Echoing Ghosts

Abstract

This article is an autoethnodrama that explores the reminiscences by two authors’ immigration experiences as an international student and the dependent spouse. The story we will tell evokes how immigrant students’ adjustment requires an endless border-crossing that exists in geographical, cultural, and everyday-life levels. Indeed, while some agonies of international students were documented, the struggle of their family members, which would undergo even more troubling experience, has been less known to both public as well as academia. Moreover, by choosing the ethnodrama, the play seeks the possibility of empathetic engagement from the audience. With the dialogues based on spoken as well as unspoken performance, this script attempts to visualize the affective presence of the unseen, particularly the unfocalized immigration story of F-2, the spouse visa of international students, who calling themselves as “ghosts.”