Fremont, California. 1980s
Baba loved the idea of America.
It was living in America that gave him an ulcer.
I remember the two of us walking through Lake Elizabeth Park in Fremont, a few streets down from our apartment, and watching boys at batting practice, little girls giggling on the swings in the playground. Baba would enlighten me with his politics during those walks with long-winded dissertations. “There are only three real men in this world, Amir,” he’d say. He’d count them off on his fingers: America the brash savior, Britain, and Israel. “The rest of them--” he used to wave his hand and make a phht sound “--they’re like gossiping old women.”
The bit about Israel used to draw the ire of Afghans in Fremont who accused him of being pro-Jewish and, de facto, anti Islam. Baba would meet them for tea and rowt cake at the park, drive them crazy with his politics. “What they don’t understand,” he’d tell me later, “is that religion has nothing to do with it.” In Baba’s view, Israel was an island of “real men” in a sea of Arabs too busy getting fat off their oil to care for their own. “Israel does this, Israel does that,” Baba would say in a mock-Arabic accent. “Then do something about it! Take action. You’re Arabs, help the Palestinians, then!”
He loathed Jimmy Carter, whom he called a “big-toothed cretin.” In 1980, when we were still in Kabul, the U.S. announced it would be boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow. “Wah wah!” Baba exclaimed with disgust. “Brezhnev is massacring Afghans and all that peanut eater can say is I won’t come swim in your pool.” Baba believed Carter had unwittingly done more for communism than Leonid Brezhnev. “He’s not fit to run this country. It’s like putting a boy who can’t ride a bike behind the wheel of a brand new Cadillac.” What America and the world needed was a hard man. A man to be reckoned with, someone who took action instead of wringing his hands. That someone came in the form of Ronald Reagan. And when Reagan went on TV and called the Shorawi “the Evil Empire,” Baba went out and bought a picture of the grinning president giving a thumbs up. He framed the picture and hung it in our hallway, nailing it right next to the old black-and-white of himself in his thin necktie shaking hands with King Zahir Shah. Most of our neighbors in Fremont were bus drivers, policemen, gas station attendants, and unwed mothers collecting welfare, exactly the sort of blue-collar people who would soon suffocate under the pillow Reganomics pressed to their faces. Baba was the lone Republican in our building.
But the Bay Area’s smog stung his eyes, the traffic noise gave him headaches, and the pollen made him cough. The fruit was never sweet enough, the water never clean enough, and where were all the trees and open fields? For two years, I tried to get Baba to enroll in ESL classes to improve his broken English. But he scoffed at the idea. “Maybe I’ll spell ‘cat’ and the teacher will give me a glittery little star so I can run home and show it off to you,” he’d grumble.
One Sunday in the spring of 1983, I walked into a small bookstore that sold used paperbacks, next to the Indian movie theater just west of where Amtrak crossed Fremont Boulevard. I told Baba I’d be out in five minutes and he shrugged. He had been working at a gas station in Fremont and had the day off. I watched him jaywalk across Fremont Boulevard and enter Fast & Easy, a little grocery store run by an elderly Vietnamese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen. They were gray-haired, friendly people; she had Parkinson’s, he’d had his hip replaced. “He’s like Six Million Dollar Man now,” she always said to me, laughing toothlessly. “Remember Six Million Dollar Man, Amir?” Then Mr. Nguyen would scowl like Lee Majors, pretend he was running in slow motion.
I was flipping through a worn copy of a Mike Hammer mystery when I heard screaming and glass breaking. I dropped the book and hurried across the street. I found the Nguyens behind the counter, all the way against the wall, faces ashen, Mr. Nguyen’s arms wrapped around his wife. On the floor: oranges, an overturned magazine rack, a broken jar of beef jerky, and shards of glass at Baba’s feet.
It turned out that Baba had had no cash on him for the oranges. He’d written Mr. Nguyen a check and Mr. Nguyen had asked for an ID. “He wants to see my license,” Baba bellowed in Farsi. “Almost two years we’ve bought his damn fruits and put money in his pocket and the son of a dog wants to see my license!”
“Baba, it’s not personal,” I said, smiling at the Nguyens. “They’re supposed to ask for an ID.”
“I don’t want you here,” Mr. Nguyen said, stepping in front of his wife. He was pointing at Baba with his cane. He turned to me.“You’re nice young man but your father, he’s crazy. Not welcome anymore.”