Bruce B. 21 years old. Junior in college. Bio major. Cuban mother, White father. The city of Boston is where I call home. My last name is actually pretty Boring. Feel free to follow on twitter or on instagram at @bwb1993 I do follow back. Cheers guys!!
Once more, he entered that old forgotten room in the corner of his house determined to finally give it what was missing. He looked around, perplexed as to why the room seemed eerie and empty even though it was well lit and fully furnished. He looked at the polished hardwood floor and saw his face and at this instant he realized the problem, the wallpaper. The wallpaper in the room had seen twenty springs, summers, falls and twenty one winters. The age of the wallpaper showed. It was once valiant and full of life. There was little that this wallpaper hadn't seen, and by this point it showed. Realizing this he grabbed a bucket of soapy hot water and his scraper and returned to the room determined to remove it and reveal the blank canvas that lay underneath. As he removed it one piece at a time, the question of what color to paint the room brewed in his mind and he was not able to come to a conclusion. However, he did realize that was why he preferred paint over wallpaper.
So... I've had this for over a year and have never found a purpose for it until now. Periodically I will upload pieces I have written, and I hope any who stumble across them enjoy what they read!
The Showtime drama’s version of the Pakistani capital is so inaccurate that it would be laughable if it weren’t so irresponsible.
I’m about to talk about some shit right now, so put on your reading glasses and buckle down, y’all.
(side note: I am not saying that everyone has the same experience as me. There are countless people living in poverty in Pakistan, and so many people that don’t get the same privileges as I do living there. There are many people more conservative than me and my immediate family, and many others that are just like us, if not more liberal. The point of this post is to clear up some misconceptions about living in Pakistan that I have come across, not to generalize everyone’s experiences by using my own as an example.)
First, some background info-
I’m 19. My family and I moved to the United States when I was two years old. I was raised here, I went to primary school, elementary school, and middle school in the state of New York. When I finished 8th grade and my older sister was going to college, my parents decided to take 13-year-old me and my 5-year-old little sister (who was born in NY) back to Pakistan.
So my parents whisk us away to the city of Lahore, Pakistan, and come August, we start school at an international, co-ed school that offers both the standard British O- and A-level system that most schools in Pakistan use, as well as the American high school system. (Let me stress, CO-EDUCATION. Yes, boys and girls can talk. Yes, boys and girls can be friends. Yes, boys and girls date. SO MUCH DATING.)
Now to get some feelings and personal shit up in dis post-
When I got to Pakistan, I started off with a really negative outlook because everything was unfamiliar and different. But as time went on, for the first fucking time in my life, I felt a sense of community when I went out in public. For the first time in my life, I was not being judged and put into a certain category based on the color of my skin, I was not being treated differently by teachers and students alike based on my race, I was not being given looks at restaurants and shopping malls and on the street. And then, the next amazing thing happened— I made friends.
Q: But Sanya, didn’t you have friends back in New York?
A: No. I didn’t have friends. I had friend. One friend. And I don’t know how I had her, but she’s one of the only reasons I felt attached to the United States at all after leaving. There were hardly any other reasons to— in middle school, I, a 13 year old girl, was called a terrorist. My little sister was bullied in kindergarten. My older sister was bullied up until high school. My parents had no friends. The neighbors around our house would get the neighboring kids and their parents all together and have little parties that my family was never invited to.
Now a look into my experience going to high school in Pakistan-
Q: Where do you go to hang out with friends and stuff in Pakistan?
A: My house
During high school, my group of friends consisted of six guys and three girls (including me).
Here are some photos from my 18th birthday party:
First we had a rung fight. Rung translates to color. We basically threw balloons full of dye and water at each other.
Then we had a barbecue and played with some fireworks on the roof of my house… My 18th birthday party was funner than yours.
(If you’re wondering why there’s a white girl in the pictures, that’s one of my best friends. I met her in high school in Pakistan, her mother is white and her father is Pakistani. She grew up in Pakistan, and their family was completely happy there.)
