Photograph by Whitney Curtis
If you ask immigrants and refugees when they came to St. Louis, you won’t get a vague “spring of ’80” sort of answer. You’ll get the date and time the plane landed. That’s when their life changed, irrevocably. Some of those changes chafe—usually it’s the bland frozen food, frosty individualism, tricky fine-print marketing and rat-race pace. Some sting—the casual divorces here, children’s abrupt departures from the nest, St. Louis’ chiaroscuro of racism and nonchalance about homelessness. But the city itself tends to grow on newcomers: What looked like an old, drab city compared to the flash of L.A.’s movie sets often emerges as a fun, startlingly diverse, storied and livable new home.
It almost doesn’t matter where people come from; once they’re settled, the American sense of space starts to capture their imagination. First it’s just the ability to zoom someplace on a big highway with no military checkpoints or bribes. Then it’s the quiet that lets you hear yourself think. People stretch out, relax a little; they move to bigger homes; their lives expand. Space starts to mean something more: a chance to live your life outside a traditional society’s tight constraints, jump a few rungs on the ladder, create a new life for your kids, let your dreams play out. It’s room for new ideas and a wild mix of cultures. It’s room to grow.
Judith
August 17, 1995
Growing up on the island of St. Maarten, in the Dutch Antilles, Judith (who asked that her last name not be used) learned to pay more attention to her dreams than to the physical world she woke up to. “In the dream world, you are connected with the universe,” she explains, her soft voice blending hints of French, Dutch, Spanish and English. “When you wake up, the dream has already happened; it’s a fait accompli. There are no real English words for it, just patois or Creole terms, but it’s almost like the dream world is real and this one isn’t.”
The gentle haze of that dream world was already lifting when Judith left the island for college; electricity had interrupted with TV and the Internet, and people were predicting American Idol winners instead of reading tea leaves. “I came to Illinois because we got WGN at home on pirate satellite, and like most people in the Caribbean, I was a die-hard Bulls fan,” she says with a grin.
Eager to escape her island’s confines, Judith managed to win a scholarship to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. In summer 1995, she flew to the U.S., making sure she landed in Chicago for the Bulls’ sake. “My first night in the U.S., I had my first Big Mac and watched Harry Caray on TV,” she recalls. “I flew to St. Louis the next morning and took a taxi to campus. The endless miles of seemingly flat land were disorienting—I kept expecting to see the sea and the horizon. The air felt very heavy; it was hotter than it was in the tropics, and everything stuck to my skin.” The passing trucks terrified her: “I had not ever encountered semis on a highway—or a highway, for that matter. When a radio announcer casually stated how many people were going to die over a holiday weekend, I was stunned—it was a large chunk of many islands’ populations. I assumed the people driving were not aware of the statistics, because why would they drive, knowing the dangers?”
She met her roommates, two girls from rural areas who were convinced campus housing was punishing them with a black roommate. They seemed to think islanders were savages. One wanted to know if they lived in mud huts. The other announced, “You can’t be Dutch. You’re black.”
“You’re American,” Judith pointed out. “That’s not a color.”
“I’m German-American,” the girl corrected.
“Sehr gut, sprechen sie Deutsch auch?” Judith replied, using her Dutch to shape the German.
“What?” the girl asked, irritated. “I don’t speak German. My great-grandfather came from Germany, so I’m pure German.”
Judith sighs, remembering her confusion at “someone claiming a people and a culture and not knowing anything about them.”
East St. Louis puzzled her, too, until she realized that “here the minorities are colors; back home it’s cultures, and there are shantytowns of Haitians. When I moved to Belleville in 2003, I got called ‘colored’ twice in a month. In St. Louis, especially the city, a lot of white people try too hard to be who they’re not, and they become part of other cultures but sometimes in the worst ways. A white dude will start speaking slang to me, and I won’t even know what he’s talking about, and he’ll get offended at me because I’m not black enough. I try to explain that my English comes from books and TV; it’s not my native language.” Then there are the wannabe Huxtables, she adds: “They didn’t grow up like blacks in the suburbs, who conjugate—but that’s what they’re trying to be. And they don’t want to hang with me because I’m too black.”
