In 1992 a door to America opened for me. If I bought a business and hired a certain number of workers, I could get a green card. Afsana was reluctant to go. With an enormous effort, she had learned German and had come to accept Germany as her new home. But I did not want to stay in Germany. The risk I had taken in buying ostmarks with our life savings had paid off. I bought a SpeeDee Oil franchise in San Diego.
Before we left, we had dinner at Uncle Gholam’s. “Your father is not here, Bar,” Uncle Gholam said solemnly. “So it is my obligation to say what he would say. You are making a big mistake. Your children are comfortable in Germany and have many friends and relatives here. Why do you want to go to America? I don’t understand this. There’s no government health care, no help if you’re unemployed, and the cities are full of gangs.”
“Baba said I should make decisions that would give me the most opportunities,” I replied. “America may not be perfect, but it’s still the land of opportunity.”
“If you go to America, you’ll never see Afghanistan again,” Uncle Gholam said, his voice rising—which was not like him.
“My Afghanistan doesn’t exist anymore,” I replied defiantly. “And it’s my fate that I should go to America. When I was in Turkey, Abbas told me, ‘You should not resist your fate; you should swim with the current.’ I swam with the current of the Kabul River when I left Afghanistan. Now I will swim with the current to America.”
On the opening day of my new business, Afsana and Mariam came to help. We arrived to find the former owner’s manager and four employees waiting for us. The manager, a huge figure with dirty-blond hair and a bushy mustache, was hobbling around the shop, delivering orders in a booming voice. When he saw us, he waggled a fat finger at me.
“Come!” he said. “I need to make clear the relationship between you and me. Do you know why the last owner went bankrupt? I’ll tell you why. He didn’t listen to me. I paid all his expenses—his big mortgage on his fancy house, his kids’ private schooling, the monthly payment on his Mercedes. I watched his wife come in each week and take money from the cash register. If you want to survive in this business, you’re going to have to listen to me. And anything you want to say to the workers has to go through me, so that there are no misunderstandings. You got that?”
How could he talk to me like this? He was supposed to be working for me. I felt such shame that I prayed for the earth to open up and swallow me.
“Do you understand me?” he boomed as if I were deaf. “Do you speak English?”
I grabbed Mariam’s hand and sat her down in the office, bristling with fury, trying hard to contain myself, trying to think of what to do or say.
“Don’t do anything crazy, Baba,” Mariam begged.
I did want to do something crazy, but I did not want to lose my business before I even started. Why was this happening? I paced back and forth in the office, feeling the sweat beading on my forehead as Mariam and Afsana looked at me with worried faces. The whole time the manager stared at me as if I were an idiot. Please God, I prayed, help me. I made a decision and waggled my finger at the manager to come. He planted his hulking frame in the doorway, oil dripping from the rag he was holding. “I live in a small apartment,” I said. “I have no mortgage payments. I drive an old car. My wife and I have experienced worse things in our lives than you will ever know. She has no need for money. There’s the door you walked through this morning. I want you to walk out that door right now and don’t return.”
He didn’t move. “Who will run your shop?” he asked.
“That’s no longer your concern.”
“If I go, the workers go with me.”
“Fine. Take all your friends with you!”
He stood there, staring, as if he did not believe what he had just heard. “I’ve seen many crazy people,” he finally said. “But you’re the craziest.” Then he folded his arms across his massive chest and said, “You know corporate isn’t going to like this.”
“I told you that’s not your problem.”
He threw the oily rag on the ground, walked over to my desk, grabbed a handful of invoices, and tossed them in the air. Paper rained down like kites whose strings had been cut.
“Boys, I’m no longer working here,” he shouted to the workers. “Now’s the time for you to decide. Are you leaving with me or staying with this crazy guy?”
The men looked at each other. Then they looked at the manager. Then they looked at me. They followed the manager out of the shop, as the line of cars waiting outside grew longer and longer. Mariam looked at me. “He can’t treat me like that,” I said.
“What are we going to do now, Baba?”
“I don’t need them,” I said. “I’ll do it.” But even as I spoke these words, doubt crossed my mind. I’d watched a shop in operation during my training sessions and saw how to change oil but had never actually changed it myself. I knew that if the shop closed for even one day, corporate could take it away. I found a large sheet of paper, wrote “No Tune-Ups Today, Only Oil Changes,” and taped it to the front window, then rolled up my sleeves and said to Mariam, “Let the cars in.”
Crouching in the pit beneath the first car, I unscrewed the oil plug. Hot oil erupted, spurting down onto my face and body. I reached for a rag and banged my hand against the hot engine.
Seven hours later, I was covered in oil and sweat, burned, and utterly exhausted. “Tell the rest of the cars we’re closed,” I called to Mariam. “Tell them to come back tomorrow.” I wiped the day’s misery off me and then collapsed into a chair. Afsana, shaken, sat across from me trying to stay composed.
Mariam closed up the register, then entered the office and approached me on gentle footsteps. My head rested on my chest, eyes closed, too exhausted to even think. “We did it!” she yelled, and I looked up to see the biggest smile I’d ever seen. She hugged my tired, oily frame.
I placed an ad in the local paper offering to pay more for a manager and workers than SpeeDee suggested. Over the next few days, men began showing up at my shop. “You can start right away,” I told each one—without even asking if he knew what an oil pan was. I hired a new manager as well.
Each day at noon I brought out containers from the small fridge and sat down to a lunch of Afsana’s lamb and rice with a very large cup of green tea. I had brought a little bit of Afghanistan with me. My thoughts of home were suddenly interrupted by a loud, familiar voice, and I almost spilled my tea.
“I didn’t know you were so sensitive.” In the doorway stood the large figure of my former manager. “We Americans are a very up-front kind of people,” he said. “We tend to speak our minds. You may not be used to that kind of thing, being Afghani and all.”
“You walked out.”
“Look, I saw your ad. I’ll come back, and I’ll respect you. And I’ll only take a hundred dollars a week more.”
“No. Not for a hundred dollars more or a hundred dollars less.”
He looked completely surprised. “You’re sure about that?” he asked.
“Yes, very sure,” I said, and as he turned to walk away, I called after him, “and Afghani is our currency. I am Afghan.”