Epic Magazine - Little America: Incredible True Stories of Immigrants in America

I was nineteen when I moved from Karachi, Pakistan, to Grinnell, Iowa, to attend a small liberal arts college. Karachi is a bustling port city of nearly 15 million people. Its crowded, rambunctious, teeming with energy. Grinnell, on the other hand, is vast, empty, teeming with corn. It was a true culture shock. Unsurprisingly, there werent many South Asians in Grinnell, so people wanted to know who I was and where I came from. Not all the questions they asked me were smart (Do you guys eat breakfast?), but they were always asked with genuine curiosity.

By the time I graduated in 2001, I was ready to move back to somewhere more metropolitan, so I made my way to Chicago. Grinnell was wonderful, but I was excited to have dining options besides Taco Johns and the meatball marinara six-inch at Subway. I landed a job with a tech training company that agreed to sponsor my work visa. They sent me a massive thousand-page manual and said, Well pay you to learn this entire manual and call you the night before we need you to start actually working.

I would stare at the manual out of the corner of my eye while I played video games all day with my roommate. Then at night, I would go up at various comedy open mics around Chicago, performing jokes Id written for an average of thirteen people at a time. Initially, it was great: I was getting paid to play video games and perform stand-up comedy. How long could this last? The answer: two months. The day they called and fired me, I threw the manual in the trash. Then I realized that if I didnt find a job that sponsored my work visa, I would be deported.

In the midst of my frantic job hunt came September 11. Overnight, the political tide turned against Muslims. People who looked like me began to be treated with a sense of suspicion and otherness that I had never experienced before. I remember when I walked into a 7-Eleven in the suburbs of Chicago after tanking yet another job interview, one customer loudly said, Hope you dont have your pilots license. I even got harassed at comedy clubs. Wheres Osama? was yelled at me so often when I was onstage that I wrote a response to that specific heckle. (I have no idea. He hasnt called me in months.)

One night, about five years later, I was performing stand-up in the back of a diner when I was heckled again. Only this time, the heckle wasnt racist and it came from the mouth of a beautiful woman named Emily. Eighteen months later, we were married. By then, Id found a job at the University of Chicago that sponsored my work visa. But our marriage, through which I got my green card, helped solve an important part of my immigrant story: the quest to remain.

Little America is based on the premise that every immigrant has a story. And at a time when political rhetoric so often demonizes immigrants, the stories were telling on television and in the book you hold in your hands have the potential to shift that narrative. Because when you hear someone elses story, youre able to see your struggles in their struggles, your passions in their passions, your humanity in theirs. The narrator of the story ceases to be the other and simply becomes a person. Oh, and as for Pakistanis, yes, we do eat breakfast. Try the halwa puri. Its especially good.

Kumail Nanjiani, Los Angeles, 2019

NIGERIAOKLAHOMA

I remember the first time I saw a cowboy. It was a surprisebecause I didnt think cowboys existed anymore. Id only seen them in movies. It was the fall of 1980 in Norman, Oklahoma. I was sitting in a classroom at the University of Oklahoma, where I was getting my masters degree in economics. A slim, tall man strolled in. His heels clicked as he walked. He wore a red-checkered shirt, thick denim jeans, brown leather boots, and a wide-brimmed hat that obscured his face. He took off his hat and set it down. The hat took up its own seat, and nobody dared to sit there. I stared at him, in awe of his confidence. In Nigeria there were nomads who raised cattle and wandered from place to place, but they had no style. This man was the first American cowboy Id seen in real life, and I was amazed.

Im from a small town in Nigeria called Abiriba. Im a member of the Igbo tribe. Growing up, I watched all the American Westernsthe John Wayne movies, Clint Eastwood movies. I know all the lines from A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Uglyboth of which I must have watched fifty times. There were peddlers whod come to our village, show American movies on a projector, and sell us American products. So Id always had a vision of the cowboy in the back of my head. Cowboys were a myth, a symbol to us, but when I came to America my professors were cowboys, my classmates were cowboys. Oklahoma was full of them.

When I left Nigeria, the country had just emerged from a very brutal civil war. The country was devastated, so if you could afford it, you left for better opportunities. I was the only black man in my university program, and one of the few in town. I quickly learned that there was no barber in Norman who could cut black hair. I let my Afro grow. My accent was thick; to Oklahomans, unintelligible. Sometimes theyd pretend like they couldnt understand what I was saying. Some were rude, and I thought their attitude was unpolishedlet me put it that way. Id go to churches where I was the only black person, and sometimes Id be wearing traditional Nigerian garb like a dashiki or isiagu and no one would talk to me. Theyd look at me like, Why are you dressed like that? Id sit down and people would get up one by one from the pews and move somewhere else. Id leave feeling rejected and alienated. I didnt become an American on the spot. I wanted people to know that Im still African. They were proud of their culture, and I was proud of mine, too.

But I could also see the Igbo spirit in cowboy culture. The Igbo spirit is tenacious, and we are deeply connected to our land, which is rich and full of oil. I could see how much cowboys loved their landtheyd stay here forever, they would never leave it. Cowboys are unapologetic, too. Blunt. They do not care what other people think. I could imagine them a hundred years ago, when Oklahoma was still known for its quarries. They had to tough it out themselves. They could not depend on the government, they could not depend on anyone else. Coming from Nigeria, where the government was never on my side, I could identify with that.