"Muslim Hannah Montana"

My father asks me if I'm doing okay during our weekly phone call. I respond in English to his questions asked in Urdu. The phone call consists of many pauses and moments of silence. We both struggle to find commonalities and keep the conversation going.  Although few words are spoken, these calls do display how much we care for each other. The silence reflects how we both know that our different upbringings resulted in our lack of understanding for one another but that at the end of the day we are family. 

A picture of my father and me back in the day.

I often think about how easy it is for me to get along with almost every walk of life from different ages, ethnicities, races, and personality types. Yet, I find myself struggling to have a simple conversation with my parents. My entire family immigrated from Pakistan when I was one years old. Although we left the physical land, my parents never left behind the culture. The rigid standards expected from my siblings and I to uphold both Pakistani and Islamic values often clashes with our desire and sometime necessity to assimilate with American culture. It is hard to share the instances of my life with my parents because I fear upsetting them or getting criticized. 

If both my siblings and I as well as my parents took a little more time understanding each other, maybe these conversations would be easier. Comedic actor, John Cho, reflected on the lack of cultural understanding between himself and his parents after he received a lashing for referencing a sassy, yet harmless quote from a Judy Blume book to his South Korean parents. I have experienced similar culture clashing incidents with my parents. One of the more prominent culture clashes was trying to be a trendy high-schooler while also trying to remain modest from an Islamic standard. However, this found to be very difficult especially when my parents would find things like long athletic tights to be too revealing. Most of the trendy outfits at the time included cropped tops, ripped jeans, shorts, and other types of clothing my parents would never approve of. However, I really enjoyed these fashion trends and wanted to feel comfortable in my clothing. I would leave my house in an outfit my parents would approve of and change in my car into the outfit I actually wanted to wear. This behavior coined the term, "Muslim Hannah Montana" onto me from my friends. 

It never felt good to me that I essentially had to hide a part of myself to my parents but it was only to protect them. I believe that my family has come to a mutual agreement to keep some parts of our lives to ourselves while sharing other parts with each other. The types of things I'll share with my parents are anything involving, school, work, Islam, and some instances of my social interactions with others. I am okay with this limited kind of conversation, and they are as well. 

Some of my friends who didn't grow up with immigrant parents or aren't immigrants themselves, think that the relationship I have with my parents is a bit odd. However, in situations where people you love come from such different cultural backgrounds, you sometimes may need to adapt your habits and behavior around those individuals as a form of respect. This adjustment in behavior is geared towards respecting my parent's culture and to sustain peace in the household. I also resonate with certain aspects of the culture as well. As Sarah Smarsh described in her book, Heartland, she did not leave one world to enter another but rather held them both simultaneously. I believe I have had the same experience juggling the drastically different cultures from my immigrant household and growing up in America and I strive to maintain this balance.