This chapter samples basic signs for public transportation. In China, getting around in and between cities is done mostly by public transportation such as bus, metro, and train.

This chapter explores the writing of Aleksandar Hemon, Dmitry Samarov, and Erika L. Sánchez as a process of carving out a personal space in the city. Their diverse literary output exemplifies the complexities of immigrant identity and its myriad dialogues with home, boundaries, and space. Hemon’s literature reveals a nuanced spatial-temporal sensitivity that establishes a multilayered and overlapping experience of Chicago and his native Sarajevo. Russian-born Samarov encounters Chicago through the window and rearview mirror of his taxi, observing the city and its inhabitants close-up yet from the sidelines. His unique perspective encompasses the immigrant outsider stance alongside an intimate insider knowledge, facilitating his tersely articulated and poignant vignettes of Chicago’s city- and human-scapes. Sánchez, second generation Mexican, boldly crosses restricting boundaries in her work, challenging constraints of family, community, neighborhood, and nation. By straddling a mixture of cultures, languages, genres, and themes, she cultivates her own distinctive space. Taken together, the writers offer a literary panoply of what it means to be an immigrant in Chicago today.