I Could Tell You About Myself (But It's Complicated) Pt. 2

Shehla: Hi, everyone. May peace be on you all. Welcome to another episode of I'm A Muslim (And That's Okay!). My name is Shehla, and it is currently 10:35 at night. And again, this is my prerecorded show disclaimer, because even though I'm back, I’m back from spring break and back home, but it's not just me anymore. I'm here with the kids and [laughs] there's going to be no recording happening in any amount of peace and quiet with them around. So it will have to be prerecorded until all the pandemonium surrounding the COVID-19 virus I guess subsides and we can go back to normal, which may be a while. So I'm not asking anybody to go out anytime soon. Just stay in your house, stay put. 

It's funny. [giggles] For me, I guess being the introvert and socially isolated person that I am usually, it really hasn't made too much of a difference in my life other than the fact that my kids are always here and chaos. But I know it's hard for a lot of people. I was really thinking about today's episode. I was going to do continuation of my, I guess background and I thought I'd maybe switch it up just slightly because I was about to continue on into what happened after I got married. And I thought, I've had a lot of people ask me about my wedding. I guess how people in the West perceive it, the whole. I think most people have only seen slash Pakistani/Indian weddings in the media. It's fascinating for them, but I guess you have to live through it to know how huge of an affair it is. So I thought I'd delve into that just a little bit in today's episode and maybe continue on with the rest of my time here in the US. 

So the year is 2007, and I have chosen a suitable suitor, I guess. [giggles] We agreed to be married. And for most people who don't know, Pakistani weddings are not a one-day thing ever. There's probably easily like a bajillion day involved in the planning of the wedding and in the wedding itself. Although, if you had to look at it from a religious perspective, from an Islamic perspective, there's only like the one main day where you say sort of the I do, and another dinner in which everybody from the groom side invites the entire family from both sides, and supposed to be like a dinner. But that's not how it is traditionally. Oh, gosh, when I was getting married, what we had was, what's formerly known as the Nikah. And the Nikah is the day of the wedding when the bride and groom say, I do. We had that first. Even though my wedding was a small affair, it wasn't small by any western standards. The only way we really ever realized that when we came to the US after our wedding-- And of course, I had to start the whole process for my husband to, so he'd be able to legally live here in the US and do his residency and all that, because I was already a citizen, applied for his green card, all of those things. 

We had hired a lawyer. Most of the time, lawyers will guide you through the process, because when the immigration process happens, you do have to answer a lot of questions. One of them is that they're trying to make sure that you're not in a sham wedding or sham marriage just for the sake of green card and all that. And he's like, “Pretend I'm the immigration officer and give details of your wedding.” And we're like, “It was a small affair, nothing big, just 300 people.” And he was like, “What do you mean, just 300?” And we're like, “Yeah, for a Pakistani wedding, that's not a lot of people.” [laughs] You should have seen the look on his face. My gosh. That's when he realized, yeah, for us, 300 is not a huge number. That's just like close relatives is like 300. You invite a couple of aunts, uncles and all your cousins, maybe a friend or two, and it's 300 people. 

I think that's one of the things that people in the West probably can't wrap their heads around it. 300 is not a large number for people from Pakistani backgrounds. So for full on proper weddings, the guest list goes into the thousands. It's really, really ridiculous at times. And that's the thing for my wedding. We had the main day when we did. Again, not a whole lot of people. It was put together in a bit of a hurry and for the rest of the days. But you have to invite everybody. And by everybody, I mean everybody. It's not just aunts and uncles and cousins. It's your cousins in laws and your second uncle twice removed. Everybody has to be invited, otherwise, you are not honoring your family and your relatives. It's so bad. But it was big. 

