by Elly Fishman
The fantasy isn’t perfect. Sarah doesn’t like the savior-teacher trope and she doesn’t consider herself one. Even when she has brought such cases to DCFS, her impact goes only so far. Parents lie. They say there is no marriage or that the arrangement is the daughter’s choice. That leaves not only Sarah, but all those involved in the girls’ lives—refugee resettlement agencies, friends, counselors, employers—with little ability to help.
But Sarah still tries. The next time Fatima Peters brings up Shahina’s poor attendance and grades, Sarah’s answer is simple: “I’m not ready to give up yet.”
ZAKIAH
•
Shahina never imagined she’d leave Yangon, the capital city of Myanmar where she was born and raised until age fourteen. The Yangon Shahina knew was a landscape of jarring juxtapositions. The streets boasted a mix of old and new. Painted stucco neoclassical buildings—remnants from the country’s long history as a British colony—sat next to golden pagodas while lush streets were lined with jazz-age mansions. The perimeter of the city was marked by the Yangon Circular Railway, a crowded train where monks in maroon and nuns in pink and saffron rode among city residents who carried bundles of tamarind and mango to city markets.
Shahina lived at Yangon’s center in an apartment where both Zakiah and her grandmother were raised, too. Despite a decades-long military junta that had transformed much of the lush, resource-rich state into a closed-off impoverished society, Shahina’s world was somewhat isolated from hardship. Her grandmother ran a successful real estate business and both Shahina and Zakiah were raised wealthy, by Myanmar standards; there were drivers and maids and plenty of space.
Zakiah hadn’t planned to raise her daughter in her childhood home, but when her marriage to Shahina’s father fell apart—he walked out of the house after a fight and never returned—Zakiah had no other option. She resented living with her mother, who she felt expected Zakiah to take care of her.
Zakiah was considered ethnic Indian, a class of Muslims brought into Myanmar by British colonists who had become relatively well integrated into Burmese society. Because of her situation, she was considered a divorcée, a designation that held her back. While she spent several years working as a salesperson for a makeup company, Zakiah, together with her mother, determined that she had a better chance at a new future in Malaysia, where jobs were plentiful, the pay better, and where she could escape the stigma of her ruined marriage.
Shahina was six when Zakiah moved to Ipoh and left her daughter in the care of her grandmother. In Ipoh, a popular tourist destination in Malaysia with a world-renowned culinary scene and hawker markets, Zakiah worked in a restaurant where she rolled fish balls for soup. After several months, Zakiah took a job at an iron-welding factory. There she met her future husband, Samad. He was a Rohingya refugee working in the country temporarily and hoping for resettlement. As part of a group of deeply stigmatized rural Burmese Muslims who had been ineligible for full citizenship under the military junta, Samad, like some 150,000 registered Rohingya refugees in Malaysia, had fled there to find work. Zakiah knew her family would not be happy with the match. Marrying Samad meant marrying below her class, so Zakiah waited to tell her mother about the marriage. To Zakiah’s surprise, her mother was accepting of her daughter’s choice even though it meant Zakiah would likely never return to Myanmar where discrimination against Rohingya grew increasingly dangerous.
In the years since Zakiah had left Yangon, ethnic Burmese Muslims, and particularly the Rohingya people, had become increasing vilified under Myanmar’s Buddhist government. In 2012, Rhakine, the Myanmar province that was home to much of the country’s Rohingya and Kaman Muslim populations, erupted in violence. Villages were razed across the province and Rohingya families were buried in mass graves. The violence against Burmese Muslims only grew worse in the following years. Reports of mass slaughters across the province started to make headlines, including one outbreak that left ten Rohingya headless, their corpses bobbing in a water tank. The attacks marked a surge of government-sanctioned discrimination and violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar, acts that would eventually lead to an exodus of over one million Rohingya to neighboring countries such as Bangladesh and Malaysia.
Like so many Rohingya refugee families in Malaysia, Zakiah’s and Samad’s lives remained in limbo. Rohingya refugees—Zakiah now identified as one—still faced great prejudice in their adopted home. The country provided next to no aid for refugees and denied them the right to work. The Malaysian government charged for health care and most Rohingya, including Samad, were left to find jobs in the country’s shadow economy. Rohingya children were also barred from attending government schools and private ones proved expensive. Samad continued to work as a welder, but he instructed Zakiah to leave her job. He told her that a wife’s job is to stay home and take care of the home. Zakiah acquiesced, but with only one low-paying job between them, the two often had to forgo meals in order to save enough to pay rent.
Hoping to escape life in Malaysia, Samad applied for official refugee status with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2013. Resettling in a new country, Zakiah was told, could promise protection and access to work and schools. But the process, which included several rounds of screenings, vetting, and interviews, could take at least two years. Zakiah sent for Shahina. She wouldn’t leave Malaysia without her. When Shahina arrived in Malaysia, however, her mother’s new life shocked her. Zakiah and Samad lived in a tiny apartment on what Shahina considered scraps. After six at night, the one-room apartment stayed dim until morning. The family scrimped on electricity to have enough money for phones, their lifelines to home and the UNHCR, which was handling their appeal. Shahina was also expected to wear a hijab, which she had never done while living in Yangon. The demand irked her so she spent most days texting with friends back in Yangon and talking to her grandmother on the phone. Shahina begged her mother to return her to Yangon where she had attended private school and had her own driver. She wanted to reclaim the life she’d left behind. Zakiah answered her daughter’s frustration by reminding her of the promise of the United States.
