Thirteen years ago my girlfriend (now my wife) and I were at Kinko’s in southern California doing some copy work. We’re both teachers and we found ourselves at Kinko’s more often than we liked. While waiting for the job to get done, I spoke for a very long time to the manager, a young looking man named Robbie, originally from Pakistan.
He told me his life story. He currently worked 70 hours a week, combined with his Kinko’s manager job and his duties at an Indian restaurant.
Robbie explained that he could have stayed in Pakistan where he would have been rich. His father offered him his business. Life would be easy. He’d marry a local girl. He’d never have money worries.
But he didn’t want any of that. He wanted freedom. Specifically, he wanted American freedom. Dating a girl in Pakistan was like dating her whole family. One wrong step and you might offend a father, a brother, a cousin, and you’d be dead.
So he left Pakistan and landed in New York. He was amazed at how forward the beautiful women were.
I asked him why he worked so much. Because, he said, since moving to America he had been married and divorced six times. He had a lot of child support. His whole life was working. He no longer had time to get into trouble.
There was something appealing about Robbie, his optimism, his spirit for life. I don’t think he would have been happy conforming to prescriptive cultural code in his hometown. At the same time, I felt for a man who had to work all the time to feed the many children of his ex wives.
In life we often exchange one form of imprisonment for another.
I would be interested in the tales those six wives could tell about Robbie, something to the effect that you can take the boy out of Pakistan, but you can't take Pakistan out of the boy.
Posted by: Ed | February 20, 2013 at 08:01 PM