by Sam Farran
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OUR PLANE TOUCHED down in New York City, but we didn’t spend any time there. We caught sight of the Statue of Liberty out the plane windows, misty and green against the gray, choppy waters of the harbor below us. Then we transferred planes and headed right to Michigan, where we stayed at my great-grandfather’s house in Highland Park before using some of that hard-earned restaurant money to buy a house a week later in Dearborn. The month was February, and not the sort of February we had grown up with in Lebanon or Libya: Michigan was frigid. First order of business, we all got winter clothes. Second order of business: school. We started right away, on either the second or third day we landed. Knowing one word, “hello,” and pretty much shell-shocked from the change in country, culture, weather, time zone, and home, I sat in the back of an almost-normal US elementary school classroom wondering how the heck I would survive.
I say “almost normal” because Dearborn, Michigan—even at that time—was a different place than “normal” America. We had such a high population of Arab families, fathers who had come to work in the automotive industry after other family members settled there, that this school, Salina Intermediate School, had one of the nation’s first English as a second language (ESL) programs. ESL helped me immensely, allowing me not only to work on learning how to communicate in my new country but also to continue my studies of math, science, history, and geography, while transitioning to English. ESL bridged the time between when I arrived and when I could undertake those other subjects in English by providing dedicated resources to ensure I did not lag behind. It allowed me to continue learning in Arabic while I learned English. This, along with the overall quality of the education, really motivated me to come to school and take advantage of the wonders of America.
But it wasn’t just ESL that helped me transition. About 40 percent of the other kids in my classes hailed originally from Lebanon and Palestine, some of them even from Tebnine, so I felt right at home, could talk with them, could make friends and find support. A kid from Lebanon, from a village near mine, Mohamed Ajrouch, who had only arrived a month before me, took me under his wing. We went to ESL together, and he helped me with my English as we sat in the back of the classroom.
Two days into my time at Salina, I experienced my first real culture shock. This happened in gym class, during a swimming lesson. I stepped into the locker room, and all the boys started taking off their clothes.
This never happens in Lebanon.
It’s taboo across most of the Middle East. You have to make sure the bathroom door is locked ten times before you ever do your business.
There in that locker room I was stunned, staring and frozen in place, no idea what was going on and refusing to get naked myself. The gym teacher, Mr. Costia, who wasn’t Arab at all, still had taught himself a few words of Arabic.
He said, “Habibi, what’s the matter?”
Everyone liked Mr. Costia. He was not only the gym teacher but also the football coach. He had a heart of gold, and as his attempts at Arabic showed, he really took an interest in us as kids. But his phrasing here turned out to be especially unfortunate: habibi means “my love.” Everyone had gotten naked already. Some had already run out of the locker room and jumped into the big pool. As I stood there with Mr. Costia calling me his “boy love” and waiting for me to strip, I felt more and more isolated as the other kids went out to the pool. I thought the worst rumors about America might actually be true! What sort of depraved situation would this become? What would happen if I took off my clothes?
I clammed up, refused.
I wouldn’t take off my shoes, let alone my shirt.
I absolutely refused to take my pants off.
So, of course, Mr. Costia had no choice. He sent me to the principal’s office.
In Lebanese culture this is also a big no-no—to dishonor yourself, to cause your parents stress and make them get involved in your shortcomings at school. Needless to say, the whole experience turned out to be traumatic for me. Even after the principal patiently explained, through one of the several interpreters on staff at the school, the purpose of the swim class, the cultural norms of locker room etiquette, and the requirement for me to get changed in order to not fail the course, I still didn’t want to do it. But my parents had a stern discussion with me over the kitchen table that night, and at the next gym class, I bucked up, stripped down (blushing all the way), put on my swimsuit, and jumped into the water.
Which wasn’t the end of the problem.
I didn’t know how to swim! But I sure wasn’t going to resist and have my parents called to the principal’s office again.
That episode almost killed me twice over—once from sheer embarrassment at my nakedness and then again as I sank to the bottom of the heavily chlorinated deep end, only to be dragged spluttering up to the surface by Mr. Costia, who had to jump in to rescue me.
Although gym class frightened and nearly killed me, I’ve got to say again that school in America overall turned out to be a dream. Free milk. Free lunch. And every day during lunchbreak we were given the choice to pay a nickel to watch a movie. All these things amazed me, so different were they from school in Libya or in Lebanon, which was rudimentary and sometimes even cruel, with headmasters not averse to whacking our fingers with a stick and with twenty or thirty kids of all ages crowded into a single dingy, undersupplied classroom.
I did not take the benefits around me in my new city and country for granted. The movies were fun, sure, but like the ESL classes, they served a purpose in helping me improve my English. And the lunches and milk, well, perhaps I was a little skinny—not malnourished because my parents ran a restaurant, but certainly skinny. There seemed to be nothing as effective at putting on pounds as good American milk and a hot lunch at an American school!