Freshman year, stressed by all the uncrossable racial lines, Judith gained 25 pounds eating Southern fried chicken, pasta and apple pie. “I couldn’t believe the blandness—no heavy seasonings, no marinating—but I loved the high-calorie comfort foods!” Cold cereal threw her: “Where I’m from, cereal is always warm and sweet, and we ate it as a sweet before bed. Because so many people in the Caribbean are lactose-intolerant, cold milk is used as a safe, inexpensive laxative!”
What she does love is the freedom here, the ability to consciously bring your dreams into reality.
“The U.S. is so big, there’s a little spot for everybody,” she says. “I love that a 6-foot-3 transgendered drag queen can twirl a baton down Euclid and no one bats an eyelash. Back home he would have been dragged away and locked up.
“There, the downside to the dream is all the stuff they don’t acknowledge,” she says slowly. “Depression has to be ‘cleansed.’
“I don’t believe everything from home or here,” she concludes. “I’m certainly not a full St. Maartener anymore. I’d spent a lot of time traveling around the U.S., and when I went home, it felt claustrophobic. You can only go so far on St. Maarten before you fall off a cliff.”
Jailall Jairam
November 14, 2002
For a kid in a poor family in Guyana, the world was supposed to be pretty small. But Jailall Jairam was bent on going to college. He was managing a gas station and taking engineering courses when he met—and kept running into—a Peace Corps volunteer in his village. Their long, intense conversations struck sparks they hadn’t expected. When she left, he came to the United States to visit her. Then she came back to Guyana …
Now they’re both here, married, with a baby boy. Jairam earned his college degree in construction management, and he’s a construction inspector for the city of Lake St. Louis.
“I crossed the Missouri River coming over here tonight,” he remarks, looking up from lacing his shoes for his weekly guys-after-work soccer game in University City. “That silty water color always reminds me of home. We lived right in front of the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s brown there because of the silt coming out of the Amazon rain forest.”
What wasn’t familiar, in his first days here, was the highway: “Hundreds of vehicles going one way, hundreds of vehicles going the other way! I kept looking out the window, overwhelmed. This place was huge. And the trees and buildings were almost close to what we see on TV back home. We had Saved by the Bell”—he laughs, embarrassed—“and CNN, some ESPN, Friends. Little House on the Prairie—I remember that one.
“The immediate thing I loved was sitting down and talking to people and hearing their viewpoints,” he says, sobering. “People could disagree and still be good friends. I love that about this country. Back home you had to be careful about what you said.”
Seasons thrilled his athletic soul: “In Guyana the trees are green pretty much all the time. Here, you see the colors change, and you have three months for each activity; you can expect what is coming next. The year goes faster.”
So does the clock: “I get up, get my shower and get dressed. I try to be on time always. At home it didn’t really matter; I would go home and take a nap and take two or three hours for lunch. Here you have to move fast. At first it was difficult; now I kind of like it.”
Socially, he says, “people here are very to the point. And they really need their space, physically and emotionally. You are expected to go to college and get your own apartment, even if you live just an hour away from your parents!
“When I first came, I went to a bar with a couple of new friends,” he recalls. “Back home I would buy a round of beer. Here my friends just bought one beer for themselves. For me that’s kind of a rude thing to do.” Now if he’s drinking, say, with workmates, Jairam might not buy rounds either. But with friends he still buys the round, no matter how tight money is.
“I’m not too much worried about the economy,” he says with a shrug. “We grew up in a system where, yes, you have to deal with it, right? What are you going to do, stay home because gas is expensive?” He gazes out at the soccer field, a vast space manicured for grade-school kids to frolic. “Over here you have an abundance of opportunity. You can become what you want to become. Back home you’d have to be in a wealthy family or have political connections.”
