I REMEMBER THE DAY I first started learning English in Karachi, Pakistan. The first grade had just started for me. I was still trying to get acclimated to being away from home every day with all these kids and this stale chalk smell that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would be a massive part of my life for the next twelve years. We were a week in when the teacher pointed to a drawing of a tiger and said, “Tiger.” I remember being annoyed. I already know how to say tiger. Sher. Why did I need another whole new way of saying it? Now I will have to choose whether to use the Urdu word or the English word the next time I see a tiger. I was six years old. I couldn’t handle that kind of choice and the effort that came with it. I felt frustrated and angry. This first-grade scam was a real waste of my time. By the time we got to the word for rainbow, I had had enough. I threw the book down on the ground and pouted “Now this is getting ridiculous.” In Urdu, of course.
I was eighteen years old when I moved to America from Pakistan. I moved, on my own, to Iowa for college. Not just Iowa, but a small town in Iowa called Grinnell with a population of fewer than ten thousand. When I tell people that, they get a quizzical look on their face. “Why Iowa?” And I always tell them the same thing: I truly had no idea how big America was. I wasn’t yet aware of the great overabundance of choices one has in this country. It’s so big and contains so many completely different terrains, cities, towns, and villages. I had known America from movies and TV shows (Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Gremlins 2), so I assumed all of America was New York or LA. I landed in Des Moines, Iowa, and said, out loud to myself, “Where are all the buildings?” Then I was driven to Grinnell, and I said, this time under my breath, “Where are any buildings?” This was not the America I was shown in Pakistan. Karachi is a bustling metropolis too, and a rural area was so outside my reality.
My first two weeks in America were an extension of my first days learning English as a child. My jaw hurt from speaking a new language all day. I knew how to speak English (I’d learned how to say rainbow, tiger, and a whole host of other words), but I think my mouth wasn’t used to making those English sounds all the time. I remember thinking that I should have never left Pakistan.
I didn’t belong here. They didn’t have any of my favorite foods, but they did have a lot of Rice Krispies. The other thing that struck me was just how many different brands of the same thing America has. In Pakistan, we had two brands of sliced bread, with wheat and white variations, for a grand total of four different types of bread. In the entire store. Occupying one portion of one shelf. Easy. The first time I walked into a grocery store here I remember seeing just rows and rows of bread. A sea of bread. Potato bread. Rye bread. Pumpernickel. No wonder everyone in America is always stressed out. Picking out bread is a massive undertaking each time! Oh, and peanut butter. We didn’t have peanut butter. Here? Peanut butter on everything. Crunchy and smooth and kinda smooth and kinda crunchy. Peanut butter was a weird concept to me: Butter from a peanut? Listen to how that sounds. I’ll stick to cow butter (or butter butter), thanks. But I couldn’t say I didn’t like peanut butter! To Americans, it seemed as if not liking peanut butter was akin to burning the flag. Even though you had a million choices for which kind of peanut butter you preferred, you did not get to choose to dislike it altogether.
Little things heightened the sense of strangeness of being in a new country. The average height in America is two inches taller than in Pakistan. In Pakistan I was one of the taller people. I would walk into a room and see the tops of people’s heads. And now suddenly I was shorter than most people. It wasn’t like I was in a land of giants, because it’s only two inches. It was more like I was standing in a ditch . . . that moved with me.
My dorm room freshman year was tiny, just large enough to hold a chest of drawers and a bunk bed. My roommate had the top bunk; I had the bottom. Every night I looked at the metal bars of the bed on top of me and they looked like prison bars. And that’s how I felt. Like I was in prison. Trapped. My prison bars would be the first thing I would see every morning. It didn’t make sense. I would lie there and think, This is the first time I’m out on my own, away from my family, out in the world. I should feel free—but I felt trapped. Trapped in this land of overwhelming options and choices.
But there were some good things too.