In 2016, Samad achieved official refugee status. He was told he and his family would be resettled in Chicago. Zakiah knew little of the United States, but the promise of education, jobs, and a place where she and her husband could live freely inspired optimism. Perhaps Zakiah could reclaim some of the life she’d lost. Shahina, too. But for Shahina, moving to the United States simply meant that, for the second time in her life, she found herself uprooted, but this time to half a world away.
10
MAY
Shahina and Aishah
On a warm spring afternoon, the sidewalks on Devon Avenue throng with a jumble of Sunday shoppers. Parked cars line the streets, many of them boasting license plates from nearby states. Families travel for hours to shop here. Devon is a Chicago thoroughfare busy with Indians, Pakistanis, and Somalis, with Orthodox Jews, Sikhs, and the city’s vast mix of Christians, such as Egyptian Copts, Guatemalan Pentecostals, and apostolic Nigerians, all of whom have churches nearby. Shopping bags fill with ingredients for curry, biryani, vegan Egyptian stews, and Sabbath challahs. Twenty-three-dollar fifty-pound bags of rice are universally popular. On the surface, busy Devon is Chicago at its best. Here Islamic bookstores stand a few feet from sellers of Hindu statuary and a local Rohingya center endorses a Jewish congresswoman. The sun is out for the first time in days, and the street is a cacophony—car horns, bhangra music blasting from store speakers, the squeals of children biting fried, sweet Burmese dough balls rolled in sesame seeds and stuffed with rice and coconut sugar. Though it’s mid-afternoon on Sunday, this is Shahina’s first time out of the house since Friday.
Shahina breathes in the fresh air. The crisp wind offers a welcome change from her family’s cramped apartment. At home, Shahina has no personal space. The living room, where she spends most of her time, centers around a small rug, where her two-year-old brother, who was born with a bir
th defect that has left his arms without hands and with legs that taper off after a few inches, spends his days squirming on the floor. The boy was born while Shahina’s family was on the run. At nearly two, he remains mute—half of his tongue is lodged too fully in his throat. The apartment kitchen is a sink and a microwave that rests on a shoddy shelf. Often the only food items in the house are individually wrapped Burmese sponge cakes, instant ramen, and half-empty bottles of orange juice.
Despite the small, cluttered space, Shahina and her mother rarely interact—the two go weeks without talking—and when they do, Zakiah brings up marriage, curses her daughter’s obstinacy, and pushes her to land a husband.
Shahina takes advantage of today’s outing by donning her favorite dress, a long red polyester button-down with ruffles at the shoulders and a black belt clasped at the waist. She’s paired it with a black wool-blend hijab, a braided choker that she’s stretched across her forehead, and a small, furry, baby-pink purse. She’s painted her lips hot pink and intensified her eyes with pitch-black contact lenses that ring her pupils with tiny white dots that catch the light.
The sophomore has plans to meet Aishah in an hour. First she wants to visit her favorite shop, Pakistan Fashion. The boutique, no bigger than a walk-in closet, brims with scarves, belly dancing garb, and bangles in seemingly every color. Once inside, Shahina runs her fingers across the chiffons, polyesters, and silks, feeling their textures. She pulls out several jewel-tone dresses stitched with plastic crystals and rhinestones down the bust. She stops at a tunic meant for a burka ensemble. Like the girls at Sullivan from Afghanistan, Congo, and Guatemala, Burmese girls have their own shopping strips where they blend Yangon styles with those of Chicago teens. Zakiah has urged Shahina to wear more conservative tunics, but so far, she has refused. She doesn’t even like wearing a hijab; she prefers to wear her hair down. Shahina pledges to herself that she’ll jettison the scarf when she lives on her own—which is to say, not with a husband she’s been rushed to find or one forced on her.
Leaving the store, Shahina makes her way toward a string of jewelers. She passes by several of the shops, deeming their styles too traditional or too garish. Or at least, the wrong kind of garish. But after a minute, she stops. She leans into a window to see a display of necklaces, her nose nearly touching the glass. At the center stands a collar with sheets of yellow gold fanning out from a central pendant like birds’ wings. The piece looks like the one she wore at her engagement party last year. She shudders.
Chicago’s Burmese community is small, and Shahina knows people judge her choices. Whenever she talks about the past, she tends to look over her shoulder, checking if anyone is eavesdropping.
