The New Yorker:

How the American Dream can become an American nightmare.

By Jamil Jan Kochai

Our Agha sprayed chemicals. Every workday, he woke up at five in the morning, put on his rubber boots and TruGreen ChemLawn uniform, and drove out to the wealthiest neighborhoods in greater Sacramento to spray and fertilize lawns. At home, in the evenings, Agha would devour enormous plates of rice and meat, and then he would lie back on the couch with a hot cup of tea, exhausted and aching from twelve hours of handling pesticide tanks. Sometimes my two little brothers and I would sit on the carpet a few feet away and just watch him. It was as if our father was always burning—even then, I had the sense that he was dying for us—but the fires that scorched his body fed our bellies and kept us warm.

Thick-necked, wide-shouldered, and incredibly strong for his size, Agha often said that he was not born for labor (he was a poet, at heart) but that his body seemed to be built to withstand great suffering. He began to work on his farm in Logar at about six years old, cutting wheat and hauling vegetables and chopping branches. Neighbors used to ask Agha’s old father, a widely respected nomad named Hajji Alo, why he worked his little son so hard. “If I don’t teach him how to suffer now,” Hajji Alo had proclaimed, “he won’t learn how to withstand suffering in the future.” Twelve years later, on the jagged cliffs of the Kirana Hills, Agha would remember his father’s proclamation as he spent sixteen-hour days lifting and hauling heaps of gigantic stones. Having fled Soviet Army massacres in Logar, he had arrived in Pakistan, hungry and destitute, with a large family to feed. He felt grateful to his father then. If Agha hadn’t been hardened from childhood, he would never have survived those brutal months in the hills. Agha went on to labor all across the Earth. He crushed stones in Punjab. He built streets in Iran. He repaired machines in Alabama. He fixed pipes in San Francisco. He dragged our little family from one land to the next, keeping us fed and clothed, in search of a job that would finally allow him to settle down and live out his American Dream.

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