That's the thing with my wedding. It was not just my wedding. At that time, I had a combo wedding. My brother also got engaged at that time too. And we were like, “Okay, let's do this together.” And everybody from my family, my husband's family, and my brothers in laws and their family, it was a huge, massive thing. Oh, gosh. And for me, it was like my worst nightmare come true. Not because I had my brother getting married at the same time. It wasn't like that. It's just I never wanted a big wedding. I've always been so socially, I guess aloof or introverted. That would be the word. I told my parents that if I had my ideal wedding, I would be having a court marriage, and then that's it. And they would always laugh at me that, “How can you even do that?” But that would have been my thing. I just hated the fact that there were so many people at the combined wedding and the amount of socializing. Gosh. 

It's not just that. Pakistani weddings are also pretty opulent in the sense that-- I guess a lot of women are into this. I don't know, but I've never been into this whole princess fairy tale thing. But I would imagine, I guess other women are. Otherwise, there wouldn't be such a huge industry revolving around creating these really blinged out dresses. My dress was bling. Not just one dress, like all of my dresses. I had three major dresses made for my wedding. They were all so blinged out. My God. When you have a blinged out dress, it weighs a ton. I'm not saying that I didn't necessarily choose the dress. I guess I did. Actually, I don't know if I can say I chose the dress because I wasn't even here when the dress was chosen. I was running back and forth between continents trying to get my husband's immigration paperwork done. I just told my mom, “Look, ma, I need a white dress and a red dress and make another one, a pinkish color, I guess something that's not too bright pink.” That's what my mom did. 

But my mom, I think, wanted to turn me into a princess. When I came back and I saw the dress, I was like, “Oh, my God.” It was so heavy. It was like literally trying to carry another person around on you all night. And that was for three days that I had three separate dresses that were all incredibly blinged out. I wish I could show you pictures over the podcast, but these were ridiculously blinged out dresses. It's not like they didn't look nice. They looked nice, but wow, man, since then, and I had never before that worn anything so heavy. That's just the dresses. 

It's not just the dresses that are like over the top. Pakistani weddings are, if you talk to anybody from that part of the world, it's the dress, the makeup and the jewelry. And on the wedding day, at that time, there was still a trend of wearing heavy jewelry, and that's what I got sort of stuck with as well. Again, not my favorite thing to do, but it was just this thing. That's the thing. Again, I think we put ourselves as the youngsters when we were young in a situation where we can't say no since our parents usually end up paying for our wedding. So yeah, they're paying for the wedding. So if they buy you something and it's heavy not to your taste, you're like sort of shut up and wear it because you're not in a situation to be beggars can't be choosers, that sort of thing. 

But yeah, my jewelry was heavy. It was nice, but it was so heavy and I have not worn it since. It's sad because it is so over the top big that there's no way I could wear it anywhere. Like, literally not in the US especially, woo-wee. I'd be walking signpost for somebody to mug me even if I attempted to wear even one of my smallest pieces of jewelry, but that's how it is. That's how it is in Pakistani culture that when the bride like on her wedding day, she receives a whole lot of jewelry that is really big. And from what I've heard, the trend has changed because again, gold is getting expensive. You can't really have a whole lot of it nowadays. You can't afford a whole lot of gold nowadays, which is fine. I wish it was the same when I was getting married. It would have been a lot cheaper to get me married. But yeah. 

Woo, the makeup. My God. And again, for all those people who know me, they know that I hate wearing makeup with a vengeance. I don't even wear lipstick on most days. Lipsticks is for special occasions or for when I wander into Walgreens and find some random nice color and I'm, “Ooh, let me buy that,” and then I never wear it for the rest of the year. I'm just like, one day I try it out and it's sitting in my box in my bathroom and I don't wear it again. My only I guess regular piece of makeup is I guess my kajal that I wear. And yeah, that's probably the only thing I wear every day on my eyes. But other than that, nothing else. Yeah, I don't know, it's just how I am. But that day, ooh, so much makeup and foundation. And wow, it was ridiculous. But yeah. 

