It was 9:00 p.m., just a half hour before Nazneen’s freshman formal at the University of Michigan, and she slowly began to realize that she was no longer at home. With her shoulder-length black hair flying in all directions, Nazneen, also known as Naz, scurried around her dorm room attempting to find her dressy clothes, which were still packed away in boxes. Just as she was about to step out of the dorm, her cell phone rang and displayed “mom” on the front cover. Suddenly Naz started worrying. “Did my mom find out I’m going out? Do you think I should’ve asked her or at least told her I wouldn’t be in my room?” she exclaimed to her roommate, who was not used to hearing Naz speak in a loud tone. It was Naz’s first time going out without getting permission from her parents.
Back in New Jersey, Naz would’ve had to ask her parents if she could go out and then sit through a process of questioning or, as Naz referred to it, “interrogation.” Throughout high school she went through an all-too-familiar routine of being asked who, what, when, where, why. Most of the time, even after all the questioning, she would not be allowed out. During each interrogation she would tell herself, “In a few years I’ll go to college, away from home, where I won’t have to deal with all their restrictions.”
Naz’s parents moved from India to the United States in 1986 and initially chose Queens, N.Y., as their home. According to a census-based profile released by the Asian American Federation of New York, New York’s Indian American population is the second-largest Asian American group in the city and is concentrated within Queens. Her parents chose Queens specifically because many of their family friends who had previously immigrated from India also had settled in Queens. Yet the way of life in Queens was quite different from that of India.
To her parents, Naz says, New York was a “melting pot of many different
ethnicities, cultures, traditions and ideas. It was all so overwhelming—the loud police sirens, tall apartment buildings, so many new faces.” Being in a new country, in a new culture, brought about a sense of caution to them. As a result Naz was restricted to the confines of her family’s two-bedroom apartment in Queens. She was not exposed to sports and didn’t “play out in the front yard or just hang out with friends” as many children her age did.
Queens, where she was born, is a fast-paced borough of people frantically rushing to get from one place to another with cars driving by and honking every other minute. But Naz recalls living there as a slow-paced, almost routine life.
“From the time I can remember my life in Queens was one big routine. I was dropped off at school and picked up, went home and did homework, read some books, watched a little TV if I finished my homework early enough,” she says with a small regretful sigh. “Oh yeah, Friday nights were spent in my mosque, along with any other night my parents were free.” While going through this routine, Naz didn’t really feel as if she was missing out on meeting people of different culture or participating in extracurricular activities or playing outside because this routine was all she knew.
Her parents learned that the school system in Edison, N.J., was considered to have a high ranking. Many of Edison’s schools have been ranked among the top 100 of elementary, middle and high schools in New Jersey. They moved to Edison in 1997.
The shift to New Jersey changed the way Naz thought. After interacting with school friends, learning of extracurricular activities and seeing them play in the front of her new apartment, she quickly began to realize how “overprotective” her parents were. Yet even after living an America for 11 years, and now no longer living in the city, the move to suburbia had almost no affect on them. They still guarded their “little girl.”
Naz questioned her parents about why she did not get to play outside whenever she wanted or go to the mall alone. The only response she received was that she had to concentrate on her education. Slowly, after daily quarrels with her parents, she occasionally was allowed to play outside supervised. Then came her slight involvement in extracurricular activities. She began playing soccer and played every Saturday for the next five years.
When Naz entered John P. Stevens High School in Edison, which ranks among the top 50 high schools in New Jersey, she saw her school friends having much more freedom than her. While playing soccer and sometimes playing outside were a lot compared to what Naz had in New York, in high school she saw her friends “going to the mall unsupervised, going to the movies and parties and just doing things as they pleased.”
Initially, during her first two years of high school, Naz, just as she had in middle school, argued with her parents. She went through lots of questioning and only occasionally went out with her friends. Thinking back Naz said, “Everyone around me was going out and having fun, and I kept wondering why not me?”
Eventually, Naz became “exhausted” with all the questioning. As much as she wanted to go out, she all the more abhorred the questioning and restrictions. There were times that she went through the long process of questioning only to get the response “Sorry, Naz, not this time.” She had finally had enough. She came to a conclusion during the end of her sophomore year. “No matter what, I just wouldn’t ask them anymore. It wasn’t worth it. I would be the model child that they wanted and persuade them to let me go far away to college, where I wouldn’t have to keep getting their permission.”
Her last two years of high school were spent obeying her parents yet secretly researching colleges that were away from home. Naz decided to pick and choose her battles, and she knew that going out a few times in high school was not worth the risk of ruining her chances of going away for college.
The time for Naz to make her case about leaving home and going far away for college had finally arrived. She was prepared. She had done her research to show her parents that the schools she had gotten into in New Jersey were not as good as the University of Michigan. She knew that education was her parent’s weak point. “They had always wanted the best education for me,” Naz recalls. But at the same time, having their “little girl,” their only child, go away from them was also a big concern. In the end, after much persuasion and many arguments, education took top priority. Naz could already smell the sweet aroma of imminent freedom.
Naz looked down at her phone, which still showed the words “mom” on the front cover. To pick up or not? After what seemed like an eternity standing in the hall of her dorm, Naz decided that tonight she would make her own decisions. She would let her mom leave a voicemail and call her back the next morning. She was a long way from home. As she started walking toward the formal, Naz hesitantly thought, “There’s no way they could know what I’m doing or try to control me from Jersey, right?”
The freedom that she did not have for 17 years was finally all in front of her. She had all the freedom she could ever ask for, at least for now, in college.
Ashraf Bhalwani is a Rutgers-Newark student. Posted January 2006.
