In Which We Are Judged On So Many Things

painting by Kate Shaw

The Right/Wrong Time

by HAFSA ARAIN

1

I certainly did not know two years ago that leaving school would be just as harrowing an experience as entering it in the first place. When I started graduate school as a rather insecure 25-year-old, I found the first semester to be one of the most challenging experiences of my life. I remember a conversation with my mother a few weeks in, in which she lamented the loss of my presence at home, and in which I lamented the loss in my confidence and ability to speak my mind. Through her tears and my discomfort, I communicated what I could not say to her in person: that I wanted more than anything to come home and be comforted.

My parents, who have learned how to be supportive of me and my choice to study the humanities, sent me to California with the sense that I would relearn who I was and return to them a reformed and renewed person. This is true, although I never went back to Chicago. I relearned who I was in graduate school — rebuilt what I had deconstructed in undergrad — and now I need to relearn how to be a whole new person. One who does things instead of thinks things, one whose identity is connected intimately to whom one works for.

This is because we pretend it is a choice who we work for and why — have we not been directed through life’s strange twists and turns to end up in a place if only because chance made it so? That you met so-and-so doing something connected to what you do, or that your friend introduced you to someone who happens to have some money set aside for an intern — these are the ways we get jobs, not because we actively search for something that fulfills our identity. This is the way I have gotten jobs — only because I have proven myself to the right/wrong people at the right/wrong time.

Painting by Kate Shaw

It is a strange thing, then, that we place so much value in where someone chooses to make their living. We ask about it at parties, or assume that it must be announced like a calling card on social media. It must go after my name in every email I send out — I am inextricably connected to what I do. Even after I am much older, should I ever decide to leave what I do even though it is fulfilling, it will live on my resume as a stamp of my life as a 27-year-old. You did “x” for “x number of years” and that’s how we will define you.

The only act in connection to work that has ever proven my identity is leaving a job — ceremoniously and at a young, impressionable age. The leaving was the act of being myself. The leaving is what led to everything that came afterwards. The leaving was the key to my success. When I tell some relative much later in life how to feel alive, I will tell them to quit their job in the way I did: without any regard to the consequences. Quit when you know you can’t take it anymore, and then revel in your poverty, for it was your own choosing.

Of course, I could never imagine giving such advice now — not when I know too deeply and too recently what it feels like to see bright red numbers and an unfortunately placed “-” on my bank statement.

2

Unlike my sister, who works as an accountant, I have found that the kinds of jobs I've had expect me to envelope myself in them. In most cases, I have not minded this expectation. I am accustomed to enveloping myself in things — it is how I exist best. In college, it was maybe listening to certain kinds of music or reading certain books. In graduate school, it was my research and exploration of young Muslim women living in Pakistan.

Such a life is only worth living if you believe in what you envelope yourself in. And such was my perception of crisis in my transition from student to worker that I met with my thesis advisor at first notice to go over the potential PhD programs to which I should apply. In recent conversations with him, I have confessed my own doubt and apprehension in my work. To this he replied: what is your project?

And to that, I thought, I have too many.

painting by Kate Shaw

3

Having been raised to be creatively-focused, I find the most challenging aspect of my job is not the expectation of bringing ideas forward or challenging my bosses, but rather the expectation of hyper-productivity. I had never judged myself before on how much work I could accomplish in a day, only the quality of said work. To be judged on both now is a challenge I have never encountered before. As much as I try to welcome such a challenge with open arms, I find that I am often seeing my own flaws in a way that makes me resent what I used to do and who I used to be. That I could have spent all that time learning how to be better at what I do now and didn’t — that I had wasted so much of my life not being a good enough or fast enough worker.

I resent those who are able to work in the creative field even more than I resent myself. I recall especially a talk I attended a year ago with Zadie Smith, a much beloved author, who said that she could spend at maximum about four hours per day writing. What I actually resent is not that she requires only four hours per day to write amazing works of literature, but rather her financial ability to live her life comfortably while working however many hours she chooses to.

4

When my mother turned 50 — a few years ago now — she told me over the phone that everything she thought she knew about herself was so little compared to what she knew now in her middle age. Her role as a mother, as an immigrant, as a woman – all of these things made such little sense to her when she was my age. Even in my struggle for instant satisfaction as a millennial, I hold very closely onto this notion. That one day, I too will be a slightly wrinkled 50-year-old woman who will look back on my life with the solid understanding of where I have been and where I will be then.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her twitter here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her childhood.

Paintings by Kate Shaw.

"Kahlil Gibran" - Starfucker (mp3)

"Malmö" - Starfucker (mp3)

In Which We Travel From One Bazaar To Another

Full Blast

by HAFSA ARAIN

1

I left a ten-day long stay in Turkey almost as soon as the protests had begun there. I traveled with a group of fellow graduate students and our Turkish-American hosts who had set up a series of informational meetings and tourist activities so that we could learn more about the country. On our boat ride on the Bosphorus, we saw bright red flares reach the sky. The morning earlier, on a bus ride to a mosque for the dawn prayers, we saw about a hundred young men chanting and waving the red Turkish flag. I saw no gun-toting men, no real indication that danger was ahead.