So I had my three really blinged out days of looking like somebody else. I didn't look like myself. When the pictures came back from the photographer, I was like, “Okay, this is not me. It's somebody else. She looks nice. It's not me.” [giggles] But yeah, Pakistani weddings are the real deal when it comes to extravagance. There's lots of socializing and lots of merriment, singing and dancing. It's the whole shebang. You cannot not have fun at a Pakistani wedding. I've always found them really tiresome just because of all the people that are involved in a wedding. 

And of course, and this is my public service announcement, for anyone invited to a Pakistani wedding, they're notoriously late, always. Except for mine, because I come from a family of people who are ridiculously punctual. It doesn't matter which side of the family you look at, we're all ridiculously punctual and we always had early weddings, and that's one of the only things that I liked about my wedding that at least it didn't last until like 03:00 AM or something. But most Pakistani weddings if you get an invite, it says 07:30. it's never going to start at 07:30. Let me just tell you that. 

So anyway, yeah, so 2007, I had my big Pakistani wedding. Yeah, I moved to the US. We were in the middle smack dab of the recession in the US. And at that time, we had moved to Detroit. Yes, that's where my husband's residency was. I think what most people don't understand, especially who view immigrants as outsiders is that how hard it is for somebody who's coming from someplace else to be able to adjust to a lot of things. Now for me, I consider myself I guess very exposed to Western culture, mostly through the media. Again, I can't say it's the same as living in the US. But even when I was growing up, we used to watch a lot of shows that were broadcast over the television that usually were simulcast from the US. Shows like Full House, and we used to get satellite TV, and we were exposed to a lot of things from the West. 

But even then, when you come to another country, it is a culture shock in the sense that nothing is the same anymore. You're used to a certain way of life, living under certain circumstances, and everything gets slipped on his head. I found that when I came to Detroit that everything was so different, that nothing was what I was used to. It made it hard. I was all alone. I don't have any family in Detroit particularly. My brother lives in Chicago, and that's about three hours from Detroit. But even then, living in Pakistan, you're used to having family around you. Again, as I'd mentioned in my previous episode, that no more than half an hour away. Nobody is really far from you. But coming to the US, and when we moved to Detroit, I found an overwhelming sense of loneliness. 

Again, I guess being introverted and not very talkative, I found it hard to make new friends or friends at all. I don't think I really had any friends. We had some really nice neighbors, but I don't make friends easily. You can call that a bad thing and I wouldn't disagree with you. But it's just how I am. I don't really make friends very easy. That was a hard time. It was a lot of adjustments. Married, everything is new. The marriage is new, the place is new, the apartment is new. We also got robbed twice in the first six months that I was in the US, I was living in the US. [giggles] It was just a whole lot of things crashing in one on top of the other. That made the entire thing particularly hard. But again, slowly and surely, I adjusted to how things were in the US. 

For the first time, I had to do everything on my own. Wasn't really used to doing that in Pakistan. For those who have never lived there, you can say there's lots of things that go wrong in Pakistan, but you've always had the support of your family, plus I was always used to growing up with maids and even what you might call a chauffeur over here. Over there, we used to call them drivers. I barely ever had to do my own laundry. I never vacuumed or really cleaned or dusted. I think my mom was most afraid for me because I was so lazy. Still am in certain things. But I had never done any of these things on my own. That's one of the things that is particularly shocking when you come to the US that you have to do every single thing on your own. Take out your own trash, do your own dishes. I'd never done my own dishes. It's bad. So bad. I was so spoiled. 

But slowly and surely, you get used to that, because again, I would call those things like small things that you have to adjust to. I think the biggest thing that still bothers me, I guess, as being someone, even though I was born here, but my experiences are from another country mostly. Not anymore. I guess I've been here for over a decade, but even then, you see people view you as another. As not another, but the other. I noticed that for the first time in Detroit that when I would go to stores, people do look at you funny. It's hard to explain. Especially, children, I noticed because children don't have a sense of-- they're not aware of the social niceties that you shouldn't be staring, shouldn't be pointing. They would look at you and point at you. 

