An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice

An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice

by Khizr Khan
An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice

An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice

by Khizr Khan

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Overview

This “moving [and] wonderful” memoir by the Muslim American Gold Star father, captivating DNC speaker, and 2022 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient is “a story about family and faith [that] can teach all of us what real American patriotism looks like” (The New York Times Book Review).
 
“[Khizr] Khan offers a valuable perspective as we continue to debate what kind of country we want to be.”—The Washington Post (Best Books of the Year)
 
Khizr Khan electrified viewers around the world when he took the stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. And when he offered to lend Donald Trump his own much-read and dog-eared pocket Constitution, his gesture perfectly encapsulated the feelings of millions.
 
In this urgent and timeless immigrant story, Khan shares the extraordinary, ordinary journey that led him to that moment: He was the oldest of ten children born to farmers in Pakistan. He was a university student who read the Declaration of Independence and was awestruck by what might be possible in life. He was a hopeful suitor, awkwardly but earnestly trying to win the heart of a woman far out of his league. He was a loving father who, having instilled in his children the ideals that enticed him and his wife to America, tragically lost his son, an Army captain, in the Iraq War. He was and is a patriot, and a fierce advocate for the values enshrined in the American system. 
 
An American Family shows us who Khizr Khan and millions of other American immigrants are, and why—especially in these tumultuous times—we must not be afraid to step forward for what we believe in when it matters most.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780399592508
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/24/2017
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 13 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

About The Author
Khizr Khan was born in 1950, the eldest of ten children, in rural Pakistan. He moved to the United States with his wife Ghazala, in 1980. The couple became American citizens and raised their three sons in Silver Spring, Maryland. Their middle son, U.S. army captain Humayun Khan, a graduate of the University of Virginia and its Army ROTC program, was killed in 2004 while stopping a suicide attack near Baqubah, Iraq. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Khizr Khan holds a BA degree from Punjab University, an LLB from Punjab University Law College, and an LLM from Harvard Law School. He is a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court; the Washington, D.C., State Bar; the New York State Bar; and the American Bar Association. The focus of Khan's legal practice is on complex civil litigation, electronic discovery, health privacy compliance law, and civil rights and veterans' rights advocacy. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022. He and Ghazala live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Shoeless in a Shaft of Sunlight

I carried a sheaf of papers almost as thick as my hand to the third floor of my dorm on New Campus, just across the canal from the academic buildings. My room was small and sparse, just a metal desk with a matching chair and a small electric fan to blow away a little of the Pakistani heat. It suited me. My clothes were tucked neatly into a closet, and my bed was a cotton mattress on the floor. There had been an iron bed frame, but it was too short for me, so out it went. Sleeping on the floor was better for my back, anyway.

I slipped off my shoes and dropped the pile on the desk. It landed with a flat, dull thump. There was no textbook for my course in Comparative Constitutions of the World, just this pile of unbound papers, curated by the professor and kept behind the counter at a cramped bookshop in the old Anarkali bazaar. It was the oldest marketplace in Lahore, a kaleidoscope of fruit stands and food carts and stalls that sold cloth and spices and produce and a thousand other goods, almost anything anyone might want to buy. The air was perfumed with cardamom and the smoky-­sweet tang of grilled meat that gradually curdled into a stink of horse dung and diesel and human sweat; and the alleys were crowded with rickshaws and taxis overflowing with passengers and packages. Horses pulled buggies and left droppings on the paths. Skinny men hauled large carts with unreasonably heavy loads. In the jittering splendor of Anarkali, I always noticed them, saw what poverty could force a meek man to do to earn a few rupees.

It’d taken me forty minutes by bus to get to the shop, then another forty back through the unrelenting traffic of Lahore. When I got to my room, a shaft of late afternoon sun slanted through the window.

Printed across the top page was constitution of the united states. Below that, deeper in the stack, were the constitutions of the Soviet Union, a fat ream of interminable articles and clauses, and of West Germany, slimmer, I would discover, but just as dull, as well as the Magna Carta. I hadn’t bothered skimming any of them as I rode the bus back through the potholed and rutted streets. It seemed too much trouble to be juggling pages of legalese while bouncing beside sweaty commuters. But now, standing alone at my desk with the kind of half-­bored curiosity one tends to feel in a burgeoning dusk, I turned the page.