My parents used the last of their savings from Libya to open another restaurant in Dearborn. They bought a Coney Island Diner, which was a popular chain in the 1970s—vinyl upholstered booths along one wall, a few stools at a coffee bar, a cash register with a glass-topped cooler beside it to display pies and other deserts. Their concept was to remake it in Lebanese fashion, serving hummus, tabbouleh, shawarma, kibbeh, and all the great things that made their Benghazi restaurant such a hit. Problem was, they opened it up on the wrong end of town. East Dearborn was still predominantly white, Italian, and Irish, and under the notorious administration of Mayor Orville Hubbard, it was known as one of the most segregated communities north of the Mason-Dixon Line. We got about twelve customers a day, a few Poles or Italians who came in and then a few brave Arabs who drove the whopping four miles across town to patronize us. Obviously, the restaurant failed pretty quickly. But my dad wasn’t daunted.
In addition to my father’s working the assembly lines, first at Chrysler for a few months and then at Ford for a number of years, we bought another restaurant, this one on the South End of town and fated to have a much longer life. I worked there, as well as at a convenience store my family bought soon after, for most of my middle and high school years, busing dishes, waiting tables, and even cooking on the night shift.
Amid all this, our family took on yet another American trait within the first year or two after landing: we started to go on annual family vacations. While that trip from Benghazi to Tripoli felt a little bit like a vacation, at least in hindsight—with all of us loaded into that hired car, basically fleeing willy-nilly to avoid the recruitment efforts of the PLO—we now got to experience the true joys of the annual car trip.
Our trips didn’t focus on Disneyland. We didn’t trek out west to Yosemite or Yellowstone or even to Mount Rushmore. We didn’t do the kitschy stops along Route 66.
My dad had a favorite, though, and it was his choice, for something like ten years running, to pack the whole family up and sojourn to Niagara Falls.
What did this look like for a Lebanese family newly arrived in America? Not too different from what most people remember from those days before cell phones, video games, and
LCD screens mounted on the backseats of shiny SUVs sank their pixelated claws into the scrum of our kid brains and kid energy to anesthetize the whole experience. Although my dad’s trophy car, purchased after his first few years of hard work on the assembly line and in the restaurants, was a red ’77 Cadillac Eldorado, he didn’t ever take us to Niagara in that. No, we piled everyone into a conversion van: plush seats, tinted windows, upholstery, cheap venetian blinds making the inside always a bit like a cave or a bordello. Four kids, mom, dad, sometimes a random assortment of aunts, cousins, or friends added to the mix: this whole gaggle crossed via the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel or the Ambassador Bridge, traffic depending, and took Highway 401 along the north shore of Lake Erie toward the falls.
The trip involved all the normal threats to pull over and sort out the fighting, maybe to blister a behind or two, as well as the constant questions (by this time in a mix of Arabic and English) about how much farther we had to go and when we’d get there. Kids got carsick. Parents came up with games to divert our attention from beating and poking one another—games like “I Spy” and song singing and searching for all fifty states’ license plates. All of that is, I think, roughly the same experience every kid and parent from the 1950s through the early 1990s had on American highways.
The main difference, on this four- or five-hour journey across a bit of American-ish Canadian territory, was that when we stopped midway at a park or roadside turnout, my mom would get out an assortment of decidedly Lebanese food, usually breakfast because dad liked to get going before daybreak on these vacations. We’d have ful (beans) and lebnah (Lebanese sour cream) and cheeses and flatbread, as well as tea, not a breakfast most Americans would ever eat, though we loved it.
When we finally arrived in the afternoon at the falls, my father’s eyes would go wide, just the same on his tenth visit as on our first. We’d tour around the falls. We’d hike a little. And then we’d do just what any other American family would do, albeit with Lebanese force and passion: we’d fight over where to stay for the few nights of our visit, which restaurants to eat at, who got to sleep in what bed, and what things to do and see.
Overall these vacations were as exhausting as they were enjoyable, but we did them as a family, together, and that counted for a lot. No one was ever allowed to beg off, to skip, to have other obligations. Dad set the date of the vacation, and come hell or highwater, all of us found ourselves bundled into that dark conversion van, chugging down the road toward the falls.
Although so much more happened during these middle and high school years, so many things that helped shape me as a man and form my identity as an American, the really important thing I still need to mention from this period is how I met and wooed my first love, Zainab.
In high school the idea of becoming a Marine really started to take hold in my heart. I kept it to myself for my middle and early high school years. But when I was a junior, I began to visit recruiters. I couldn’t shake the image of that Marine at the embassy gate. When I thought of myself growing up into manhood, there was nothing I wanted or envisioned for myself more than that, no higher aim I could imagine. When I went to those recruiters the first few times, they shooed me away, telling me I was still too young. But I’d get their promotional stickers, bright red- and gold-colored emblems emblazoned with the eagle, globe, and anchor. These stickers I not only collected but also began to display in a sort of weird and funny way by putting them on my silver polyester warm-up jacket. That kind of jacket was a cool guy thing back then, though the richer kids sewed patches onto the sleeves and back, rather than just applying stickers. I would have loved patches, sure, but I didn’t hesitate to use the stickers, and I was pretty proud of that Marine-emblazoned jacket as I walked the Fordson High School halls with my big Afro Sheen hair.
