The Adventures of a Pakistani in Texas

A young woman from Karachi doesn’t discover how intense Islam can be…until moving to Texas.

Illustrations by Laurel Lynn Leake

My first real memory of the United States is that of a three-story-tall Christmas tree in the middle of the ice rink of a Houston-area mall. It's the blasphemous image that I'll always associate with my family's move to America from Karachi, Pakistan, in December of 1999. I was eleven years old and the first few days of the move are a blur of spaghetti junctions, what I then thought of as bone-chilling cold, and a fascination with fast food restaurants. But the moment I spotted the tree is crystallized in my mind. It was the most spectacular thing I had ever seen.

The truth is, I wasn't sure that I actually wanted to live in the land of great opportunity that my parents claimed America would be. Instead, I spent the first few days in a country I'd only ever seen in the movies in a kind of muted awe. Though my parents tried to get me excited about the new Honda Odyssey they bought and the fact that I'd have my own bedroom, I wandered around our house in…