We Need New Names

Darling feels homesick and asks Aunt Fostalina if she can visit her family and friends back home. Aunt Fostalina finally tells her that it costs too much to just go home whenever she wants, plus she doesn’t have the immigration documents to return to America. Messenger, who is seeking asylum in the US, smuggles guavas as a present from all of Darling’s friends, and she eats them and thinks longingly of home. She’d promised to keep in touch with her friends but lost contact after a while. In the beginning, she wrote all the time, and about everything she could think of, except for crime and other negative things “because they embarrassed me, because they made America not feel like My America, the one I had always dreamed of back in Paradise” (190).

Darling goes to retrieve Aunt Fostalina’s purse so that she can buy a push-up bra she sees on TV, and she looks at a cemetery out of the bedroom window. She notes the beautiful sculptures, most of them angels, all over the place. When she first arrived, she thought cemeteries were museums because of how manicured and beautiful they were.