He sneezes three times in a row, rocking the bleachers. His new allergies are killing him. “What I like about St. Louis is the diversity,” he says, waving away the ragweed. “My wife is a white American; we have a little boy; he is obviously a mixed kid. We like raising him in a society where you have all these different people coming together. We moved here, and within two or three months I ended up playing cricket with some Indians from India.”
By the same token, he says, “Every day I feel stronger as a Guyanese. When you are in the country, you don’t feel as patriotic, not until you are out of the country.”
So what would he say to the nativists’ taunt, “So go back home!”?
“I wouldn’t say anything to them,” he answers quietly. “Those are just people who have a small view of the world.”
He loves grilling, loves St. Louis barbecue, sorely misses his chicken curry and his dal puri. These do not strike him as contradictions. “Another thing I like is when you go to Busch Stadium, you have that big hot dog and that big beer. And I love the Arch—I even researched the math. I proposed to my wife on a snowy day inside the Arch.”
Could he, in Thomas Wolfe’s sense, go home again?
“I went back in 2005 for a visit, and it was hard,” he says slowly. “I stayed with my parents, and early in the morning they were up, and the noise! The traffic, and the kids running up and down … If I went back for longer?” He pauses, squinting out at the field. “I would miss having my own space.”
Kiet Dinh
March 30, 1993
Kiet Dinh’s father was one of the boat people who left Vietnam in desperation after the war ended. He’d served in the air force—on the wrong side—and would never have been allowed to come here officially. “He left in the middle of the night,” Dinh says. “Only my mom, aunt and grandparents knew.”
Dinh learned that his father, after two prior, failed attempts, had set out once again to cross the ocean in an old, battered wooden boat. “There were 50 people in that boat with my father,” Dinh says. “Everybody sat knee to chest all day long. The engine died a few days into the trip, and they just floated. Five days later they got picked up by an oil rig and brought to the closest island, which was Malaysia.”
A Catholic organization sponsored his father to come to St. Louis. Back in Saigon, Dinh’s mother received a stack of paperwork for family reunification. “I don’t remember if I was excited or not,” admits Dinh, then 15. “We did always have the impression that America was a much better place. Why, I don’t really know.”
He remembers arriving: “The air smelled weird, cold. It was flurry snow the next day. I didn’t understand a lot of things—like the word ‘restroom.’ We were taught ‘WC.’ A restroom, I figured, was where you’d lie down. The first drink I had in this country was a Busch beer. My dad saw me take it from the refrigerator and said, ‘It’s OK in the home, but over here, you have to be 21 to drink in public.’ Back in Vietnam, if you can handle it, you drink it.”
He was struck first by the spaciousness of homes here. “A house 600 to 800 square feet would hold 10 or 12 people at home. But I did think it was a bit strange that people always had their doors closed. Back in Vietnam, doors are often opened during the day.”
His initial delight at the racial mix twisted when black students at Roosevelt High started to heckle him. After Dinh’s brother got suspended for getting into a fight trying to defend him, Ron Klutho, who worked with immigrants at St. Pius V Catholic Church, asked Dinh how he’d feel about going to a private school. “I didn’t even know what that was. He arranged for me to meet the principal of St. Mary’s High School, and I asked my dad to sign the paper, and Ron found a sponsor family to pay for my tuition. That’s when I first learned about charity. If people came to us, we always helped—but we waited for the person to come to our door, and we knew them. Here people just signed themselves up to help a stranger.”
Klutho also helped Dinh get a job caddying at Westborough Country Club, giving him a quick golf lesson on the front porch. “We never had country clubs,” Dinh explains. “There was one golf course during the war, but they tore it down.” When his dad dropped him off (at 6 a.m., with promises to be back around 8 or 9 p.m., after work, to pick him up), Dinh’s first nervous thought was, “My class is no match.” Then he started meeting the golfers. “They took me under their wing—I learned how to make jokes from them! That job changed my life. I learned there to apply for the Evans Scholarship, and I went to Mizzou on a full ride.”
Now comptroller and IT manager for a small company, Dinh has an MBA with a marketing emphasis. And he feels thoroughly at home.