The topic of gossip remains front-of-mind when Shahina arrives at Ghareeb Nawaz, a Pakistani restaurant on the eastern end of Devon Avenue. Shahina and Aishah gather here often after school. The two became close after they met at a friend’s birthday party at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. The food, they agreed, though not halal, tasted delicious. Soon, they discovered they spoke the same two languages—Burmese and Complaining-About-Their-Mothers. The spacious Pakistani restaurant is a favorite among Muslims, especially taxi drivers, who fill the tables in the early morning hours after their overnight shifts. But today, families—grandmothers in shalwar kameez bouncing grandchildren in their laps while reining others into their chairs—discuss the week’s gossip in a babble of languages: Arabic, Rohingya, Urdu, Farsi, and more. Aromatic curries waft from the vast, populous kitchen where white-smocked and square-hatted men churn out dozens of dishes—frontier chicken, tikka paratha, chili gosht—beloved in part because full plates cost less than $5. Coming to Ghareeb Nawaz is a kind of ritual for Shahina and her friend. They can spend hours here, sitting over plates of food, reminiscing about the watermelon juice, beef satay, and papaya salad sold on the streets of Yangon.
Today, the two friends pool $13 between them. Aishah works at the neighborhood Jewel-Osco grocery store and always sets aside a few dollars from her paycheck for these outings. Moving down the long steel cafeteria counter, they settle on a chicken biryani; it comes with a mountain of rice, and a plate piled with paratha, an Indian fried wheat bread. The two dishes should be enough to last them through dinner, they figure. Neither of the girls plans to go home before 8 p.m. After ordering, the duo settles into a table toward the empty back of the restaurant, removed from eavesdroppers.
“You remember when I called to tell you I was engaged?” Shahina asks Aishah, launching right in.
“I was so shocked,” responds Aishah, “and sad.”
“You didn’t even believe me.”
“Yeah, but also, I kind of did, since my mom did the same thing to me.”
During her freshman year at Sullivan, Aishah, now nineteen, fought off a suitor her parents picked for her. The man was in his early thirties and lived downstairs from Aishah and her family. He would sometimes say hello to Aishah, then sixteen, in the hallway. He asked her about her day and for news from school. It started off innocuously, but later gifts began appearing at her door; a new iPhone, then a gold ring, and eventually a new set of Bose headphones. He waited for her in his car outside Sullivan. He’d follow Aishah home, calling her name and telling her to get in his car. When he told Aishah’s mother that he wanted to marry her, Aishah was adamant that she would not marry him. But Aishah’s mother encouraged her daughter to accept the proposal. She said that marrying a wealthy man would help secure a good future.
“They always just want you to marry the rich guy,” says Shahina.
“Yeah, my mom was like, ‘You won’t have to work. You won’t have to worry about nothing. Just do whatever you want. You will live like a queen.’ But really, that guy was like a wolf.” This wasn’t the first time Aishah encountered such an aggressive man. Aishah’s mother wed Aishah’s father in an arranged marriage, despite the fact that he already had two wives, one in Thailand and another in Laos. Aishah has also seen her father hit her mother. “You have to protect yourself from guys like that.”
“This would never happen in Yangon. Most people marry when they’re like twenty-three,” adds Shahina. “That’s a normal age. This is happening because we’re in America. Our parents, they’re scared that we’re in America. They’re scared that we’re changing.”
Shahina shrugs and digs into the plate of biryani. Just then, her phone dings. It’s a Facebook message from a boy—not the kind of boy her parents have in mind for marriage.
The boy is tall, with a strong jaw and thick, black hair. He travels among the Asian Boyz gang, a group made up mostly of fellow Rohingya refugees. The boys have been increasingly drawn to American gang culture. Sarah is aware of the problem; she’s had the words “gang intervention” written on her office whiteboard since January. One reason she hasn’t yet confronted the crew is that she figures their interest is mostly cosmetic. But she still finds the phenomenon bewildering. How is it that boys who watched Buddhist soldiers burn their villages are enamored with, and bewitched by, Chicago gangs? Other refugee kids, like the Congolese who left town, run to steer far away from gangs. The tall boy Shahina likes, and his pals, however, may find that gangs offer power, money, status, and community—qualities that could attract any young person who feels a sense of powerlessness.
Shahina finds herself drawn to these boys. In her eyes, they are dangerous and unpredictable—two qualities the seventeen-year-old craves. She and the Rohingya boy have been texting on Facebook all afternoon. Despite being drawn in by bad behavior, Shahina sticks to less treacherous topics: music, scary movies, and her favorite foods. The two trade messages about their families. Dozens of texts are just strings of emojis that have grown into inside jokes. They laugh about certain friends’ chastity and others’ indiscretions and send each other plenty of selfies. They swap less-than-scenic photos taken in the cafeteria, the classroom, by a windowsill, and from the library floor. In other words, they flirt like other teenagers. But for Shahina, the stakes of such behavior are high.
<
br /> Shahina looks up from her phone. She waves at a young woman, no older than eighteen, who has just walked through the door dressed in a smattering of pastel colors topped by a baby pink hijab. Trailing behind her are two small children and a forty-something man.
“Like that,” says Shahina raising her eyebrows as though to convey shock. “She was forced to marry that guy when she was fourteen. Now she has two babies.”
“She looks so sad,” adds Aishah. “She could be his daughter.”
“I’m not going to get married,” continues Shahina. “My mom doesn’t believe me, but I’m going to show her that I can live my life without a husband.”
“Our parents all think we need men for our future,” says Aishah, “but what about woman power? We can live our lives on our own.”
