I, Migrant by Sami Shah

Author:Sami Shah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2014-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

I, AMERICA

15

Moving to Australia was the second time I left Pakistan. The first was when I went to America for college in 1998.

Even though I ended up returning home in 2002, when I boarded that flight to Virginia in August 1998, both my parents and I thought I was leaving for good. That was, after all, the traditional way; child goes to foreign land for education, gets job in same land after graduating and ends up settling there for the rest of his life. My mother’s brother had done much the same decades earlier, living in New York since the seventies. America was where people from the developing world sent their children to have better lives.

It was something I had dreamed of for years before going there. Growing up in Karachi, I read American comics, watched American movies and listened to American music. By the time I was applying to American universities, I knew as much about America as I did about Pakistan. I wasn’t alone in this either – the entire planet is bathed in American media. When I was finishing high school, friends who were leaving for British universities faced a more alien culture than those of us bound for the United States.

My own fascination with the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ began with Archie comics. I and everyone I knew collected thin digests packed with the adventures of the red-haired teenager and his friends as they lived out their eternal youth in Riverdale, the apotheosis of smalltown America. As a little boy, I dreamed of visiting Pop Tate’s ‘Chok’lit Shoppe’ and ordering a soda, of riding around in a jalopy with Betty and Veronica, and running through the school halls under Mr Weatherbee’s stern gaze. It didn’t help that everyone told me I looked like Jughead and Dilton Doiley’s illegitimate son.

Even the toys my friends and I collected were American (although they were probably made in Taiwan or China). We knew the name of every GI Joe action figure and could sing along to the theme song – a Pakistani children’s chorus extolling the virtues of ‘a real American hero’. By the time I entered my teens, I graduated to superhero comics. Twenty-one pages of full-colour adventures starring an endless array of spandex-wrapped warriors. Epic sagas held together by a pair of staples.

I was thirteen when I read my first Marvel comic, winning it in a game of table tennis played against a boy at school. I can’t remember his name anymore, nor what he looked like, nor indeed what collateral I offered against the comic if I lost. All I remember is that in a best-of-three match, my winning point was hard fought for. He was gracious in defeat, handing over without complaint the X-Men comic he had brought back from a holiday to America. I took it home, hid it from my mother (‘Comics ruin your English,’ she used to say) and only took it out once I was sure everyone was asleep.

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