its geologic cauldron, headlights sparking, wide avenues cutting it into provinces, into eras, divides as clear as evening’s shadow from the mountains.
I never intended to come to Afghanistan. It’s odd how little we learn from experiences and choices, that we can wake up in Afghanistan and go about our days, forgetting that something of consequence had driven or lured us. Our paths of longing rarely lead where we expect. I used to think I had nothing in common with my mother, but eventually I realized that I shared her frustration, her inability to belong to the world she craved.
She wanted to be part of respectable society. She spoke rarely, so I never knew what set her alienation into motion. Solitude, I’d learned as a child, is not a static state in a singular element, but a movement, even a journey, that can go in as many directions as we imagine.
My mother was born in 1964, a reckless child of the economic boom that seemed to be lifting Japan toward global economic domination. I never met my grandparents. She raised me in a one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo and worked nights as a hostess. Her job seemed respectable when I read about it in magazines and discovered that a few hostesses had become celebrities of a sort. I was relieved to learn that hostesses weren’t prostitutes, though some people perceived them as such. Maybe her career explained the familial rupture, or maybe she’d found her job after a fall from grace. She did go on dates with certain clients, and on occasion she didn’t come home. I suspect she desired a few of her suitors. Their gifts piled up: fur coats, jewelry, chocolates, and perfume.
I was raised like an envoy back to the people she’d lost. She managed my outfits and schooling, helped me with my homework. As I got older, I realized how educated she was. That was the reason wealthy men wanted to relax in her company as she poured drinks and discussed politics and history. Even as her beauty faded, her mastery of the art of listening and polite conversation retained its value.
She never told me I was different. The Japanese are conditioned to find discordance, and it was from children at school that I learned I was haafu. I asked my mother what it meant, and she explained that, yes, my father was American. Who was he? Where was he? Could I find him? These were questions I asked for years. But she knew little. He’d grown up in California, lived in New York, and visited Tokyo. She’d been nineteen and had met him in a club. He was a wan naito sutando — a one-night stand.
As if to console me, she said that children with mixed blood were often stars in Japan, models and actors — symbols of beauty. When we walked in the street, she pointed to posters of women advertising clothes or shampoo, and at the magazine covers on the racks.
When I was nine, I realized that haafu was the Japanese pronunciation of half. I had made English my passion and felt a sense of ownership over the language. I was drawn to it before it was offered in school. I watched English TV, read magazines and eventually novels. I was soon better at speaking English than my teachers. But science, my mother told me, over and over, was life’s highest calling, and languages would not earn me the respect I deserved.
When I got a little older, I sensed another difference within me. There was a misalignment of desire that I couldn’t verbalize but felt in the way I gravitated toward girls, how talk of boys didn’t interest me. The girls ignored me, sensing they weren’t entering into an alliance for a mutual goal but were the goal themselves. Just as my mother wasn’t part of the society she craved — though she could evoke it to the satisfaction of powerful men in hostess bars — I saw my people in American novels and TV shows, and counted my days.
To please my mother, I excelled in science, through university and into a respectable job, synthesizing lab reports on DNA studies. One day I learned that she’d been writing letters to her parents for years, and one had finally been answered. They wanted to meet. We had a long tense dinner at which a gray-haired man with pouches below his eyes asked me about my work. My mother had two siblings whose photos were on the walls, and I learned about them and my successful cousins. Hearing my mother and grandparents speak, I realized what I should have long before — that I was her fall from grace, that the family’s last shared memories dated to her pregnancy.
After dinner, at her home, she wept, thanking me, and then I went back to the apartment I’d recently moved into. The next day I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t go to work. All my life I’d lived under the weight of something I was unable to name, an array of fears — of difference and failure — and now I saw that my life was invalid in my culture. My story — if it were to be told — was that of a mistake attempting redemption.
After a week, I accepted that I could no longer pretend. I slept and spoke to no one, and in the times when my mind cleared, I read American stories — of defiance and adventure for the sake of self-invention. Until then, my fate had been to fashion myself in an image established by a society under the domination of toad-like old men with teenage mistresses and three-thousand-dollar suits. I craved leaving behind the hypocrisy and setting out for a frontier where I could prove that my confused beginnings were the prologue to something great.
Of course, when I did cross the Pacific, to San Francisco, the place I found was no frontier. The America I’d composed in my brain was a country of the past: the memories or inventions of dead authors. I was frightened by the uncertainty before me and realized how much fear I’d been harboring, how much it had locked me into my previous life. Every decision now was laden with expectation and consequence, and yet I gradually realized that when I was making the decisions, selecting my challenges, the apprehension that had overshadowed my life became manageable.
Though I floated through my travels, my choices at each juncture encouraged me. Exploring the West Coast, I wrote travel pieces, mapping the area by its tourist venues, trendy hot-spots, and gentrified streets.
As my writing found an audience in Japan, I was offered assignments abroad. I composed testimonies to the luxury of a new generation of Gulf State hotels, or the splendor of parks in Africa and Asia. When an editor asked if I would go to Afghanistan, my dread seemed to erase me, and this compelled me to confront it — to let it purge me of myself.
I was hired to write about Bamiyan, one of Afghanistan’s safest provinces and the historic home of the Hazara people I resembled. When I arrived there, at an altitude of eight thousand feet, the spring air was cold and the trees barely budding. I visited cathedral-high niches in the cliffs, where the Taliban had dynamited the ancient towering Buddha statues, and I climbed to the crumbling mountaintop turrets of Shahr-e-Zohak, the red fort at the entrance to the Bamiyan valley. I visited Afghanistan’s first national park, Band-e-Amir, a chasm holding six sapphire lakes separated by natural travertine dams.
In the guesthouse, listening to journalists and NGO workers on R&R from Kabul tell stories, I felt a twinge of recognition, as if the characters from the novels I’d grown up reading had appeared in the flesh. What I found familiar wasn’t just their love of adventure — that is universal enough — but an obsession with testing boundaries and reinvention. They sounded excited by their own words — the experiences they described not finished but still having effect on them, like a catalyzed chemical process or an initiated life cycle.
A few days later, in Kabul, as I met more expats in cafés, bars, and hotels, my impression grew, a sense that they had stepped out of history’s shadow and knew it — that their thoughts and actions actually mattered. They seemed aware of their fears, capable of describing them, and yet able to survive here. I delayed my flight, found a room among expats, then a studio apartment, and my articles began edging away from the subject of travel.
For a year, as I navigated unease in my new environment, the dangers of daily life illuminated parts of my old self that I hated. The attack on the safe room forced me beyond a fear so old it was a current — a river I had always swam against, moving closer to its source. I found myself in a quiet, powerless space, where what was was: material, unmoved by my mind, unclouded by emotions and ideas. In the weeks after, tiny pieces of glass emerged from my body, from my knees, from my palms, from healing cuts I’d barely noticed.
In the dusk, as Kabul’s lights came on, I decided that I’d sufficiently tested my courage. I made my way down rainwater gullies or in the dirty patches of snow to keep from slipping, moving aside for a