The Constitution was not on the next one. Instead, the title on the second page was declaration of independence.

Those were curious words, the way they were arranged into an aggressive noun. I rolled them around in my head. To declare your independence. I declare my independence.

My spine tingled, straightened, a quick, involuntary spasm. I’d grasped, in that moment, a remarkable insight, a great and improbable truth I’d never conceived to be possible.

In January 1972, I was a college graduate, fluent in three languages and studying law. But I knew almost nothing of America. Very few of us at the University of the Punjab did. The little I did know I’d learned from movies with forgettable titles, and those mostly involved cowboys. I’d studied none of the history or politics. I had no concept of independence as something that could be declared or demanded. If you have lived half of your life under martial law and the rest in a swirl of political chaos, Western ideals aren’t readily in your orbit. The idea that people could simply announce they were taking charge of their own affairs was so bold as to be unimaginable. It had never occurred to me.

There’s a long, elegant sentence at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence about how when people dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another, they owe mankind the courtesy of explaining why. Even ignorant of the specifics, I recognized that sentence for what it was: a polite introduction to treason, the codification of a rebellion.

We hold these truths to be self-­evident . . .

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, too intrigued to stop reading long enough to find my chair.

. . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . .

The thing is, those truths were not remotely self-­evident. Not to a young man in Pakistan and not to most people in the whole of human existence. It did not matter if men were created equal. From my own experiences, I knew that men were sorted into strongmen and dictators; rich men who didn’t need a ration card to buy a bag of sugar; desperate, determined men who were beaten by police in the street; and, mostly, masses of the poor and illiterate who struggled to survive from season to season. Rights were not unalienable. There were only tenuous privileges granted by capricious powers, which meant that they were not rights at all. There were no rights.

I don’t know how long I stood there, shoeless in that shaft of sunlight. The Declaration is not a long document, only thirteen hundred words, but I read conscientiously, deliberately, too enthralled to move. I’d never been so struck by a few sentences, ideas and ideals that, for a moment, removed me from where I was to where it was possible to be. Most Americans inherit the principles in those first paragraphs as a birthright. To many of them, the words are just dusty history, studied in a civics class, half-­forgotten. But to me, a student in Pakistan, they were radically charged—­as revolutionary as they’d been two centuries earlier when they were fixed to paper.

I kept reading, through a list of grievances. I had no idea who’d written the Declaration, nor against whom those grievances had been lodged. But thenI realized: That didn’t matter. This wasn’t only foreign history. This was our story, too. The story of Pakistan, the story of the subcontinent, the story, really, of all colonized peoples everywhere and in every era. This was my story and my parents’ story and my grandparents’ story before them.

Except the Americans apparently had figured out a different ending than we had.

I shook off a creeping numbness in my legs, pulled the Declaration from its place atop the pile, and sat down on my mattress on the floor, my back against the wall. I’d read it first with a student’s curiosity. Now I had to read it as a researcher on the cusp of a breakthrough, picking through the details, examining the clauses and phrases, fitting them into a precise and unified theory. To know the whole, I needed to understand each piece.

I was like a lonesome islander who’d found a bottle washed up on the beach, a secret script tucked inside that told of a wonderland, a fantastical place that existed, improbably and perhaps impossibly, far across the ocean. I needed to explore it, to set my mind deep into the words, let them absorb me, take me to a place so different from where I was.

“Okay, we have to go, Muazzam.”

My father smiled at me. Like everyone else, he called me by my middle name. He looked at his watch, a Camy on a gold band that wrapped around his wrist, but we all knew it was getting late in the day. The sky above my grandparents’ courtyard blushed with the first pinks of sunset. “The bus will come soon,” he said. “Time to pack up.”

In the morning, my grandfather had walked to the butcher to buy meat in his neighborhood in Gujranwala, a small industrial city an hour north of Lahore. Sometimes he would get a cut of goat and sometimes beef and sometimes, but not often because it was special and expensive, chicken. Sometimes, the butcher would whisper, “I won’t sell you meat today,” which meant the cuts in his shop were fatty or rancid or nearly so, and he would send my grandfather away with nothing. Today, my gran­dfather had bought goat.