“Over there, people really keep to themselves. Private matters are private matters. Over here, I’m not afraid to tell you things,” he says, launching into a list of comparisons that feels almost confessional. “The way we communicated was more abrupt, almost rude: ‘What do you want?’ Here, a waiter might say, ‘Would you like this?’ There’s a little more smoothness. And everything is drivable here. Over there, often there were no roads, so we used to ride motorcycles. Here you just drive to Chicago, carefree; over there, a road trip meant you had to pack food, because you might not find a restaurant.
“St. Louis is much smaller now,” he observes. “At first it seemed huge—so much room, wide streets, a ton of people. To drive to the Galleria from Tower Grove was a long, long drive. Now it’d be like walking to the corner. I love the Hill, Imo’s pizza, the uniqueness of each neighborhood, like Soulard and how its history was French ... All those things are a part of me now; I’m part of the history, because I’m here.”
Only a few points of friction remain—like the concept of sharing. “If a group of Vietnamese friends eat together, one person will pick up the check, and everyone will chip in. We would never ask a waiter to split it up. I hate splitting checks. Individualism is still something I cannot get into. My roommates will ask, ‘Can I eat your apple?’ I say, ‘That’s why it’s there, don’t ask permission, just use it, maybe buy a new one when you go to the store next time.’”
Dinh shrugs. In every other way he feels thoroughly American. “Now I sign myself up to help people all the time,” he says with a grin. He dates women without thinking about their race (“I’m an American now; she’s just another person”) and ignores what used to feel like class barriers.
He might even join a country club.
Firas Al-Takrouri
July 28, 1998
As a kid, Firas Al-Takrouri ran and played on the streets of Hebron in the West Bank, paying no attention to the conflict raging through the Palestinian territories. Until high school. By that age, “you can feel it more,” he says. “And by the time I got to Bethlehem University, I was working on getting to the U.S.” He’d studied English at boarding school, and when he ran into an American volunteer, she promised to sponsor him to study in Missouri. “I got into a one-year vocational school,” he says. “I wanted a four-year degree in computers, but I thought, ‘I’ll figure that out later.’”
When he landed, the first thing he noticed was, “You can move freely. Back home, if you want to cross from Jordan to Jericho five minutes away, you need a day.”
Speaking freely was almost as easy. “I didn’t answer political questions for the first two years,” he admits. “September 11 had a lot of effect, and being in St. Joe, Mo., the only one that looks like this … It wasn’t bad—but I do have to be careful.”
He can speak his mind about scientific subjects, though—even if they conflict with religion. “Education here allows a lot to happen,” he observes. “But things are catching up there; it might not be as offensive now to talk about abortion or stem cells or cloning.”
Al-Takrouri wound up finishing his coveted degree in computer science and computer information systems at Western Missouri State University in St. Joseph. He focused his job search on the coasts; he’d been once to St. Louis, to see the Arch, and the rain had fallen on his back in icy sheets, and the city had looked old and gray. “I judged the place in a day and a half,” he admits.
When a software company offered him a job here, though, he looked again—with fresh eyes. “The first thing I wanted to do was explore,” he says. “I’d be working in St. Charles, but people told me to get an apartment across the bridge so in the morning I’d be against traffic.” A lady rattled off a long list of nice neighborhoods: “It was like Chinese, but I did catch the ‘across the bridge’ thing, and I did catch ‘Creve Coeur.’”
He settled in easily. “When I was in St. Joe, if I wanted anything Middle Eastern, I would have had to go to Kansas City to get it. Here you just walk across the street to Pita Plus.” St. Louis was a little bit trafficky compared to the suburbs near St. Joe, and he soon realized that it was offensive to honk. “Back home, traffic’s mainly in the morning, but people honk all the time!” He starts to mention other differences, then catches himself. “You just can’t compare. The whole country is like the smallest state in the U.S.—and with no highways. My family, when they came to visit, loved all the green and empty space. My parents walked all the way around Creve Coeur Lake, and they are old!
