How well do you know Canada?');"> How well do you know Canada? It really is a wonderland, this Canada, where only the roller-coaster rides are death-defying, where rumbling Russian tanks never shatter the dull quiet of Maple's still-treeless streets.
So this is our life, says 66-year-old Khan Soroor, an actor, translator, journalist and poet who might have been called the family patriarch back in Kabul but in a Canadian subdivision has to settle for the more challenging and ambiguous role of father. And when he sums up the life, the new life, that the Soroors have made for themselves in this New World, he doesn't start with the number of houses his children have bought or the jobs they've attained, the education they acquired against all the odds or their numerous artistic accomplishments. No, what he emphasizes first of all is that highly reassuring trait of our national character, a quality that makes us the envy of much of the rest of world even as it sometimes drives our more dynamic and risk-seeking leaders to despair.
We are safe, Mr. The Soroors know the value of safety, just as much they could teach any Canadian CEO about the true meaning of risk. It seems a long way off as I move from house to house in Maple, talking with family members about their roundabout 25-year journey, sipping endless cups of tea and nibbling on kebabs or cardamom-scented kofta meatballs to honour the ancient Afghan compulsion for hospitality.
But the memory of what drove the Soroors from their once-comfortable life in Kabul is still fresh. The children were in danger, Mr. Soroor says as his wife, Mazida, looks away with a sadness that evokes her days as a famous Afghan stage actress.
During the night, the would pay a visit and say, Give up your boys to come with us and fight the Russians. And then during the day, the pro-Russian Afghan troops would take the young boys away. There are six Soroor children, ranging in age from 21 to 44.
The two oldest sons, Wais and Walid, were prime targets of the military recruiters, who were increasingly desperate for cannon fodder as the guerrilla war dragged on. In those days, their father remembers, the soldiers would round up young boys and tell them to roll up their trousers. If they saw hair on their legs, they'd make them go off to fight.
Never to be heard from again, in many cases. That children had to fight in a war is bad enough, and what made it worse was the fact that there was little to choose between dying for the desperate Marxist puppet regime that had replaced the pro-Western monarchy or disappearing to the mountains to join Islamist rebels who were far from being the freedom fighters of CIA lore. But it's the arbitrary everydayness of the threat, the future-destroying nature of civil war, that seems chilling so many years later when I catch up with Wais Soroor in his hard-won suburban peace.
I was a medical student back home, he says as his young daughter Sara picks out Beethoven's on the basement piano. I was young and focused on going far in life, aiming to be a heart surgeon. And then our lives dramatically changed.
I remember waiting at a bus stop, on my way to an important anatomy exam, and then the army rounded us up by force, hundreds of us, to be volunteers for the war. As a medical student who might prove useful down the line, Wais managed to escape the military press gangs. His brother Walid, now 40, disappeared without a trace one day while playing volleyball with his friends, and got to return home only because an officer recognized his family name and knew his parents' work as actors.
That same respect, unfortunately, made them officially ineligible to leave the country artists, like doctors, were considered servants of the state. The family tried to weather the wartime chaos as best they could. The third son, Waheed, now 35, remembers competing with his friends at the age of 9 to collect spent bullet shells and watching with fascination as the Russian helicopters bombed rebel outposts in the mountains surrounding Kabul.
But anxiety was a constant: Russian tanks would gun down anyone caught on the streets after the 10 p.m. These family stories took place at a time when I was hauling my son through the crowds at his first Toronto Blue Jay game or trying not to worry when my daughter took a spill at her first riding lesson.
I listen and wonder what I would have thought as a parent in similar circumstances or, indeed, as a child and what I would have achieved if I had done as the Soroors and decided to quit my life and start over as a refugee. Could I have succeeded, as complacent and quintessentially Canadian as I am? All the bribes, the faked passports, the crooked friends in high places, the threats of imprisonment or even death, the dashed hopes, the family separations (Khan didn't see his wife and daughters for two years), the human smugglers who could or couldn't be trusted, the longing for an unknown future that almost certainly would be worse than the life that I was born to.
When I first met the Soroors 20 years ago, my answer was a definite no. The only thing that has changed since then is their success in this country I still can't quite believe what it takes to become a proud Canadian when your starting point is the hopelessness of a far-off war rather than my own 1950s suburban idyll. My patriotic pride is more a vicarious thing, something I find less in my own relationship with the uncertain notion of Canada and all those Maple-Leafed symbols determined to turn into clich s than in the all-too-real experiences I can persuade these people to share.
I first encountered the Soroors in 1987, long before they had made their way to the orderly houses of Maple, when all eight of them were living near us in a two-bedroom apartment above a noisy Latin restaurant on Toronto's busy St. Our meeting came from one of those happy accidents that life sometimes doles out just to keep you believing in fate's better side. My family and I had recently come down in the world, or so we thought, having moved into a neighbourhood more suitable to our meagre incomes after years of house-sitting for my mother in a comfortable part of WASP Toronto.
My son's highly multicultural Grade 1 class was a study in chaos, and when my wife volunteered to help out by coaching children on the class computer, she met a chatterbox named Wajma Soroor. Six-year-old Wajma, a recent graduate of the school's English-as-a-second-language program who had arrived in Canada with her parents just months before, adopted my quiet son, became pals with my wife and soon accepted an invitation to lunch. You were the first Canadians to invite me into their home, she told me at a downtown Toronto Starbucks, her preferred habitat far from Maple's more traditional family values.
