The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  And my mother shrieked, “You can’t leave that child here alone!”

  (Fair enough.)

  Suddenly this unmistakable voice above and behind me said, “Emily and I will be fine.”

  I turned around to the man standing behind us, and I said, “Thank you.”

  My mother looked at me and said, “You can’t leave Emily with a total stranger.”

  And I said, “Mom, if you can’t trust Joe DiMaggio, who can you trust?”

  Joe DiMaggio, who just like us was standing there, waiting in line—looked at me, looked at my mother, and gave Emily a huge grin. And then he put out his hand and said, “Hi, Emily, I’m Joe.”

  Emily shook his hand, and she said, “Hello, Joe, I’m Emily.”

  And I said, “Mom, let’s go.”

  So my mother and I headed down the hall. We got to the plane, and my mother got on fine. It was probably twenty, twenty-five minutes by the time I got back, and by that time Emily and Joe were all the way up at the front chatting with each other by the counter.

  Joe DiMaggio had wrangled Emily’s ticket for her. She was holding it. He was clearly waiting to go to his plane until I got back.

  I looked at him, and I said, “Thank you very much.”

  And he said, “My pleasure.”

  He headed off down the hall. He turned right. He gave me this huge salute and wave and a tremendous grin and went off to his own plane.

  Emily and I went to Washington, DC. The interview went fine.

  I got the grant, and that was the beginning of the work that now, thirty-three years later, has become the story of inherited breast cancer and the beginning of the project that became BRCA1.

  DR. MARY-CLAIRE KING is American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. She was the first to show that breast cancer is inherited in some families, as the result of mutations in the gene that she named BRCA1. Her research interests include the genetic bases of schizophrenia, the genetic causes of congenital Mendelian disorders, and human genetic diversity and evolution. She pioneered the use of DNA sequencing for human-rights investigations, developing the approach of sequencing mitochondrial DNA preserved in human remains, then applying this method to the identification of kidnapped children in Argentina and subsequently to cases of human-rights violations on six continents. In 2016, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama.

  This story was told on May 29, 2014, at The Players in New York City. The theme of the evening was Mercury Rising: The Moth at the World Science Festival. Director: Catherine Burns.

  I grew up in Afghanistan during the Russian occupation, and as a child I remember my dad being gone a lot. The subject of my dad’s whereabouts was somewhat taboo in my household, because my mom told us we were never to ask about him, so we never did. And sometimes I wondered if he cared about me.

  Growing up during the war was very difficult, because we had bomb explosions and missile attacks on a daily basis. By the time I was ten, these explosions were getting closer and closer to the city of Kabul, where we used to live. In fact, there’s a distinct whistling sound that the missile makes right before hitting its target, and sometimes the explosions would be so close you could hear that.

  In the meantime there was a rumor about a regime change, which was devastating news for my dad, who was a high-ranking officer working for the current regime. Historically, the newer regime takes over by violently dismantling the old regime. My parents were desperate to try to get out of the country, but they couldn’t, because the government put a lockdown on everybody’s visas; they needed everyone to stay and fight the war for them.

  The only way to get out of the country was on forged papers. In the early 1990s, after a daring escape in the middle of the night, my parents and brother and I migrated to the US on forged papers and asked for political asylum. This meant that we could stay here temporarily while they reviewed our case. They gave us a work permit, and driver’s license, and Social Security card.

  So all of us started working. We had family in California who helped us get settled. Fast-forward five years, our lives were so normal that the biggest thing on my mind at that time was how I could get my mom to extend my curfew and let me stay out late.

  Then one day I’m at my first job at the Men’s Wearhouse, and my dad calls me. I could hear by the excitement in his voice that there was something going on at home.

  He tells me, “You need to come home right away, because there’s a letter from immigration.”

  I speak the best English in my household, so he wanted me to come home and translate.

  (And for those of you who’ve been lucky enough not to be familiar with the immigration system, they don’t send you regular updates, like, “Hey, still thinking about you all, haven’t forgotten about you.”)

  I rush home, and I find my dad in his security-guard uniform. My mom and my brother are home, ’cause my dad called them, too.

  I’m sitting at the dining-room table, and all three of them are kinda hovered over me, and rushing me. “Come on, come on, read it. What does it say, what does it say?”

  So I read just the highlights really quickly. It says our appointment has been moved up to next week, and that we need to bring all of our legal documents, and our family photos, and things that are important.

  We start jumping up and down, thinking, This is it. This is the appointment that we’ve been waiting for.

  The day of our appointment, we drive about forty-five minutes to downtown Los Angeles, and we go into a big government building. Upstairs, there’s an immigration officer waiting for us, and he guides us into this room.

  The moment that the doors opened up, all of us looked at each other. We felt like we were in the wrong place. The people that were sitting there were visibly upset. Some of them were still crying.

  We were told, “Just sit down until you hear your last name.”

  After a while my dad asked me to go and ask the security guard how long this appointment was going to take, and what were we here for.

  So I go up, and I ask an immigration officer, “Hey, can you tell me how long this appointment might take? Because my dad needs to get back to work.”