Again, I don't blame the kids necessarily, or I don't know if I can blame the adults, but I found that a lot of people were not exposed to people who are probably from immigrant backgrounds. I think the most unsettling thing about this was and still is is it makes you very uncertain about where you really belong. And because now, if I had to say-- I would say that the US is my home now. This is where I have lived for over a decade. My entire family isn't here, but a good part of my family is now. I have my brother and sister here. A lot of my uncles are here now, a lot of cousins here in the US. My kids were born here, they are raised here. I belong here now. My kids definitely belong here. They don't know any other place other than being in the US. 

The fact that I'm still viewed as-- and me and my family, it's not just me as the other as someone who shouldn't be here I guess if I had to say it, or somebody who doesn't fit into the collective. I know [giggles] I threw in a Star Trek reference right there. But that's the thing. If I don't belong in the collective and my family doesn't belong in the group that is the citizenry of the United States, then how is that even possible? It's something that I have struggled with over the past decade, because I've lived in a lot of places. The first four years we lived in Detroit, when my husband was doing his residency. And then he did his fellowship, two fellowships actually in Houston. We moved all the way from Detroit to Houston. 

Houston is a lot more welcoming, I found, because it's so diverse. Even though part of Texas, it's the red state, but Houston is so diverse. [giggles] I don't know how many of you ever been to Houston, but Houston is pretty random. When I first moved to Houston, it reminded me a lot about Karachi because A, it's always crowded. B, very diverse. You have a huge Muslim and south Asian population over there. So you feel right at home. There is so much chaos in Houston. It is ridiculous. The traffic within the 610 loop is ridiculous. And the other thing about Houston is there are parts of it that are pretty badly made. I hate to even throw mud at that city, because I love Houston, whatever you can say whatever you want, but Houston is my place of nostalgia in the US. It reminded me so much of Karachi, because it's so random, and yet it exists somehow. Something brings together all the chaos and it functions. It really, really functions. One of the biggest cities in Texas. 

Then after Houston, we moved to a small town just outside of Houston, a city called Beaumont, and not very far from Houston. And again, Beaumont itself, generally, it's within what is called the Golden Triangle I guess in Texas. Its primary industry is oil. And again, lot of I guess middle-class people, blue collar, majority white. But even then, in Beaumont, I think even with its high white majority, it was very welcoming. Again, I was surprised. I was not expecting that to be. And here, I guess it's hard to explain, but when I was in Beaumont and the 2016 rolled in, Trump was elected. And before the elections, I had never felt in Beaumont, even though white majority and majority blue collared families, they were good people, good welcoming people. I'd never felt any sort of fear in that small town. 

But the night when Trump got elected, it was very scary for my family, because you could hear the gangs outside and the news started exploding with these accounts of blatant racism, graffiti, the rise of the neo-Nazis in the US, white supremacist. It was a very scary time for us, because even with these good people that were in Beaumont, I did not feel safe. 

And that is the unfair part of it. If you want to point fingers at me, I guess that yeah, I'm a US citizen, but I didn't have the US experience, fine, you can go ahead and do that, but you can't do that for my kids. My kids are born in the US. They are being raised here. We have been living here in the US for over a decade, and we are good, law-abiding citizens. We are not people who are taking anything away from anybody. We live our everyday lives. We try to be good citizens in every way possible. 

There are people out there that will point out that, but not all immigrants are that way-- yeah, but not everybody, immigrant or not, is good either. It's not about where you come from. Most immigrants just want to exist with some semblance of peace and tranquility in the US. As my story illustrates, they don't come here just for one reason, and they're not here to take away something from somebody else. We're just here because we think that we might have better opportunities here. That's not a crime. We're not here with the explicit intention of taking away jobs or opportunities from anybody. That's not how it is. It never really is that way in a majority of cases, but that's the thing. 