“Our family values are a lot stronger than they are here,” he says abruptly. “My brothers live with me, and if my parents were here, they would definitely live with me. Here, the child is 18 and for some reason they leave? I don’t know what’s going on there. It’s surprising, right? We don’t have that. I don’t want my son to turn 18 and say, ‘See ya, Dad.’ That would be hurtful. I’m 28, but my dad could come and kick my ass if I did something wrong.”
Much as he misses the tight mesh of family loyalties, he’s exhilarated by the breadth of ideas. “Schools in my country are a lot stricter, and what is available in both places is taught on a deeper level there, but there’s so much more available here.” He watched spellbound while NASA landed the Phoenix on Mars. He loves the wildcats at the Zoo: “If they are hiding, I will wait for them.”
Al-Takrouri and his wife now have a baby boy. “Everything I did at 18 or 19, he’s going to do at 3 or 4,” he says, his tone eager and rueful. “He’s going to be exposed to a lot more, but not see as much conflict.”
He smiles at the casualness of American life, the “Hey, how are you?” that allows people to step into each other’s lives so easily. “Over there, we have to respect women’s space,” he explains. “You cannot just walk into a room full of women. Here even the language is more open. There you show a lot of special respect for elderly people.”
He closes his eyes, remembering the sensory pleasures of the Hebron markets. “You smell fresh vegetables, people barbecuing, spices, fresh fish and meats. Here you hardly smell anything, except for meat that’s been there a week or so.”
He’ll go back someday soon to visit, he says. “But I don’t think I’ll just be able to sit still and be in family gatherings all the time. I’d need a lot more activity than that.”
Dženana Mruckovski
August 9, 1994
Bruno Mruckovski
December 12, 1994
The Bosnian civil war had already broken out in cities around Kotor Varoš, but for 17-year-old Dženana Hadžiselimovic, it wasn’t real until the morning of her dentist’s appointment. “I needed to get there at 8 o’clock, and the city overnight had been occupied. The Catholic church next door was surrounded by soldiers, and there were tanks in the street. I was like, ‘OK, so when am I going to be able to go to the dentist?’” Her family waited, expecting the government to change—but after Dženana’s older brother was drafted into forced labor, they knew they had to leave as soon as possible.
Her parents paid money and worked their way up the list to leave. “We were forced to sign over all our belongings, the apartment, everything we had. They told us we could bring no pictures; they don’t want you to have any history. The day we left was probably the best day of our lives. But my mother kissed the door of our apartment, saying, ‘What about my dishes? I’m never going to have all that again.’ She had worked all her life for the things she was leaving behind.”
After a year and a half in Croatia, the Hadžiselimovi´cs flew to St. Louis. “My mom freaked out the night we arrived and said, ‘Where did I bring my kids?’” Dženana recalls. “But for me it was ‘I’m coming to America!’ A new continent. A new beginning.”
She reeled from the smell when they arrived at their friends’ house, on Chippewa and California. “Hot asphalt,” she explains. “It was almost 100 degrees. They’d warned us it was humid, but my definition of humidity was not this! Still, I couldn’t wait to get up the next morning and just walk.” She waits a beat. “Then I realized people don’t walk. There was nobody in the street, just a few kind of suspicious-looking people. We couldn’t find a corner grocery store. But then the people we did meet were really friendly, and that struck me as odd. Everybody greeted you like they knew you. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘this is nice …’”
She found the National supermarket at Chippewa and Grand “overwhelming in a good way,” its abundance a promise that everything would be OK. “The amount of electricity and lights!” she exclaims.
“We lived almost for a year without any electricity after the war started,” recalls the man who’s now her husband, Bruno Mruckovski. Born in Sarajevo, he came to St. Louis by way of Serbia, Belgrade, Budapest and Vienna. He arrived at Christmastime, and he remembers smelling cinnamon and hearing happy carols in the mall. After years as a refugee, it seemed almost surreal.
Bruno and his brother had spent the first year of the war hiding in their parents’ apartment—until soldiers knocked on the door. They dug trenches for a month, then managed to get out with illegally printed forms. “Our parents stayed,” he says, voice heavy. “They believed—they still believe—that you can’t start life over. My father said, ‘What am I going to do without my screwdriver?’”