My mother and my grandmother cooked in the kitchen at the back of my grandparents’ courtyard. There was rice, of course, and also a sweet rice because it was sort of a celebration, all of us together for the first time in a month. Vegetables were washed under water drawn from the kitchen pump. There was no refrigerator, and no electricity anyway, so what vegetables ended up on the table was a crafty calculus of what was available from the market and what would keep the longest. Turnips, potatoes, onions, and garlic could wait in a cool and dark corner until they sprouted eyes and new green shoots. Spinach would wilt in the summer heat and so had to be eaten immediately, but lettuce and cucumbers could survive a day or two.

I played with my brother and my sister on the packed clay of the courtyard. I was six years old, the first of my parents’ ten children. A new sibling came on a regular two-­year cycle. When I turned eight, there were four of us, three brothers and a sister; at ten, there was another brother, and so on until there were five brothers and five sisters. But then, when I was six, it was just the three of us.

We ate in the middle of the afternoon. My father waited to sit until his own father sat, and then waited some more until his mother told him to sit. He always deferred to his parents. If my grandmother had announced that the sky had turned green, he would have nodded and said, “Yes, Mother.” That was how a child treated his elders, with respect even if it meant that sort of silly deference.

Over dinner, the adults spoke mainly of the extended family, of who was marrying whom, where a cousin had moved and why, about a nephew who’d finished university and begun a professional career. The afternoon wore on until the bright azure above the courtyard dulled to dusty cobalt edged with pink and orange. My father looked at his watch and told us it was time to leave.

I had come to hate sunsets. Sunsets meant saying goodbye.

My mother fussed with my brother and sister, found their shoes, settled them. The rest of us sorted the leftover food, then stacked the plates in the center of a small tablecloth that we bound up by the corners and tied into a satchel I always insisted on carrying. Then the five of us went through the door from the courtyard to the street.

The bus stop was about a quarter of a mile away, and we walked along the side of the brick road. Dread settled into my stomach, and with every step it rose, burbling up through my chest, into my throat. I hated those walks.

The bus came. My father got on first, which he usually did, so he could survey the seats, who was sitting where, and, if he had to, ask someone to move so he could keep his family together. People were surprisingly accommodating to such a request. My brother and sister followed. My mother hugged me. “I love you, Muazzam,” she said. “We’ll see you soon.” She kissed me on the top of the head and climbed on the bus.

I ran to the other side, into the street. I always hoped they would sit on the street side, where passengers weren’t pressed against the windows to see what the sidewalk vendors were hawking, and I could watch them for a few moments while the bus idled and coughed exhaust into the evening air. I waved and smiled an oversized smile.

The bus pulled away and I ran to the other side of the street, where there was a small hill. I scrambled to the top. The road was long and flat, and from up there I could watch the bus shrink into the distance until it was only a tiny blur. My eyes teared. I started to cry, and then I sobbed, great, hyperventilating heaves, alone at the top of a hill in the dusk.

I lived with my grandparents, as I’d done for so long that I had no memory of having been sent there. There was no particular reason, other than my grandparents were retired and had no children at home and wanted my father’s firstborn to raise. I never asked why, never begged my mother to let me get on the bus, never pleaded to come home, because to do so would have been ungrateful and rude. Why shouldn’t I be content with this blessing? My grandparents didn’t have to divide their attention among three children. I was their only concern. Besides, one did not question his elders. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

They schooled me at home. They believed there were many varieties of children in the local schools, and they preferred I not associate with several of them—­the disobedient, the slothful, the unserious. When I got a little older and learned to play cricket, they would walk with me to the pitch and wait and watch, and when it was over, when the other boys went wherever it was boys went, they walked me home.

There were two neighbor boys who came to play, but not often. And I had pets for a while, two chickens that hatched from eggs my grandparents hid in the nests pigeons had burrowed into one of the mud walls of the house. When they were little and yellow and downy, I chased them around with a handful of feed and a bowl of water. When they were grown, with talons and beaks, they chased me around, hungry or maybe playing but scaring me onto my cot until my grandmother shooed them away. But other than that, and visits from my parents, it was mostly just my grandparents and me.