  He says, “Your dad will get back to work, all right, just not in this country.”

  And my heart just dropped. Going back was not an option, because we’re now considered traitors, and would be arrested as soon as we got off the plane.

  I sat down and hesitantly told my dad this, and my dad lost all the color in his face.

  Suddenly my dad is hunched over, and he’s holding his chest. He’s visibly in some kind of pain.

  So I get up, and I go up to the same officer, and I ask him if I can use the phone. He says no. Then I ask him if I could use the bathroom, and he lets me. I open up these big doors, and I’m rushing. There’s a long hallway, and I’m looking to the left, I’m looking to the right, looking for a telephone. Finally I spot it at the end of the hall, and I grab the phone, and I dial our attorney’s number.

  Now, I was extremely upset with our attorney, because we couldn’t afford even our own meals sometimes, but the thing we always wanted to be sure we had money for was an attorney. And so for her not to be here was really upsetting to me.

  This girl answers the phone—she sounds like she’s about eighteen years old, like my age at that time. I am asking her to put our attorney on the phone, and she keeps refusing.

  I tell her it’s an emergency—“PLEASE PUT JODY ON THE PHONE!”—and as soon as I hear Jody’s voice, I completely break down. I explain to her that something is wrong with my dad and they won’t let us get help for him.

  She tells me to just sit tight and she is going to see what she can do. So we’re sitting there, and my dad continues to be in pain.

  After about forty-five minutes, a man walks in and says our last name, and all four of us get up, and we’re following him. We’re not sur
e where, but we’re following him. We end up going into this office, which was so small that only my dad and I could fit in it.

  There’s a man in there who’s working at his desk. He doesn’t even acknowledge that we’re standing there. He doesn’t speak one word to us. He just hands over this paper that said our visa had been extended for three months, so that we could go get my dad some medical help.

  The next three months are the worst time of my life by far, because we’re fearing deportation every single day.

  Whenever we would see the mailman show up and put mail in our mailbox, it was a moment of dread—none of us wanted to go and check our mailbox. And my dad’s behavior was so completely over the top.

  He moved out of my mom’s bedroom and into the living room. Our blinds were closed, whether it was day or nighttime, and he slept with a pair of clothes right next to him. Whenever he heard footsteps, he would jump off the couch and look through the blinds to see who it was.

  At the end of a few months, we finally go to our final appointment. We walk in with our attorney, and I notice that it’s a different judge who is sitting there. It’s an older gentleman, and he looks really intense. He won’t even smile.

  The judge carries on with our attorney for a little bit and then turns his attention to my dad. After some basic questions, he gets right into it and starts asking my dad if he has a translator, and my dad says, “My daughter will translate for us.”

  I was pretty intimidated.

  The judge tells me, “Young lady, whatever I say to you, you translate exactly what I say, nothing more, nothing less. And whatever your dad says, you tell me exactly what he says, nothing more, nothing less.”

  I agree. He asks my dad questions, really demeaning questions, like, “Do I understand correctly that you came here on forged papers?”

  And my dad starts to say, “Well, yes, but…” And then my dad goes into this long explanation.

  But the judge cuts my dad off and says, “I just want to hear yes or no. I don’t care about the explanation.”

  And so the conversation goes on like this, back and forth, and it’s not going well at all.

  Finally he tells my dad, “You know, we here in the United States do not give citizenship to people that break the law. We can’t, and I won’t.”

  And as soon as I translate this to my dad, I put my head down, and I just start praying.

  When I open my eyes, I see my dad rising out of his seat. He starts unbuckling his belt, at which point I’m thinking he’s completely losing his mind. I’m not sure what he’s doing.

  But he lifts up his shirt on the right side and, in his native language, looks at the judge and says, “This is what the communists did to me.”

  He’s pointing to a five-inch knife scar.

  Then he pushes down his pants in the back and turns around a little bit, and again says, “This is what the communists did to me,” pointing at three gunshot wounds.

  And he takes off his shoes, and takes off his socks, and says, “This is what the communists did to me.”

  He’s pointing at his toenails, which they had tried to pull out with pliers.

  I remember thinking, I know I’m hearing what I’m hearing. But everything wasn’t registering, because I am translating these horrible things and also learning for the first time about my dad’s whereabouts. All those times years ago that I didn’t know where he was, wondering if he cared about me, he was in prison being tortured.

  And in that moment I have never felt more sorrow.

  He continues to tell the judge, “It’s easy for you to judge me. You sit in that seat and you wear that robe. But if you came on this side, and you looked at me—one man to another—you will see that everything I did, I did to save my children. I had no other choice.

  “And you might deny it right now, but had it been you, I know you would have done the same thing. If you have to show the American public that you didn’t take it easy on us, I understand. Send me back. I volunteer. But please let my children stay. Please give my children a new home.”

  And then he puts his head down and starts crying like a baby.

  The judge leaves. We’re on a break.

  The judge comes back after an hour, and as soon as he enters the room, I notice that he doesn’t have his robe on. He goes up to his chamber and grabs something and starts walking back towards us.