Dženana’s mother, on the other hand, brightened as soon as she went to a couple of South City yard sales and bought dishes and furniture. “There were no garage sales at home; they never throw away anything,” Dženana says.
“It’s so much harder to earn all of that over there,” Bruno adds.
“America for us was an icon,” he continues. “I grew up with Western culture, Beverly Hills, 90210. When I came, my aunt and uncle lived in South County, and to us it was luxury.” He worked first at a restaurant, then making pipe fittings, then selling furniture. When his English smoothed, he found a job as a mortgage loan officer, and his brother went into real estate.
By then he’d gotten used to many things: the silence (“Even two blocks from Kingshighway, you couldn’t hear cars, only birds”); the danger (“I remember someone telling me, ‘Don’t walk on the street; either you will look suspicious, or someone will kill you’”); the fact that people drive everywhere instead of walking and stopping to chat with their neighbors; and the way “you have to read everything twice before you commit to anything. It’s all packaged up really nicely, and then you get something you didn’t want, like French onion flavoring on your potato chips.
“Six months after I got here,” he remembers, still amused, “the phone rings, and this guy says he’s with the police fraternal order. In our country, if the police call, that’s trouble. I’m thinking something happened to my brother. They ask for money, and I say, ‘OK, no problem!’ Now I say, ‘Why are you calling me at 9 p.m.?’”
He hasn’t gotten used to the frequency of divorce, the tensions of racism or the lack of time with family—although he admits he’s the first violator in that category. “I’m so busy all the time! I wish the day lasted another 10 hours. People here have so many opportunities, and if I have an opportunity to either make money or entertain myself, I’ll just do it. These 13 years passed like—” He snaps his fingers.
Then his voice softens. “I do wish people were more neighborly. In Bosnia your neighbor was really more than your relative; he was the closest person you had. Homes stayed in families, people didn’t move much, and your door was always open to your neighbor; you had coffee with him. You don’t have to talk about serious stuff—lawn mowers, soccer. Here everybody is busy. I had a condo for two years, and I didn’t even know my neighbors’ names.”
The sense of abundance that struck both Bruno and Dženana when they arrived grew complicated as they watched Americans demand instant gratification—and tumble into debt. The instant friendliness that puzzled and warmed them now, in honesty, feels a little superficial at times; it so rarely translates into deeper conversations or enduring friendships. The sense of promise darkened when they realized how easily a single health crisis could destroy years of financial success, then brightened as they began to fulfill their dreams, enjoy a few luxuries, make a life for their two boys.
America’s iconic freedom and opportunity might be bittersweet, but they were real. And powerfully addictive.
Hamdi Hashi
September 21, 1995
When Hamdi Hashi was 10, the world in which she’d belonged so effortlessly turned strange and threatening. She heard people fighting over who should be president of Somalia—and then they closed her school and the madrasah where she did Islamic studies—and people started flooding from Mogadishu, where the war had started, into her hometown of Kismayo. “I remember my parents saying, ‘We need to get out of here,’” she says, voice tightening. “My mom’s younger sister, who had six kids, was missing, and my mom would go to the bus stop and train stop every day to check for her. She finally came. I remember counting the kids and thinking, ‘Why are they taking our beds?’”
Hashi’s family made it to a refugee camp in Mombasa, Kenya, but the local tribe resented the Somali newcomers. “We lived in mud houses. They burned down the whole camp more than once, and the Somali people kept rebuilding it.” After two years, her family was allowed to come to the States. “It was the trip of a lifetime,” she says. “At the Kenyan airport, everybody was smiling and hugging, and we were all dressed up, not like here, where you wear your jeans and T-shirt.”
They arrived—eight girls, two boys and Hashi’s mom—in New York, then flew to Arlington, Va., to stay with her cousin. “It was summer, we came at night, and the neighborhood was so quiet and green and nice. We stayed with him three months. Because of the time difference, we would wake up in the middle of the night, eat ice cream, watch TV and talk!”