After 12 years, and we moved out of Beaumont about two years ago and we moved to Dallas. Again, Dallas is a big city. When you compare it to Beaumont, it's really huge by any respect. But even then, it's not the same city as Houston is. I can still sense that even with its huge, like, I don't know how many people are aware of this, but Dallas has a huge Muslim community. I'm not even kidding here. It is ridiculously large. But Dallas is conservative. I don't even know how to explain this, but the first time I came to the US-- Not the US. Sorry. When I came to Dalla, we drove here because we were looking for houses to move into, when we were moving from Beaumont, when my husband got his job here in Dallas. But it has a completely different air to it. There is something about Dallas that you can sense that it is not as open as maybe a city like Houston, or even a small city like Beaumont. 

I think before President Trump's election, I had never felt really any sense of fear in Beaumont. It was only afterwards that I really became scared because I guess you might see the stereotype is the smaller the town, the more likely you are to face discrimination. 

And again, I don't think that generalization is accurate for Beaumont, but we were scared for our kids. Really, we were. We were hoping that a bigger city like Dallas would be a place that is a little more comforting, especially since there is such a huge Muslim population over here. But Dallas, even being a big city, is not as open. And thankfully, I've never had to really face any outward discrimination. I've never had anybody loudly comment upon me about my I guess appearance, hijab, whatever you wish to call it. But gosh, you can sense it in people's attitudes when they look at you. 

I've been trying to find a job in Dallas for a long, long time now. Very unsuccessfully ever since we moved here, I was doing my master's online through the University of Iowa. I needed to do an internship because I had no previous work experience in the US, and I really needed something going for me. So I haven't even been able to secure an internship in Dallas. The only place that was willing to hire me was a company that operated completely online, California-based company. I couldn't even find an internship in Dallas. I still haven't been able to find an internship in Dallas. Let alone a job. I can't really say that it's just because I'm Muslim, but I don't know, considering all the places I've applied to, it seems a bit ridiculous that I haven't been able to at least get any positive response from anybody. 

Anyway, but that's a rant for another day. So from starting out with my parents coming to the US and then having us, then them moving back to Pakistan, and me and my siblings ending up back in the US, that has been my journey and our journey, my family's journey coming back to the US and coming into the US. I hope that through I guess listening to my story, people will be able to see that all of us as people who are immigrants or who are from immigrant backgrounds have different stories. It's not the same thing. We're here, because we wish for something better for ourselves and for our family. And again, that is never a crime. If anything, we really, really wish to contribute the best we can to the US and to make it a more richer place to be in with our experiences being the diverse experiences that they are. 

I can safely say that, me being raised in Pakistan has given me a global perspective that many people who have been born and raised here wouldn't have a more I guess you can say an international experience. It really, really does open your eyes to a lot of things that-- Most people who have just experienced the US won't be able to have. But at the same time, we as immigrants are dedicated to making things better over here as well. That's why I think it's so heartening to see that there are so many candidates this year's election, even though we only have two. Oh, I can't even say two anymore. One presidential candidate who's made it through again, not of immigrant background, but it gives me hope that we can finally be seen now. And it's important. I want my children to be able to see them and go, “Yes, we are American citizens, and we want to be able to contribute to making a better America.” 

So with that, I will end today's episode and hopefully bring in a new episode next week, if not Friday, then Thursday night as it was today, whenever time I can get a little bit of peace and quiet. So until then, may peace be on you all and stay safe. 

Thank you so much for tuning in to I'm A Muslim (And That's Okay!). And if you wish to follow my social media for more updates, you can follow me on Instagram, on Facebook and on YouTube. All the links to those are in the show notes. And if you are on Apple, or on Spotify, on Podchaser, please do give my podcast a five-star rating. It really does help get me in the public eye. And if you wish to donate to support the podcast, you can do so through the PayPal link in my show notes as well. Take care.