Walking down Coney Island Avenue, from Church to Cortelyou, it is impossible not to notice the presence and warmth of Middle Eastern culture. Everybody you see has family or friends walking beside them; the restaurants are all halal, and the spices and incense from the local shops purify the all too often vagrant smells of New York streets. These streets, it quickly becomes apparent, have lost a big part of their New York-ness, and have become mere foundations for the rich and intimate culture of the people of the Middle East.
On one of these streets, in an apartment building above a classical guitar shop, lives my interviewee with his younger brother, sister, and parents. The door to their apartment building is slightly battered and its lock broken. My interviewee’s apartment is one lengthy floor up, but the smell of homemade curry dishes and meats hit you as soon as one starts up the first step of stairs. It smells delicious and inviting. He greets me with a brotherly smile, and while walking to his room to talk, his mother gives a similarly affectionate greeting before insisting on sharing her cooking with me. It was quickly understood that ‘make yourself at home’ is implied in this house. We sit in his room with some food and tea, and he begins to tell his family’s immigration story.
“My name is Shahrooz Khan and I’m originally from Pakistan, and moved to Brooklyn at the age of 5.”
Shahrooz Khan, pictured here at 16
His father is Amin and his mother Shahzadi. They met through mutual friends when Amin was 32 and Shahzadi 25. However, before all this happened, Shahrooz says, “My grandfather passed away when my dad was finishing up high school, so he had to move to the United States to support the rest of his family at the age of 18.” Although feeling disappointed about never finishing high school, Amin nevertheless embraced all of the coming struggles to help his family. He would “stay with his uncle in Manhattan”, work “multiple jobs, and slowly try to find a way to make it.” Shahrooz stresses the impact this had on his father: “Dad had to work a job, pay for rent, and also send money back. He was supporting his entire family and it was a huge change for him.” Because of such time constraints, Amin realized he didn’t have the opportunity to go back to school once in the United States, and therefore dedicated all of his efforts to first adapting and surviving in New York, and second to supporting the rest of his family back in Pakistan.
Amin
Over one tough decade later, Amin gradually built up and triumphantly found financial and personal stability in New York. He had taken on being the manager of a limousine company, which has thus far been a greatly successful and flourishing business. At some point though, in his early 30s, Amin went back to Pakistan for a year and at that point was introduced to Shahzadi, who was still a full-time student in a local college, working towards her Bachelors. The two had quickly grown to like eachother after their first introduction. They married and had Shahrooz that same year. Unfortunately, Amin had to go back to New York in order to now make the money to support a family of his own. Shahzadi also then had to sacrifice obtaining her Bachelors in order to take care for not only her newfound family, but her aging parents as well. Because of this, Shahrooz says, “my mom couldn’t move to America with my dad just yet… she worried about her family too much.”
Over the next 5 years, Shahrooz’s father “would work for 4 months and visit Pakistan for 2”, and “mom would visit America and go for 2-3 months.” It was fairly tough on the family throughout these five years, because while Amin was working hard to provide for his family, Shahzadi was raising children most of the time by herself, and simultaneously trying to work through concerns about leaving her parents behind.
However, for Shahrooz, being so small, things were much simpler during this time. He vividly remembers his “city of Gujarat, a medium sized city” where, although it is very developed, “the roads virtually don’t exist in a lot of non major places”; there are “a lot of villages and old school mud houses”, and “you’ll see maybe two or three traffic lights in entire cities.”
Gujarat
It’s certainly a place of character. Charged with nostalgia, Shahrooz explains he was living in a type of “long giant alley way, where there’s a bunch of houses”. He remembers that “it was like small community; we all knew our neighbors and were very close… we played with the other kids in this alleyway every day after school.” It smelled like a mix of “a construction site, and a rural place”, seemed to always be “very bright and sunny”, and on the occasions when it rained, it poured. “Also”, Shahrooz exclaims, “I remember one of the best things about it is that the skies were very clear at night and you can see hundreds of thousands if not millions of stars – pitch black sky with shiny silver dots.”
Throughout the course of these five years, Shahrooz’s brother and sister were born as well, and Shahzadi became increasingly worried about her children growing up without a father figure. This concern especially escalated with the birth of Maheen, Shahrooz’s sister, and the family could no longer bear to continue being so frequently disjointed. So Shahzadi had to sacrifice being near her parents and relatives, and accept the move to a better life for her children. Amin with swift care arranged an apartment in a relatively quiet neighborhood near Midwood in Brooklyn. Shahzadi at 28 years old, with heroic grace, brought Shahrooz, then 5 years old, his brother Hashir, then 3, and their newborn sister across to New York.
Now with the whole family settled in New York, the uphill battle for a better life began to even out. Amin’s business kept becoming more grounded and successful, which gave Shahzadi the ability to stay at home and take care of her three growing children. Shahrooz, his brother and sister went to schools very close to their house, which simplified the early morning and late afternoon school routine. Still, life like always is not perfect, and despite the comfortable settling, Shahzadi felt both alienated by language and still concerned about leaving behind the rest of her and Amin’s family in Pakistan. Meanwhile Amin had to work harder and longer than ever in order to maintain the household. But, even with the never ending list of issues, the family managed to find some important solutions. For one, the “whole family goes back every 2 years”, despite the costs of such a trip often being “around 10 thousand”. Although the family “can go vacation with that kind of money, we instead go to see our families”. Also, the family often spends “thousands of dollars every year” to send Shahrooz’s grandma to stay over at their house in Brooklyn. These trips and monetary sacrifices tend to solve most issues because with the rest of the family next to theirs, “we all feel a lot better and happy”.
Shahzadi with Shahrooz’s younger brother and sister
When questioned, Shahrooz confidently sees the past struggles of his parents as transfiguring into truly prosperous futures for him and his family. ” The U.S has better education access, where in Pakistan you would have to go to the government schools to get quality education — and they are really expensive. Plus, I live in NYC, so I have a lot of opportunities and I’m in the center of the world I feel.” In addition, Shahrooz feels that Pakistan is still part of his identity; this, he says “is always good. I experience two very different parts of the world, the more the better, I understand an entire culture and another one.” If it’s one thing that Shahrooz can reflect on the experiences is that:
“Struggle is always talked about, whether it was my dad that struggled to come here and build a new life, whether my grandfather struggled after an injury in the army, or when my mom’s older brother took care of the family after her father passed away, or even my cousin working hard to become a doctor, it all comes back to me and my siblings. My family works hard and that my dad struggled and works hard so we don’t have to now, for that in return we need to be successful.”
Amin and Shahzadi, recent.
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