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In Andrea Levy's short story "Loose Change" (2005), the unnamed narrator, a Londoner of Caribbean descent, meets Laylor, a young Uzbek woman who has fled her homeland and is sleeping rough in a London square. Laylor's story prompts in the narrator a desire to perform an act of kindness. The narrator resolves to take the homeless girl home; she will wash, feed, and clothe her before directing her to a place of safety. This benevolence, she imagines, will be deeply appreciated: "All Laylor's grandchildren would know my name" (Levy, "Loose" 76). However, underlying this fantasy of care, generously given and gratefully received, is a persistent suspicion that she is being taken advantage of: that the young immigrant has "cunningly made me obliged to her" (74). Although the narrator initially assumed she was a holidaying student, Laylor's revealed impoverishment suddenly makes her a monstrous figure of corruption and defilement: "Imagine her dragging that awful stink into my kitchen," shudders the narrator, "[c]upping her filthy hands round my bone china. Smearing my white linen" (74). The narrator instinctively rejects the unspoken call for hospitality and generosity that Laylor's destitution makes on her relative affluence.
Levy's story speaks to contemporary anxieties around migration, integration, and responsibility. It also touches on questions of obligation and self-reliance that underpin narratives of "the good immigrant" and exposes the complex crosscurrent of rights, claims, and prejudices that shape the discourse of national belonging. Although the narrator can conceive of a temporary, delimited act of charity, she balks at a longstanding commitment to engage and sustain relations with the other, worrying: "How would I ever get rid of her?" (74). After the narrator recalls her Caribbean immigrant grandmother, herself once the recipient of the kindness of strangers but who now speaks of "scrounging refugees" and "asylum seekers who can't even speak the language, storming the country" (75), the story ends with a rejection of obligation as the narrator walks away from Laylor, evading her feared neediness.
This article returns to Levy's first two 1990s novels, Every Light in the House Burnin' and Never Far from Nowhere, and examines her interrogation of the figure of "the good immigrant"—the foreign-born resident or native-born person of colour who overcomes the dominant construction of "bad immigrants—job-stealers,...