One Story, Thirty Stories by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

After four days of remaining indoors, I venture out with my family. We go to Flushing, Queens—the heart of the Afghan American community in New York—with the pretence of going to stock up on ethnic groceries. In actuality, we go to check up on our community, but we are afraid to admit that it needs to be checked up on. To admit this would be to verify the rumors we hear through the insulated walls of our home in the midst of Sheepshead Bay—a mix of newly immigrated Russian, Albanian, and Turkish families, set upon an older layer of Italian American and Jewish American families—all of whom we grew up with, playing on the streets. As in many places, in Sheepshead Bay, we are one of the few Afghan families anyone has met (ever).

I don’t know what we expect to find in Queens, after hearing so many stories about Arab, Afghan, and Pakistani stores being attacked, but the Afghan shops still seem intact, and people are smiling and overcharging us lovingly. We check the Kouchi (Nomad) Market on Kissena Boulevard, the Bakhtar Market on Main Street and the Ariana Halal Meat Store on Main Street, near the Queens Botanical Garden. All are fine. All refuse to talk about any incidents. Everything is fine, so say the large flags in their windows and their neatly compressed smiles. It is difficult to pry through Afghan etiquette when one is a young female equipped with fragmented Dari trying to break through to the heart of the matter. The nearby Hindi video and music shop displays not only an American flag but an Indian flag as well—to avoid being misrecognized, assuming that an angry mob is an educated mob that knows the difference among a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Sikh.

Main Street, which is usually filled with Muslims in hijab, is now empty of ladies perfuming the air with a spill of ornate languages. I see three women in total: women who have come out in a group of three, with large men accompanying them. Everyone has flags up, but it seems part of Muslim Americans’ survival to carry one prominently. One Afghan woman in an Indian shop is dressed modestly in Western clothes. When her two almost-blond-haired boys speak to her in Dari, she shushes them up and speaks to them in English. The English language winds around them throughout the store—a young mother protecting her two boys, who can potentially pass as white Americans.

All of these women I see are out only to shop. The nearby Queens Botanical Garden, once filled with families taking their children out for strolls among the flowers, seems reserved for wedding parties. The park behind the gardens is empty, except for the ice cream truck with its rather grossly out-of-place music. The day is tinged with autumn. Sitting like this, so close to my family, so far away from the pain of the past few days, makes me feel so fortunate to be alive and so fortunate to be able to love.

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