And yet, I told the others on the bus, “The Pakistani instinct in me is telling me to run and hide. To get away from protests – this is how people get killed.”

According to my parents, a large gathering of people for political demonstration will inevitably turn out violent. They have told me this on the phone as I made my way to Occupy Chicago demonstrations, as I rallied to save the job of a professor in college, even as we watched Obama’s election on television witnessing strangers hug one another in Grant Park.

It is something my parents always say with a little bit of shame in their voices. That we should come from a place like Pakistan – with all its corrupt politicians, bomb blasts, and rivalry with the bigger, richer India – and not from somewhere else. They have only ever wanted us to feel proud of where we came from.

2

My flight from Istanbul to Karachi was shorter than I had imagined it would feel. Out the window, I watched the blinking lights of Iranian cities flash as the sun set behind us. I left California a month and a half ago, eagerly making my way farther and farther east. Karachi is my last stop before I go back. It is the farthest east I have ever been.

It is also the city in which I was born. When we came back to visit Pakistan as children – with our full American accents – my parents drove us past our old apartment building in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. I saw from the car a shattered window pane on the top floor. I drove past it again, more recently. My cousin Sara, who is years older than me, pointed out the building to me from the road – the brown earth and the brown buildings sometimes blend into one. I looked at it but did not recognize anything. It has been nearly 23 years since we lived there.

“This one?” I pointed at the building next to it.

“Yeah, it was one of these. I think that one over there,” she said, “I remember when you guys used to live there. Your taya and taijan [uncle and aunt] lived just upstairs.”

I told her I wanted to take a picture the next time we drove past.

3

A computerized image of a drone flashes on the television as we flip through channels. We never rest on the bad news – we almost reel past it. I sometimes will myself to forget that it exists. I will myself in the way I did when I lived in Chicago – when I heard of dozens of murders happening just miles away from me, I would will myself to think of something else. My first week back in Pakistan, I thought of myself as cruel for attempting to forget the innocent lives lost. By my second week I had decided it was the only way to keep going.

4

Occasionally, I will see an advertisement on television for USAID’s educational facilities in Pakistan. I have not seen any public mention of programs like this in Pakistan any other time I have visited, even though they have existed for a long time. In the commercial, a brown man dressed in shalwar kameez escorts a young girl wearing a school uniform into a brightly lit classroom. The entire ad is in Urdu, emphasizing that the curriculum is all Pakistani. I have seen this advertisement appear on the news networks mostly, after mentions of drone attacks in the north or when a news anchor reports on Taliban activities.

5

I spend my days studying languages – Arabic and Urdu – with private tutors, and my evenings accompanying Sara to the various bazaars to buy fabric and appliques for her clothing business. She is often telling me to avoid the puddles of brown spit on the ground – stains from paan, sweet chewing tobacco – and placing brightly colored fabric against my skin to see how it would look on me. My sister is getting married in autumn, and Sara is making nearly all of my outfits. We travel from one bazaar to another, meeting with tailors and the men who will sew all of the beads by hand onto my outfits. In their little shops, I fan myself as I am measured. As a reward for our hard work, we eat street food in the car with the air conditioning on full blast.

As we wind through traffic on the streets, I look closely at the Urdu script on the buildings and medians. Since the reason I am in Pakistan to begin with is to learn to read and write Urdu, I attempt to take some pictures of the graffiti so that I can read it as practice later. I mostly end up with snapshots of the political signs that line the medians on the roads. Benazir Bhutto’s face is still everywhere. I saw a particularly large poster of her, her eyes glinting with a faraway look and her white dupatta draped loosely over her head. The last time I was in Pakistan, in December of 2007, she had been assassinated brutally during a political parade in Rawalpindi.

6

When a bomb goes off in Boston, the world is shaken up. I had stared at my laptop all day when it happened, asked all of my friends in the area if they were okay. The days that they had shut down the entire city, I was glued to my twitter feed, unable to accomplish any of the tasks I had meant to do that day.

When a bomb goes off in Quetta, a city on the border with Iran in Pakistan, and 12 young women on their way to university die tragically, no one looks, notices, or even cares.

“We are used to it,” we tell each other as much as we tell ourselves. What else are we to expect of the rest of the world?

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She last wrote in these pages about the conversation. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing for This Recording here.

"I Thought I Knew" - Alela Diane (mp3)

"Lost Land" - Alela Diane (mp3)

The new album from Alela Diane, About Farewell, was released on June 25th.

In Which We Will See When We Are Older

The Conversation

by HAFSA ARAIN

If you asked my parents about me, they would probably assume I got all of my personality traits from the Roald Dahl books I read as a child. Every American part of me is foreign to them. My siblings and I are Americans and they are not, and so assumed many things about us. My mother said that when we landed in Chicago, she thought that maybe one day we would speak English so fast that she would never understand us. “Your cousins were that way,” she remembers now, almost fondly, “I could just never understand them.”