Toward the end of that three-month idyll, practicality took hold. Hashi’s mother had heard that life was cheaper in St. Louis and that Missouri was the nicest state to raise kids and had good universities. “So we took the bus here,” Hashi says. “And we were not scared. In Kenya you have to bribe the bus driver, and whenever you see the police, you are afraid. Here, you can get on a bus, and no one will stop you and ask for a bribe or ask for your documents or divide the family members.”
She remembers looking around St. Louis, seeing the big redbrick warehouses and homes and thinking, “This is an old city.” They rented a big house that didn’t have the heat turned on, so her teeth chattered at night. “We saw African-Americans but not Somalis; we see ourselves as African, so we would say, ‘Oh, this is the black American.’”
Her first weeks at Bevo-Long Middle School were rough. “The kids were really, really mean,” she says. “I wear the hijab, and they would pull my scarf and ask me if I had hair, and I didn’t know enough English to tell them, ‘This is my religion, and I do have hair!’” After a rough couple of months, two more Somali girls arrived. “Now we were a troupe: Don’t touch us! And after six months I was able to speak English and tell them why I was wearing this. I learned how to say everything I needed.
“The smell I remember is a fall smell, cold air, burning leaves. It was a new smell, a smell of peace. But there were too many car noises, too many sirens. Back home, when a siren goes off, something really bad happened. My mom used to wake up; after the war loud noises bothered her. It took years to get used to firecrackers and car brakes.”
Food was the other hardship: “Fruit tasted sugarless, without flavor. Back home, maybe there is not enough food, but everything is fresh, the meat and fruit, so whenever you cook, it tastes really good. Here everything is frozen; everything is a year old.”
Frosty air slapped her skin raw—“I’m always cold,” she says, hugging herself on an 85-degree day—but oh, how she loved the snow. “The first time, we were like, ‘Oh my God, come out and see what happened last night!’ Everywhere was white. My friend said, ‘Oh my God, the U.S. has so much money, they even put snow on the ground!’”
Hashi’s doing graduate social work, focusing on refugees who’ve suffered trauma. She hates how segregated St. Louis is, with racism substituting for the tribalism she experienced in Somalia, and an economic divide on top of it. “The poor people live on one side of the city; once you pass Clayton, you can see the difference. At home, it wasn’t like, ‘Don’t go to this place because these people live there.’ Even though people had war and they were fighting, they would not let their neighbors go to sleep hungry.
“I miss being able to belong to a country,” she admits suddenly. “I miss my language. Even though I am a U.S. citizen and a taxpayer and here 13 years, people still ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ And you know, this is the only home I have now. Somali people look at me and say, ‘Oh my God, you are American! Your Somali doesn’t even sound right!’ So if I go back home, they too would say, ‘Where are you from?’”
She shrugs off the sadness. “I’m going to the Ozarks soon! And I love the lions and the cheetahs at the Zoo. My mom used to tell us stories about lions when we were little, but I’d never seen one until I came here. In high school they used to ask me, and I’d say, ‘Oh yes, I had a cheetah in my back yard. I used to play with it.’” She tilts her head back and laughs.
St. Louis doesn’t strike her as old and fusty anymore. She spends hours studying at the South Grand Bread Co. “They have free Internet connection so I bring my laptop,” she explains. “And my friends and I try new restaurants, and I walk in Carondelet Park and work out at the gym.” Asked if any indigenous rituals appeal to her, she says, “Oh, I love the Ted Drewes. And I love the Cardinals. I went to their Super Bowl game, you know, the world champion? Me and my friends were watching on the TV, and they said, ‘Oh, let’s go downtown,’ and after seven innings they opened the doors, so we saw the last hit of the game. The whole time I was hiding: ‘Oh my God, my mom’s going to see me!’ ’Cause it was late at night. And then the next day my brother was like, ‘Did you even know we won the game last night?’ And I said”—a slow smile spreads across her face—“‘Yeah, I know.’”
