Afghan Americans Straddling 2 Cultures Share Hopes, Fears

They went to school here. They work here. Their lives are here. Like everyone else, they are scared Americans. They are also scared Afghans.

“I feel like I am two people,” said Aaron Zaheer, a pediatrician in Oceanside. “I can feel all of the disappointment and fear of an American--and I have seen war, so the fear is real for me.

“On the other hand,” he said, “I see the Afghan people’s perspective. I know how scared they are. Both Iran and Pakistan have sealed off their borders. It’s like cooking in a caldron and someone seals off the top. You cook for a while.”

Straddling two cultures often means reconciling two parts of who you are. The pull becomes painful when your homeland is Afghanistan--now seen as a harbor for terrorists and a potential enemy of the United States.

Zaheer, 32, has two first names. Sometimes he is Aaron, his Anglicized name. Sometimes he is Haroon.

“If it’s a larger gathering and I just want to be introduced and not go through the chore of explaining, I say Aaron,” he said.

When people want to know Haroon, he will explain he was born in Afghanistan. He will describe how at age 14 he fled the war-ravaged country by hiding in an apple truck to cross the border into Pakistan.

Most have no idea he is from Afghanistan.

“If you look at me or talk to me, I don’t look Afghan,” Zaheer said. He mostly speaks Spanish with his young patients and their parents at his clinic.

His wife, Jennifer, 28, has dark hair and dark eyes but describes herself as “white bread American.” She met her husband when they were undergraduates at UC Santa Barbara.

“Because of his looks and my looks, we’re often mistaken for the same” ethnicity, said Jennifer, who grew up in the Inland Empire. “I’ve had family and friends say, ‘Don’t go out this week.’ ”

Zaheer spends his free time availing himself of a luxury that comes only with living in a democratic country: He writes letters to public officials.

He has written Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista) five times. He wrote former President Bill Clinton 10 times--”not just about Afghanistan but other foreign-policy matters”--and he’s already written President Bush five times.

“Rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden,” he says. “Go into Afghanistan, but don’t bomb it, don’t destroy any bridges. . . . It’s so on the edge of mass starvation that any other thing adding to it would cause hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

In San Diego, 16-year-old Sophia Nassir goes to public school all week, then spends half of Saturday in an Afghan mosque, learning to write Persian, or Farsi, one of several languages spoken in Afghanistan.

Her parents, Airan and Faiaz, left Afghanistan two decades ago. They met and married in Texas. Since then, they have owned a string of small businesses, including a sandwich shop, gas station, liquor store and dry cleaners in the United States. The latest is a grocery store specializing in Middle Eastern foods called the Kabul Market.

“My mom, when she’s in her teenage mood, will speak in English,” Sophia said. “When she’s speaking like she’s my mother and I should be respecting her, she’ll speak in Farsi.”

Sophia, the oldest of four Nassir children, all born in the United States, said her heritage wasn’t much of an issue last week at school. Her close friends have always known she is of Afghan descent. Other students don’t bother asking. Almost everyone knows she is Muslim, but it’s not a big deal.

“When you’re a little kid, you’re interested in all kinds of things,” she said. “Kids would ask me, ‘What are you?’ ‘Afghan.’ ‘Oh, my God, cool.’ They said, ‘What religion are you? Oh, you go to the mosque? What’s that like?’ Then we would get really competitive with each other: ‘I’m Muslim.’ ‘I’m Catholic.’ ‘Mine’s better.’ ‘Uh-uh, mine’s better.’ ”

Sophia said she doesn’t mind being different. “I would tell them the stories of my prophets,” she said. “It was kind of like culture time for my friends.”

At Baxter Bioscience, the Glendale pharmaceutical company where Maryam Lodin works, few people knew that she was born in Afghanistan or that she is Muslim. She does not wear the traditional head covering.

“I may not cover myself,” said the 26-year-old Cal State Northridge graduate on a day when she’s wearing black slacks and a sweater, “but I pray five times a day. I don’t go to clubs. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs.”

But last week, everyone found out she was Afghan-born.

“Going upstairs, downstairs, I had people approaching me, asking, ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Do you need anything?’ ‘We don’t blame you,’ ” said Lodin, who works as a quality auditor. “This man came up to me and held onto my hand and then,” she opens her handbag and pulls out a little bag of candy, “he handed me M&Ms.;”

Her boss at the company, which specializes in plasma products, called her in and asked her to let him know if anyone said anything untoward to her. “So many people came up to me. The M&M; thing really shocked me,” she said, seeming more stunned by colleagues’ acts of kindness than by isolated moments of rudeness. And there have been a couple.

“One guy said to me last week, ‘I can’t wait until we bomb your country.’ ” She shrugged. “It’s freedom of speech. They can say whatever they want.”

Lodin has always had a keen sense of being both American and Afghan. She was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, but was raised in the United States from age 5. She became a citizen last year and remains a strict Muslim who doesn’t date, expects to have an arranged marriage and prods her 5-year-old niece to speak Pushtu, one of Afghanistan’s languages.

Last year, Lodin spent three months in Afghanistan, where her family still owns land. She didn’t even tell her mother at first. “She thought I was going to Pakistan for a wedding,” Lodin said with a laugh.

Like most everyone here, Lodin couldn’t tear herself away from TV news coverage and is horrified by the attack. “No Muslim would carry out an act like this,” she said. “Nowhere in the Koran does it say for a Muslim to kill like this. They will burn in eternity.”

Unlike many, Lodin is not quick to blame either the Taliban or Osama bin Laden for what happened Sept. 11.

“It’s a shame our mosque asked us to vote for Bush,” she said, adding in reference to the Taliban leaders, “He’s condemning these people he’s never met.”

Her plan had been to return to Afghanistan in December. With the country on the verge of war, she doesn’t know if she will go. “I need to keep in touch with my country,” she said. “With the education I’ve gotten here, I need to go back and use it to rebuild the country.”

Lodin seems to know that sounds too idealistic. “Or a small part of it,” she said. “Maybe start a school. I want to start something new.”