My parents could never have predicted what moving across the globe would do to their relationships with their children. They could never really have guessed that we would have to strain to speak Urdu with our grandmother, that we would have wanted to go to a senior prom, that we would want to move out of the house after high school. For as long as we had pre-planned the way to approach them with these asks, it would all come as a complete shock to them.

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These issues are common with young South Asians, desis, with parents like mine. There was a small group of us at my high school. We all had to test the limits of our parents at a young age – to see how far the fishing line would take us into American waters. There would be a collective applause when someone’s parents had allowed them to do this or that; on my part the response was usually barely masked envy. For the others, they could go back to their own families insisting that Priya’s mother is letting her go, so why I can’t I? And neither my sister nor I were allowed to attend our senior proms, no matter how many Priyas or Sonyas there would be in attendance. But this strict nature did not last long: my parents unwillingly let my sister move out of the house her sophomore year of college to live in an apartment on Loomis with a bunch of Asian international students. And after they had agreed to that, we knew that all of their restrictions on us had completely dissolved. We were free, as it were, to live our own lives.

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When people meet me, they want to know instantly where I am from. They want to know which country specifically – when I tell them Chicago they are unsatisfied. They want to know if I live with my parents. They want to know how I learned to speak with this accent. These are the very same people who want me to tell them about arranged marriages, about month-long wedding receptions, about the elaborate outfits and dance sequences in some Bollywood films.

I am a young brown woman who lives 2,000 miles away from her family. This is a conundrum that many cannot comprehend. I have come to realize that I barely understand it myself.

The question I most often receive from other young South Asian immigrants like me is, “What do your parents think of you living so far away?” These desis were surely placing themselves in my shoes. Would their own parents not be amusingly disappointed if they had a daughter like me? A daughter who would study theology over finance, a daughter who would turn down the opportunity to attend law school.

I never knew how to answer that question simply because I was too annoyed at the assumptions it placed on me. It assumed that parents were involved in every decision I made, or that they somehow had a value system on the education I was receiving. They expected parental dissatisfaction with my life. Med school or engineering, sometimes Internet technology: these fields are stereotypical of us. In our model minority-hood, our stereotype has become our own measure of success. 

There certainly was a time when my mother expected me to apply to law school. I was about to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and religious studies, and I had applied for and received a fellowship that would take me to northern California for a year. My mother said jokingly, “You are a good debater, because you debate with Mama all the time. You should go to law school.” When I responded in the negative, she became serious. “Why not? You meet some nice boy in law school, you settle down. You will have a good life.” I told her no one more time, and she stopped asking me about it.

Some part of me thought for a fleeting moment that she wanted me to go law school so she could achieve the trifecta of the desi standard of excellence: business (my sister), medicine (my younger brother), and law (me). But I think it was more that she recognized a quality in me that she wanted me to consider for a moment. She wanted me to see that I could do it if I wanted to, that I should not set aside a field because I assumed myself incapable.

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I usually speak to my mother on the telephone once a week. I have begun to reserve my Sunday afternoons for it. The conversation follows a predictable pattern: she asks me what I ate that week and subsequently spends time regretting that she never taught me how to cook properly. I ask her what she and my father have watched on television, how political situations in Pakistan are progressing, and how each member of my very large extended family are doing. We have the same conversation when we see each other in person; we have had this same conversation my entire life.

Before I hung up the phone with her on a particularly stressful Sunday during finals last semester, my mother said in a softer voice than usual, “You know, Hafsa, we believe in you.” It was the first time she had said that. My father was sitting next to her on the sofa at the time.

It was somehow easier for her to say this to me over the phone while I was on the other side of the country. I didn’t have to see the pain in her face as she said it this way. I didn’t have to see from her expression how much she sincerely missed my presence at home. She didn’t see me tear up over the phone, though she might have heard the lump in my throat.

My parents cannot know how to be proud of their children in the vocal way that other Americans are proud of their children. They were not taught to be American parents. They never had to say they believed in me, but I always knew it. Not just because they let me move 2,000 miles away, for there was no more allowing me to do things. I would have done them with or without their permission.

The fact that she had said it, then, made all the difference. It meant that she had buried her past in order for me to build my future. The things they had wanted me to accomplish had all been washed away. And even the dreams they had when they were my age - with a young family and a set of airplane tickets – were impossibly set aside. They had given us everything. My own dream of being a theologian was only questioned once. My parents asked me after I had shown them my acceptance letter for graduate school, “Do you think this will make you happy?” After I responded yes, my mother said, “Then you will do good things.”

The most recent time someone asked me what my parents thought of my being on my own in a religious studies program halfway across the country, I responded with, “They love it.”

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The conversations my sister and I had with one another as teenagers often centered on the idea that the desi generation after us, the generation where we would be the parents, would be so infinitely lucky. They would have parents that were raised in the United States like us, parents who would let their children go out on dates and wear whatever they wanted to wear, and be friends with whomever they liked. They would have parents who understood – parents who got it. But this is not true. The world that we live in is different from the world our parents lived in. This is the case for each and every one of us. My mother will often tell us nonchalantly that we will see when we are older. We will see then just how much the world can change.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in California. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the margins.

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"We Don't Call " - Thao & the Get Down Stay Down (mp3)