I remember it like it was yesterday. It’s 1990. My dad and I are riding in his car. We are on our way to buy groceries at the local Safeway. I am going through this phase, where I am trying to notice things. So, when we pull up to the next stoplight, I start trying to notice the guy on the motorcycle next to us. He apparently doesn’t want to be noticed; especially by a peculiar nine year old, staring at him through the passenger window of a minivan. “What are you looking at?” he sneers at me. I turn around fast, and face the dashboard. “Did he say something to you?,” my dad asks, “What did he say to you?” “Nothing uhhh..he didn’t say anything. It’s fine. Look green light,” I hurriedly reply. “Tell me what he said. What did he say to you?,” my dad grills me on. I stay silent. I think if I tell him what he said, he will get out of the car and kick his ass, which scares me and comforts me too.
You know how those savvy realtors tell us to bake a cake when potential buyers come to see a house up for sale. I remember as a child when my parents were trying to sell our house; and as potential buyers were perusing the rooms looking at my dad’s bang-up ceiling paint job, my mom was grilling onions on the kitchen stove. As a child, this was the type of thing I lived through; I was accustomed to it. When my father ventured out in his long white Afghani robe, I thought the stares he took in were something of bigoted public gawk. The problem being on the other end, not ours.
In a country like the US, where the norm is this celebrated melting pot of great cultures and traditions coming together, my parents were the salad. They wanted to subside in this soup as a salad; perhaps maybe as a head of romaine or as a seasoned crouton. Not wanting to mix, but to keep their own unique flavor. Not till as a recent teenager did I find this at all curious. When I stumbled the blocks, so to speak, and saw upon the way the world viewed our family, I had a rage; it was like something uncontainable. This rage was somewhat of a natural force that I didn’t know whether to direct towards my parents or towards society, because it was society that forever viewed them with a raised eyebrow. My vanity, however, was the gatekeeper of this frenzy. I felt if I had allowed open the door for this frenzied rage, it would rush out and destroy the house and everything in it. I kept it in, but now have reached a shaky balance; a peace with the realization. Whenever I speak of it my voice assumes a near-religious fervor, common to such tales of self-discovery.
It all began about two years ago when I was sixteen. The question loomed at the time, “Am I what one would even consider marriageable at this point?” To my parents, of course. But let’s unpeel this news one layer at a time.
At age 62 my father, a retired linguistics professor, is starting to look more and more like somebody’s gardener. His feet shuffle along our patio in their broken sandals. He stoops in his garden to pull out one or two stray weeds, coughing phlegmatically as he does so. Later, he sits in a retained chair on our veranda looking at the Nebraska evening sky lay deep on the ground, as he eats long slender greens known as gun-da-naa. At times he even seems to be overacting this lizardly old part, he milks it. “I am old now,” he says to me with a sturdy puniest, “I am just your crazy old Afghan father.” If he is that old, why is it that he can recall dates and events with torrid detail from his childhood like they were yesterday’s happenings? He still does the same rigorous exercise regime he has done for the past eighteen years. He keeps a bustling garden. No. ‘Crazy old Afghan father’ is in truth a code word and rationalization for the fact that my father has always had a hard time accepting that his family is being raised in a society other than what he was reared in. He expects me to grow up like they do in Afghanistan; where at age fifteen the son maybe supporting the entire family. “When I was your age I walked to school early in the morning, then walked home and had to work till dark. Then I studied at the light of an (ever-dimming) kerosene lamp and still excelled my classmates,” he most explicitly reminds me. He scores some compelling points with me. I allow myself a moment to laugh.
My mom was once the same wonderful child growing up as my dad had once been, or so I hear. She, like my dad, didn’t understand why we weren’t more like her. When she took us shopping, half her time was taken up in losing us and the other half in slapping us when she had found us. She has had ever a way with words; which I dare see myself one day mimicking in fragile envy. So complete are her arguments against us. I believe had she been given the chance, she’d have had the Americans home from China in two days.
“So who do you think would marry me, anyway?” I ask them. “Someone Afghan,” they answer like it was something obvious. “Oh good,” I exclaim, “that narrows down the field to what -- fifteen million.” No, as usual they are doing this to punish me. Thinking about the chilling logic sends shivers along my spine.
You take an Asian immigrant just off the boat, for example. Here is a woman fleeing a life of oppression under a communist or anarchy type government, with little or no public sanitation, and working in a clothing factory for ten cents an hour and repeated floggings every hour, on the hour, of every day, of every week, of every month, of every year, of her entire life. After that, living with my family and I might seem just as another bizarre incident of some kind in her life. It could happen. This scores me some compelling points, in my but feeblest of eyes. They allow a murk smile to form on their faces, a smile similar to how one smiles at a circus clown balancing a doughnut on his nose, before dismissing my strong-felt anthem.
But what disturbs me more, nonetheless, is something I am more bothered for, ‘oh,’ so a different a reason. Because in describing the potential new wife they have used only that one adjective: Afghan. They haven’t said I am looking for a smart wife or even a fat wife – no, they have picked Afghan. That word is meant to stand for so much: Asian. Asian women.
I gulp down terror as I think how this wife will just let things go after a few weeks with us. After being pressed to quit sitting around the house and do something with herself, she comes to me for compassion. She won’t see any from me. No, me with my own sterling issues to deal with will unwittingly turn her away. She packs her suitcases early the next morning, makes some sandwiches, and takes off in the family Toyota. The divorce completes in a few weeks. The settlement $10,000, the microwave, and the Toyota. My parents don’t know why she left. “She had a roof over her head and food was always on the table,” my parents wonder in amazement to each other. Apparently for them, these are the only two criterion needed to make a happy and successful household. From then on, I hear them wake up in the middle of the night screaming, chastising her name and the parents who had bore her. I score more compelling points with them, after laying down this scenario. It takes a moment for my truth to register with them. The unfamiliar sounds I then hear are peals of laughter at my, “overactive imagination.”
Memories come out like debris from a tornado. I hark back to my childhood. In the kitchen of our California house all I can see is me, standing before the oven clock. There at age seven with tears in my eyes, I hold back my speech. My dad is yelling, “What time is it? The little hand is most of the way to four and the big hand is on the eight. It was three-eighteen, twenty-two minutes ago. So what time is it now? What’s eighteen plus twenty two? Come on. You can do it in your head. Come on. Come on. Come on.” I go to the garage and see my sister’s Nancy Drew Detective book collection stacked in a Chiquita box, ready to be sent to the local Goodwill. “What you need such books for? Study Math and English,” I hear my father say to her.
They have their delights. They are old now and can do whatever they want, as I understand it. An eighty-dollar sneaker, leaving the heat on while away from the house, a nice steak dinner; they won’t ever just let anything go. They could never just let it go. But alas, they come from Afghanistan; a people with their Abbots yet without their Costello’s, as a culture I reckon to accept it. The say, out of the mouths of babes come all wise sayings. The wise babe Bart Simpson once uttered under his breath to his father, “You can take a person out of Afghanistan, but you can’t take the Afghanistan out of them.” I, however, have taken the liberty of replacing Afghanistan, with a far more vulgar word used by Bart. Nonetheless, this happens to be the equation I am stuck in, and will never get myself out of.
Last update : 13-09-2003 15:32
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