Oh, how awesome those days were, back in the late 1970s. And just imagine what a work of art I was when I first met Zainab around about that time.
Here’s how we met: I took a class my senior year called community service, which sent me to elementary, junior high, or other high schools to serve as a teacher’s aide. So, I was somewhat official, an older, wiser authority figure (with that hair, that jacket, that teenage self-assurance). That’s how I met Zainab. She was a student in one of the classes I helped with. She’d just come to America that year, which was 1978, and I met her fresh off the boat.
At first we didn’t say much to each other, but I noticed her. And she noticed me. Over the coming few days we began to communicate more and more as I went about my duties in the class. I helped her with small things, with new words and American expressions, and also with the classwork. She asked me questions, both about schoolwork and about myself. We started to get to know each other. Then we realized our fathers knew each other too. That pretty much sealed the deal, like we’d been fated to meet on this far shore, fated to reenact the traditional sort of village courtship that began with two young people discovering each other and then continued through long periods of suffering and uncertainty as the families weighed in on the suitability of the relationship. Our families both came from Tebnine, though her father had moved her family away when I was very young and Zainab had not yet even been born. Zainab herself had hardly ever visited Tebnine, spending all her childhood in Beirut. She knew of Tebnine though. It formed part of her identity, just as it formed part of mine. That’s a big thing about Lebanon: no matter where you are in the world, your village, your Lebanese home, is part of you. Tebnine was part of me, and it was part of her in just that way.
Eventually I told Zainab I liked her, and I started walking her home with her little brother Farouk as our chaperone. We kept our growing fondness for one another pretty much secret for a while, being traditionally minded like that. I would walk her most of the way before she got to the corner of her street, and then I’d say good-bye as her brother walked ahead. I never turned that corner or took her any closer to her house during those first weeks and months. Secrecy like that probably fooled no one, but it kept the aunts and moms and relatives from beginning any sort of more official dialogue. It kept the pressure off all of us, and as kids, we thought we were the first ever to have such a secret crush.
Zainab and I stayed together throughout the whole of my senior year. A few times I would skip class and pick her up. We’d go have lunch, nothing too forward, still keeping it pretty traditional and being chicken about doing much else. After a few repetitions of this though, I upped the ante. Showing off, I “borrowed” my dad’s car, that red ’77 Eldorado. Usually I drove a ’71 Maverick, which was nothing more than a souped-up Pinto, definitely nothing to impress the love of my life. But the big new Eldorado, boy, that thing clocked in about twenty feet long. When we skipped class that day, we went for lunch like usual but then drove around a bit too. With my palms sweaty on the wheel, I parked behind the Dearborn Civic Center. No other cars were in the lot. No one came in or out of the civic center. Everyone else still sat in their stupid classes.
Zainab was too shy to try much, so I planted the first kiss on her cheek, very tenderly. She sprang back, a little surprised, maybe a little offended even. Perhaps I had read things the wrong way? Perhaps she wasn’t interested in me as anything more than a friend?
I sat in my seat, very still, and noticed that my hand was starting to shake. I wondered if I had made a big mistake. I wondered if I had botched everything. I imagined Zainab’s father storming over to see my father, having a confrontation about his daughter’s honor. I imagined myself grounded forever, probably with a bruised backside. But then Zainab put all those fears to rest. She leaned over and took my hand in hers. She pulled it toward her, and I was like putty, boneless, spineless, falling all over myself as I curved my torso toward her over the central console again. She put my hand on her shoulder. She took my other hand and guided it around her lower back. And then she lifted her chin and brought her lips close to mine so that all I had to do was move another inch before we met lip to lip in that first, magical, real kiss.
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br /> This, to me, was America.
This was the John Cougar Mellencamp “Jack and Diane” fairy tale, but done up with me, Haisam Farran, as Jack, and Zainab as Diane. It didn’t have quite the same ring, our names in place of those American names, but it worked. It worked perfectly for me. I bought into it just like I bought into the silver windbreaker, just like I bought into the eagle, globe, and anchor, just like I bought into family vacations in the conversion van, lunchbreak movies, and free milk in paper cartons.
Perhaps the one thing that should have given me pause was my parents’ new restaurant, successful as it was. Still, it served mostly Lebanese, Palestinians, and Yemenis, the people who had come here to work hard on the assembly lines at Ford, Chrysler, and GM. I should have thought about this restaurant and why it was successful when the first one, in East Dearborn, wasn’t. As a teenager, it’s not easy to see one’s life from the outside, to understand how Dearborn could be both fully American and also something different, a separate and intermediary place with segregation and discrimination woven into its societal fabric. Back then I wasn’t aware of the way that so many other ethnicities and nationalities (like we Arabs) had come here—the Irish, Africans, Italians, Latinos of every sort—and how they had gone through the same slow process of discrimination and then, to varying degrees, assimilation. I could not see such things then; nor could I foresee how, even in my lifetime, the acceptance and slow process of merging into America would receive a terrible jolt, one that I would help combat as a Marine.