midnightreads

“What do we owe the people who grew us up, who first made up our entire world? It's complicated for the kids of immigrants. I'm not talking about the usual "my parents don't understand" thing. My parents believe in the power of choice, and they never asked me to sacrifice my dreams for theirs. Yet I feel like I should anyway. Where does this feeling come from? Is it just loyalty and strong family ties? Is it because, as part of a marginalized community, we all had to stick together to survive, and that sort of experience tends to become habit? Maybe it's about guilt. We are kids who benefited from the sacrifices our parents made when they decided to move to a richer, safer country. If we then grow up to grow apart, have we become ungrateful villains?”
― Uzma Jalaluddin, Hana Khan Carries On

“Tell me, Hana, how strong can blood ties remain when they stretch across an ocean?”
― Uzma Jalaluddin, Hana Khan Carries On

“I do know that, for all the benefits of being the daughter of immigrants, the one drawback is I’ve had to establish my own sense of place. All my extended family live elsewhere, on a different continent, and we don’t visit often enough to form real ties. There’s a lot of freedom in being a pioneer of your family’s history in a new place, of course. But there’s a lot of loneliness too. I’ve had to find my own family, to make the sort of friendships that are family. Yet lack of history means my roots here are shallow, my stories only a few years old.”
― Uzma Jalaluddin, Hana Khan Carries On

“I had filled my heart and hands with everyone else’s burdens, had accepted their worries as if they had been my own, assuming they were all doing the same for me—but they weren’t.”
― Uzma Jalaluddin, Hana Khan Carries On