The Freshman
The New York Times Magazine
February 26, 2006
By CHIP BROWN
Sometimes walking up College Street, when the bells were ringing in Harkness Tower and the light on the gabled dorms and leafy quads made the whole campus seem part of some Platonic dream, he could almost forget that there were people back home who would be happy to kill him.
His formal introduction to the terrain of the Western mind came in July at the start of the summer term; most of the class of '09 would not arrive until the fall term. He was glad for the chance to get his bearings. The direction of Mecca he knew from the compass on his watch. For local attractions he had a map of the campus; he got a cellphone, a Yale e-mail account. His student ID card admitted him to lots of campus dining halls, where at first it seemed he was free to choose anything he liked as long as it was pasta. He took to drinking milk with the pasta, but milk didn't agree with him any more than pasta did, and he dropped 15 pounds over the summer. It wasn't until the fall that one of his new friends, Fahad, a Pakistani, tipped him off to the kosher meat at Slifka, the Jewish dining hall.
His room was more than he could afford, but he had his hands full with his classes: ENGL 114, Reading and Writing Argument, with Prof. Deborah Tenney; and PLSC 114, Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Prof. Peter Stillman. He got a pair of B's, and B+'s on papers. ("B positives" he thought they were called.) Because his official education ended in the fourth grade, the marks eased some of his anxiety about passing muster at Yale. He spoke English well, but it was still his fourth language after Pashto, Urdu and Persian and a headache to write even for natives. What he had to learn initially was how to learn. You didn't have to read everything the professors assigned, but you had to pay close attention to the closing minutes of class, when they recapped material likely to appear on the exam. People thought he was kidding when he aske
d what the difference was between a test and quiz. Dude, you're a student at Yale, and you don't know the difference between a test and a quiz?
During the summer, he made some friends, including a nice guy from Texas, but it was not until the fall that he fell in with a bunch of foreign-born undergraduates and expats with whom he could speak Pashto and Urdu. They took him to the Harvard-Yale game; he clapped, he cheered, he had a great time, albeit without any idea what was going on. His friends taught him how to play cricket. They introduced him to weight lifting at the Payne Whitney gym. When he turned 27 in November, they gave a party, only the second time in his life anyone had ever celebrated his birthday. Friendships helped assuage the ache he felt for his wife, Asyah, and their daughter, Suraya, who was 5, and their 4-year-old son, Suleman, who was born the day after 9/11. They were all living in the Pakistan border city of Quetta with his parents. His parents fled Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion and then became refugees again when the United States began bombing in October 2001. He telephoned his family at least once a week, but the pictures he sent of himself at college seemed to have gotten lost, as did the toys he had mailed, a Thomas the Tank Engine for Suleman, a fluffy stuffed dog for Suraya. Suleman couldn't understand why his father, with a single-entry United States visa, couldn't come home for a visit during the semester break.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26taliban.html
February 26, 2006
By CHIP BROWN
Sometimes walking up College Street, when the bells were ringing in Harkness Tower and the light on the gabled dorms and leafy quads made the whole campus seem part of some Platonic dream, he could almost forget that there were people back home who would be happy to kill him.
His formal introduction to the terrain of the Western mind came in July at the start of the summer term; most of the class of '09 would not arrive until the fall term. He was glad for the chance to get his bearings. The direction of Mecca he knew from the compass on his watch. For local attractions he had a map of the campus; he got a cellphone, a Yale e-mail account. His student ID card admitted him to lots of campus dining halls, where at first it seemed he was free to choose anything he liked as long as it was pasta. He took to drinking milk with the pasta, but milk didn't agree with him any more than pasta did, and he dropped 15 pounds over the summer. It wasn't until the fall that one of his new friends, Fahad, a Pakistani, tipped him off to the kosher meat at Slifka, the Jewish dining hall.
His room was more than he could afford, but he had his hands full with his classes: ENGL 114, Reading and Writing Argument, with Prof. Deborah Tenney; and PLSC 114, Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Prof. Peter Stillman. He got a pair of B's, and B+'s on papers. ("B positives" he thought they were called.) Because his official education ended in the fourth grade, the marks eased some of his anxiety about passing muster at Yale. He spoke English well, but it was still his fourth language after Pashto, Urdu and Persian and a headache to write even for natives. What he had to learn initially was how to learn. You didn't have to read everything the professors assigned, but you had to pay close attention to the closing minutes of class, when they recapped material likely to appear on the exam. People thought he was kidding when he aske
d what the difference was between a test and quiz. Dude, you're a student at Yale, and you don't know the difference between a test and a quiz?During the summer, he made some friends, including a nice guy from Texas, but it was not until the fall that he fell in with a bunch of foreign-born undergraduates and expats with whom he could speak Pashto and Urdu. They took him to the Harvard-Yale game; he clapped, he cheered, he had a great time, albeit without any idea what was going on. His friends taught him how to play cricket. They introduced him to weight lifting at the Payne Whitney gym. When he turned 27 in November, they gave a party, only the second time in his life anyone had ever celebrated his birthday. Friendships helped assuage the ache he felt for his wife, Asyah, and their daughter, Suraya, who was 5, and their 4-year-old son, Suleman, who was born the day after 9/11. They were all living in the Pakistan border city of Quetta with his parents. His parents fled Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion and then became refugees again when the United States began bombing in October 2001. He telephoned his family at least once a week, but the pictures he sent of himself at college seemed to have gotten lost, as did the toys he had mailed, a Thomas the Tank Engine for Suleman, a fluffy stuffed dog for Suraya. Suleman couldn't understand why his father, with a single-entry United States visa, couldn't come home for a visit during the semester break.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26taliban.html
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