I did learn, though. My grandparents were friends with some local teachers who would give them the textbooks the other children were studying. History, civics, Islamic studies, mathematics. Books were my constant companions, my reliable friends. I read during the day and at night in the courtyard by the glow of the kerosene lamp, and when it was extinguished and I was supposed to be asleep, I would find a volume I’d hidden under my pillow and read in the moonlight.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Chapter 1 Shoeless in a Shaft of Sunlight 3

Chapter 2 Twenty-One Sparrows 32

Chapter 3 A Stick Becomes a Ney 57

Chapter 4 Tomorrow Will Be Better 77

Chapter 5 The Wonders of the DMV 113

Chapter 6 Already American 138

Chapter 7 No Man Is Complete Until His Education Is Complete 147

Chapter 8 Shining City 165

Chapter 9 Baba 188

Chapter 10 Always Be a River 222

Chapter 11 God Is Found Among the People 229

Afterword 265

Acknowledgments 269

A Reader's Guide 273

Reading Group Guide

The founding documents of the United States illustrate the importance and power of ideas, but they require the actions of men and women to make them real. If after finishing An American Family you’d like to enact change and embody the ideals that the Founding Fathers enshrined in our nation’s government, here are a few ways to demonstrate your own commitment to equality and justice.
Action Guide

Live by example. Tell people who are speaking up on behalf of others or whom you see being mistreated that you stand with them.

Read newspapers, watch the news, and be aware of multiple angles of a story. Form your own opinions, and judge news sources carefully before sharing stories with others.

Attend peaceful demonstrations on behalf of causes you believe in to show your support.

Vote in local as well as national elections. Put them on your calendar early and keep your registration up to date. Research candidates ahead of time.

If you see someone under verbal attack or facing insults based on their race, religion, or appearance, stand by them. Look up and attend bystander-­training courses in your area to learn what you can do to halt scenes of injustice.

Know and contact your representatives in Congress, in your state legislature, and in local government. Look online for public events and town halls with your representatives and make a point of attending. You’ll not only have a chance to get to know your representatives and voice your opinion, but you’ll learn about the concerns of your neighbors and build your community.

Consider running for office yourself, especially in local races.

Speak out when you see injustice, and engage those close to you in conversation and debate when their opinions are unjust. Listen to others’ opinions and experiences. Look for common ground between people.

Read the Constitution and keep a copy close, as
I do.

1. Discuss Khizr Khan’s relationship with his grandparents. What did he carry with him from his grandfather?

2. People often have ideas about what it means to be an immigrant or who immigrants are. Did An American Family change your view of immigration? Why or why not?

3. When Khizr began law school, what struck him about the Declaration of Independence? How did it compare to other founding documents? Have you ever had a strong reaction to reading the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution?

4. What drew Khizr and Ghazala together? What did you think about their relationship?

5. What were some of Khizr’s first observations of the United States? How did this early experience of the country influence his long-­term opinion of it? Did his first impression fit with how you see the country?

6. It’s no secret that many people complain about a visit to the DMV. Why was Khizr’s approach to it so different? Did it change your view of the DMV (or any other institutions)?

7. Did you immigrate to the United States, or have any of your family or friends done so? Discuss your (or their) experience of moving to a new country.

8. Do you think having a family influenced the Khans’ decision to stay in the United States? How did raising a family here seem different than it would have been in Pakistan? Can you imagine raising children in a country where you did not grow up?

9. Why did the Khans decide to pursue U.S. citizenship? What did they gain and sacrifice with this decision? Can you imagine making a similar choice?

10. What values did the Khans hope to instill in their sons? How did the boys reflect Khizr and Ghazala as they grew up and attended college? How was their experience of young adulthood different from Khizr’s and Ghazala’s?

11. How did Khizr and Ghazala choose to honor their son, Captain Humayun Khan? How did they find meaning in his death?

12. What drove Khizr to speak at the Democratic National Convention? What did you think of his decision to get involved in politics, and how did his politics evolve over time? What issues drive you to get involved (in politics or otherwise)?

13. If you’ve read the Constitution, do you have a favorite part or amendment? What do you like about it?

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