Don't Look Back

While Achut Deng’s journey to the U.S. began almost three decades earlier, the author of the forthcoming memoir ‘Don’t Look Back’ first shared her story with an American audience in May 2020, at the height of the pandemic.

“Do you want me to go from South Sudan to Ethiopia to Kenya and to America?” Deng asked New York Times immigration reporter Caitlin Dickerson, who’d asked the then-35-year-old single mother of three how she had come to work at South Dakota’s Smithfield meat processing plant—the site of one of the nation’s largest coronavirus outbreaks.

Listeners of the Times’s Daily podcast then heard Deng start at the very beginning: in 1990, during the second Sudanese Civil War, a terrorist attack on the then six-year-old’s village separated her from her parents, forcing her and her grandmother down a dirt road, too afraid for their lives to take a last glance at all they’d left behind.