  We’re pretty nervous. The entire time his eyes are on my dad.

  He goes past me and stops right next to my dad.

  My dad looks up at him, and the judge says, “Mr. Samadzai, let me see your hand.”

  My dad shows him his hand, and the judge puts a stamp in my dad’s hand and says, “Mr. Samadzai, I would like you to be the one to stamp your children’s papers.”

  Together they stamp our papers, and when they move their hands, it reads, “Asylum granted.”

  He then flips the page to my parents’ papers and stamps it with the same stamp.

  Then he looks down at my dad, and puts his hand on his shoulder, and says, “Welcome to America.”

  It took us eighteen years from the day that we arrived here for me to be granted an American citizenship. On January 29, 2009, I was sworn in as an American citizen, and I pledged allegiance to my new homeland.

  And it is through my children, my two-year-old son and my unborn child in my womb, that I will make sure that this gratitude that overflows in my heart every single day will continue to live on long after I am gone.

  May God always bless our America.

  DORI SAMADZAI BONNER is a writer whose award-winning essay “Red, White, and Blue” was published in Direction, the Pierce College literary magazine. On August 31, 2010, based on her passion for tennis and her life struggles in Afghanistan, Dori was honored at the US Open tennis tournament’s opening-night ceremony alongside tennis greats Martina Navratilova, James Blake, and Esther Vergeer. She has been featured on the cover of the Montgomery Advertiser News, on Bloomberg News, in the magazine of the United States Tennis Association, UMUC’s Achiever magazine, and on NPR. Dori and her husband have two adorable boys. However, it is her love for her newfound homeland that she prides herself upon above all.

  This story was told on November 12, 2014, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Now You See It: Stories of Illumination. Director: Maggie Cino.

  I am not really a girls’-night-out kind of a girl. But when some friends invited me for drinks and dinner in the city, I said, “Yes.” I needed a break from the monotony, and honestly, I needed to dress up and feel pretty.

  I took the Metro-North in from my home in the suburbs, and I got out at Forty-eighth and Park in the middle of rush hour. As I was walking along Park Avenue, I realized there was a sea of men in suits walking towards me.

  I was feeling pretty good, jauntily walking along, when I suddenly realized that not a single man had even glanced at me.

  And it struck me that at forty-four—and I was forty-four at the time—I had become completely invisible.

  I was happily married. I was immersed in being a wife and mother and—what felt like occasionally—a writer. Despite the monotony of deepest, darkest suburbia and running around after five children, two dogs, five cats, and seventeen chickens, life was good. Life was settled and safe and warm. Life was what my husband always called “pots and pans.” I knew everything about him, and he knew everything about me.

  But scratch the surface, and in fact we were going through something of a rough patch. We had so little energy, and we had forgotten to nurture our relationship. We had forgotten to pay attention to each other.

  We were exhausted. I used to say that a good night was being in bed by nine but a great night was being in bed by eight. The highlight of our month was Chinese takeout.

  And I wasn’t really happy.

  A little while after the girls’ night out, I was invited to take part in a book panel in California. Before the event I was sitting in the hotel bar, and out o
f the corner of my eye, I noticed a young, dark-haired man come and sit next to me at the bar.

  I realized that he was one of the other authors doing this event, so I turned and introduced myself. I was instantly struck by how handsome he was. He had an amused twinkle in his eye that was disconcerting.

  We started talking. We talked about books and writing and publishing. Then we skipped the small talk, and went straight to the real stuff—to relationships and feelings and life.

  He was sweet and winsome and brilliant, and it was the kind of conversation that you can only really have in a hotel bar with a stranger, when you don’t know each other, and you can reveal things that you wouldn’t ordinarily reveal.

  I remember looking at his face, at his skin, and thinking, God, you are so young, and God, you are so handsome. And at a certain point in our conversation, I thought, Am I going crazy, or is he flirting with me? Is this chemistry between us?

  Then I thought, Jane, don’t be ridiculous. You are almost old enough to be his mother. I decided we were just having a lovely chat.

  We went inside for the event, and we all sat behind this long table on a stage, and he was the first one up behind the podium.

  He stood up and said, “I was just sitting in the hotel bar with a very lovely woman, and when I told her that I didn’t know what to talk about, she said, ‘Oh, just tell funny stories and talk about celebrities.’ ”

  And I died. I sank my head into my hands. I turned bright red, and my ears were buzzing with mortification, because it was true, I had said that, only halfway joking.

  But all I could think about was he said “very lovely woman.” He said “very lovely woman.”

  It was my turn next, and I stood up, and just as I was about to start talking, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned, and there was the author standing onstage with his arms outstretched for a hug of apology. So I stepped into the hug, and there I was onstage in front of hundreds of people, hugging a man I didn’t know, thinking, What on earth is going on?

  He asked what I was doing after the event, but I had a meeting and then was leaving. So he gave me his book, and I took that book home, and I kept thinking, What was that? Was that flirting? Am I so entrenched in middle age that I have completely forgotten what it’s like?