2015-09-06
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It was as exotic as anything Ms. Zheng and her friends in southeastern China had ever seen. It was a bright colour and marked with Italian words that “we didn’t know how to pronounce,” she said. “It was a fascinating glimpse of this other world.” As a girl, she took the lessons without enthusiasm. But she liked this object, mostly because none of her friends had one. As a teenager, she began pushing her parents to move to America. When Ms. Zheng was 17, her mother took her there, but soon moved back to China. In her new home, Ms. Zheng found comfort in this object. “For months, I couldn’t speak much. I’d play to fill the silent days,” she said. Today, she has a high-powered job at an international bank. At night, she plays the keyboard in her small Manhattan apartment. She rarely uses the object anymore, but keeps it just the same. “It’s one of the few things that hasn’t changed and has stayed with me all those years,” she said.
* Abdul Rafiq, 73 | Came from: Karachi, Pakistan |
Came in: 1992 Picture: ___
Everyone knows Mr. Rafiq as Babuji, and everyone knows Babuji for his paan. He makes the snack at his sidewalk stall in Midwood, a Brooklyn neighbourhood popular with Pakistanis. He wraps a betel-nut leaf around a signature mix of lime, cardamom, fennel seeds, shredded coconut and rose-petal preserves. He sells paan for $1 each, no extra charge for tobacco sprinkled on top. Mr. Rafiq has been making the same concoction since he was a teenager working a busy street in Karachi. And he has been using the same object to make it for nearly as long. Besides two bags of clothes, these objects were just about the only thing he took with him when he left Pakistan. “It’s what I know” he said, as he dribbled circles of rose-petal syrup acorss the leaf. He said he had never worked another job, a distinction that set him apart from his rival paan sellers further along Coney Island Avenue. He pointed to the objects and said, “These two are very dear to me.”
* Nancy Kahn, 32 | Came from: Dhaka, Bangladesh |