I saw snow for the first time. The first time you see snow, it is beautiful and terrifying. I was standing outside in a cornfield, watching it fall slowly from the sky. I had never seen anything fall slowly from the sky before. I had seen rain and I had even seen hail, but those fall fast. And here I was, watching these beautiful white flakes fall slowly from the sky, and it seemed like the whole world was in slow motion, except me. That I was moving at a different speed from everything around me. And I could focus on the whole, or just pick one snowflake and watch it sway to the bottom, as if there was no gravity, as if each flake was deciding where it wanted to land.
Then I shook hands with a girl for the first time. I don’t want to overstate things, so I’ll just say I felt alive for the first time. In Pakistan I’d only ever touched females I was related to.
I started making friends from all over the world. And the culture at our school was so accepting that people went out of their way to make me feel welcomed, even if they didn’t understand that English made my mouth hurt. I had gotten obsessed with Bruce Springsteen at the age of sixteen in Pakistan. Something about the yearning in his music really connected with me. So much of his work is about hopping into a car and driving away, every lyric tinged with excitement, romance, sadness. “Well, the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere.” I felt the bigness of the world, but I hadn’t seen any of it yet. Perhaps that’s why his lyrics spoke to me. Maybe that’s why Iowa was an accidentally fitting place for me. He sings about people in small towns as if they are heroes destined for adventure. Whenever I mention to people I love Bruce, they go, “Isn’t that ironic? ’Cause of ‘Born in the USA.’ ”
I always smile and go, “I don’t understand.” I make them explain it to me. (By the way, I was the only kid in all of Pakistan obsessed with Springsteen. I would make my friends listen to his songs and they’d go, “Why do you listen to country music?”)
One of my first weeks in America, my new college friends got together to go and steal road signs. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what we did. Not stop signs or anything real like that. The DRUG-FREE ZONE sign was real popular. As we ran around in the dark, hiding from campus security, I realized that America is just like the one that Bruce Springsteen sang about, with people trying to find adventure in the dark, trying to find their way through the American dream. I’m realizing that the American dream means choice, or rather, the promise of choice. Choice in where you want to drive to, choice in what kind of bread you want, choice in what kind of peanut butter you want to spread on that bread, choice in what kind of life you want to live. You can choose to locate yourself wherever you want among so many cities; you can listen to any kind of music, eat any cuisine, worship whomever you want—or no one at all. You can even marry whomever you want. Most people here have a handful of ethnicities that make up their DNA, and they can choose to identify with whichever one they feel most akin to. You can be born into a poor family and grow up to be American royalty. You can speak any language, raise any flag. Do what you want! You can be whatever you want to be! Now, what are you going to do? Who do you want to be?! Choose!
It’s a lot of pressure! There is tremendous opportunity, but with that comes tremendous room for failure. And, of course, these choices are not available to everyone, even though that is the promise of America. And most Americans choose to believe in this promise, despite piles of evidence to the contrary.
As the years have passed, I have become more acquainted with American choices, and all the paradoxes that follow. I have become more comfortable with the luxury of decision making, and my jaw is no longer in perpetual pain. I am no longer dazzled and puzzled by bread choices as far as the eye can see. I enjoy a wide variety of carbohydrates regularly, and I even named my own cat Bagel. I can now confidently say I don’t like peanut butter without fear of people going, “You don’t like peanut butter?!” I understand that access to opportunity is not available to everyone, and that I’ve been very lucky in that regard. I mean, I got to choose the career where you stand in front of crowds of people, telling jokes into a microphone. It is a viable career option in this country. It is even a viable career option here to sit in your living room all by yourself with a microphone and record podcasts. The options truly are endless. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to enjoy this culture of choice, to build a wonderful life with my wife, a life neither of us could have dreamed of ten years ago. And now I live an existence full of daily options. Just yesterday, I got to choose from a dizzying assortment of fifteen different sauces for my chicken sandwich. Fifteen!
Despite the glaring disparities of choice that still exist in this country, I still think it’s a great place. I can look past the bizarre confederacy of peanut butter eaters and still be extremely grateful to America.
I wouldn’t choose anywhere else.