The Adventures of a Pakistani in Texas
A young woman from Karachi doesn’t discover how intense Islam can be…until moving to Texas.
Happy Memoir Monday! Today we're sharing this eye-opening story by Mariya Karimjee, which originally ran in 2014. Narratively is a proud partner of Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web, published on Memoir Land. For more great memoir stories, check out this week's Memoir Monday lineup here.
My first real memory of the United States is that of a three-story-tall Christmas tree in the middle of the ice rink of a Houston-area mall. It's the blasphemous image that I'll always associate with my family's move to America from Karachi, Pakistan, in December of 1999. I was eleven years old and the first few days of the move are a blur of spaghetti junctions, what I then thought of as bone-chilling cold, and a fascination with fast food restaurants. But the moment I spotted the tree is crystallized in my mind. It was the most spectacular thing I had ever seen.
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