idea that she’s “choosing” people to help disgusting but contemplates how she could smuggle Naser (169). She considers whether it is cruel for an ex-refugee to visit camp residents knowing that life after asylum is not much better. She compares refugees with the tourists of nearby Ioannia, who would quickly find an indefinite stay in paradise nerve wracking. Hajira invites Nayeri back for a birthday party, where the refugees tease her over her refusal to dance.

During her final day, Nayeri helps a middle-aged Iranian man complete his first trip to the store and wonders about his future. She rejects Valid’s offer for dinner out of shame over declining to take Naser back with her to England—a decision she regrets. Nayeri tries to see Majid, but his family is out, and she thinks of the Hotel Barba refugees and wonders about their present lives.