A: Movie theaters
The one that I’ve been to most often is on the top floor of a mall. They’ve got this cool ass fancy lounge area outside where you can buy anything from tea to normal movie concessions to full meals and you can sit the fuck down and eat out there or take it into the theater with you. Here’s one of their theaters in a picture from Google:
and here’s the fancy sitting area
A: Water parks
Since it gets pretty hot in Pakistan during the summer months (~115F), water parks are like ten thousand times funner to go to over there. The one that I used go to is called Oasis. Just imagine a typical water park, except at that same place you can go golfing, horseback riding, learn archery, ride ATVs, and have the bow-tied waiters do a fucking barbecue for you next to the wave pool. I’d post pictures of the park, but there are way too many of them, so here’s a photograph of my group of friends at the water park:
A: X-Park
Go karting, atvs, and shit. They also have rock climbing, this weird bungee-trampolining thing, and that zip-lining shit.
A: Restaurants
Cuckoo’s den: A restaurant located on Food Street, Lahore. You go up a fuck load of stairs, to the top of this building from which you can see right into Badshahi Mosque. Here’s the restaurant:
Then you go up some more stairs to the rooftop dining and BAM here’s your dinner view:
(that’s Badshahi Mosque.)
here’s my family on the bottom floor of Cuckoo’s Den
Cafe Aylanto: Just a normal restaurant.
oh wait, IS THAT A FUCKING CHRISTMAS TREE? WON’T THERE BE A FUSS OVER THAT BECAUSE PAKISTAN HATES WHITE PEOPLE?
No. I’ve been to Christmas parties in Pakistan. Cafe Aylanto is also super popular, and everyone loves that tree there around Christmas. White people are cool too. We like it when you visit our country.
More Cafe Aylanto:
There are a a lot of other restaurants like that around, and I’m not gonna keep doing similar things over and over, so no need for more of that.
We also have McDonalds, Carl’s Jr, Burger King, Fatburger, TCBY, Yogen Fruz, Gloria Jeans Coffees, and a buttload of other stuff like that.
School Life
Here’s me in my school uniform:
We had parties and dances at school. Here’s me dressed up as Elmo at the Halloween party:
me and my senior prom date:
my graduating class:
pretty normal stuff, eh?
***DID YOU KNOW***
-You don’t have to wear a burka or even cover your head with a scarf when you go out in public in the major cities of Pakistan. Here’s an example of what my sister and I might wear going out to eat at a restaurant or go shopping:
but we wear normal skinny jeans with tops just as often.
-The language spoken in schools is English.
-The language most commonly spoken is Urdu. Not Arabic.
-Pakistan is NOT in the Middle East.
The highlighted area is the middle east. Pakistan is not encompassed by those lines.
-Yes, everyone has shoes in Pakistan. (I felt the need to include this because in middle school, a girl was actually shocked when she found out that you can buy shoes in Pakistan)
-Most of the violence that is a result of terrorists in the country are confined to one area in the northern regions of Pakistan. Cities like Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi are just like any other city.
-We have cooler trucks than you.
(And these are just the ones my sister came across; Google ‘Pakistani truck art’ and weep for what you are missing on your highways and roads.)
Moving on from that-
So I went to high school there, I graduated, and then my parents gave me the option of either staying there for college or going abroad. Yes, my Pakistani, Muslim parents were fine with me leaving the nest at age 18. No, they did not get me an arranged marriage before sending me to college.
I chose to go back to America— I want to be a veterinarian, and universities in Pakistan are not the best for that profession. So now I’m back in America, living in Boston and going to college here. And I often experience the same feeling of alienation as I did when I was younger. Not nearly as much as I did as a kid, since cities have many more demographics than my small town in upstate New York did, but it is still there. I feel it on public transportation when I’m looked at a certain way, I feel it when the white kid that I get put into a group project with is shocked that I’m not an awkward, nerdy brown girl with a thick accent and no social skills. I feel it when I get told I look like another south-asian person that someone knows just because I vaguely have the same skin color as the person, I feel it when someone treats me with disdain before even having a conversation with me.
And I feel it most keenly when the media portrays my entire country and all of my people in the same light that this television show is.
“I’m from Puerto Rico, so in the last several months I’ve been experiencing the changing of the seasons for the first time. When I met him last fall, it was right before the leaves started changing color. And I know this will sound a little cheesy, but I fell in love with him when the seasons started changing. I felt sympathetic to what the trees were going through because I was experiencing the same. I felt part of that process. I was also changing as I was falling in love. It was similar to the way, in books, the landscape usually corresponds to the feelings of the characters. If they are moody and sad, it’s rainy and gloomy. For me, it was like a symbolic and symbiotic experience.”