It had never occurred to me a child refugee would fix such simple occasions so firmly in her memory. In any case, we were pretty sure we were the ones experiencing something special for the first time: This tiny native of Kabul, where the fierce Russians were only just starting to extricate themselves and make way for the much fiercer Taliban, won our hearts by turning up in her best formal wear, a rhinestone-decked Michael Jackson shirt, calling us Uncle and Aunt in the intimate Afghan children's style, and then advising my wife as she busied herself with the cooking that our household cats were far too lazy. In Afghanistan, she said solemnly, we have working cats who do all the chores.
Was this a story her older sister Waheeda made up to soothe her at bedtime, to give her an imaginary history so much better than the real thing? Wajma, it turned out, was barely 3 when she had been smuggled by donkey into Pakistan with her mother and sister, two years after her father and three older brothers had escaped to India and left them as hostages to fortune. When she was a baby, I learned recently, her mother had been taken to the police station for interrogation about her husband's disappearance, while a neighbour cared for Wajma without knowing what would happen next.
When we decided to take Wajma on a family road trip she, if anyone, could liven up our regular visits to my wife's grandmother's nursing home I went round to her apartment to ask for her parents' permission, thinking that recently arrived Afghans might expect this sort of Old World courtesy. Looking back, I'm hugely impressed by the hospitality and goodwill I received from complete strangers there was even an impromptu concert after the cardamom tea and biscuits and extensive questions about my small family and my non-eventful life. But back then I was completely disheartened, not just for Wajma but for her entire family her actor father, sorting mail on the overnight shift at Canada Post; her brother, the aspiring heart surgeon, who was now rising through the ranks at a Harvey's restaurant; her teenaged brother and sister, who had dropped out of high school after a few brief months of adolescent normality to help cover the family's growing expenses; her mother, who had just had brain surgery and was severely depressed and who wouldn't be in the circumstances?
All I could think of in those days, Khan said, remembering his early struggles and the brave front the family showed to visitors like me was, What will happen to us?' I felt the same way about the Soroors, working all those hours in all those low-paying jobs just to get by. I worried in particular for Wajma, who seemed even at 6 to be the kind of girl who could do anything if the odds started to tilt in her favour.
And then we lost her. She disappeared from our school, and the family left the neighbourhood. When I reconnected with them, too many years later, I discovered what had happened so suddenly: They had been offered public housing after waiting out the compulsory year.
Life started getting better, Khan told me, the exact opposite of what I expect to hear when someone starts talking about public housing especially when the area they moved to, a location familiar to TV crime reporters and media commentators ready to denounce the dangers of fatherless black families, was viewed by them as a step up from my neighbourhood. For a large immigrant family striving to keep spending down, government-subsidized accommodation was salvation, the only way for the Soroors to start getting out of the poverty trap I had envisioned for them. Dreams and realities There is a model of immigration we all want to believe in that says simply: Work hard and you can achieve anything.
The corollary of that, if you're willing to be suitably cold and analytical, is that immigrants are more willing than the rest of us to work harder and longer to get ahead. Not that they have a choice, of course, since their lives depend on it. As Canadians, we have a strong interest in believing that things will turn out fine look at the Italians, we're inclined to say, and then exaggerate the speed and ease with which a group travels from grinding poverty in Calabrian villages to granite countertops in deluxe suburban kitchens.
But now, after my fact-finding tour of Maple where the sign on the vacant lot next to Waheed Soroor's house reads, Make your dreams come true today I understand how much it takes to make the truth begin to match your dreams. Wais Soroor may be the oldest brother and therefore a second father in a large immigrant family but he was not the first member of his clan chosen to come to Canada. That was Walid, who describes himself as the black sheep in the family according to his father, he was sent here because his good looks and easy charm were getting him into trouble in India.
A previous attempt to immigrate legally to Canada hadn't succeeded the family was rejected because of Mazida's heart problems and an attempt to smuggle the boys into Germany also failed disastrously, with much loss of money. So in 1983, handsome Walid was sent into Montreal at the age of 17, posing as a Swiss national named Koch, with a fake passport, and carrying a guitar to look more like what the family imagined was a typical tourist. I got cold feet the moment I landed, Walid says.
I called my dad, crying, and said, I want to go back.' Family friends in Montreal helped him cope for the first six months, before he moved to Toronto. But the dream that he would send funds to the family, and sponsor their passage to Canada, didn't seem to have much chance of coming true.
I'd never worked in my life. Now, I was moving boxes around a textile factory, everything was fast, people were ordering me around. It was a real workout, man.
His commitment was noted and he earned a promotion, but not enough money was finding its way back to India. So in the next year Wais was dispatched, sent to Vancouver at the age of 22 simply because that's where his Indian agent had connections. With evident sincerity, he made a persuasive case for refugee status I remember the lady officer was very firm, but I witnessed a kindness in her eyes.
I had a belief that, whatever the outcome, I was not a criminal. I said that I was a young student who wanted to find a future in this great country. Immigration gave him money and put him in touch with local Afghan associations.
But because his English was poor, the only work he could find was inserting ad supplements into newspapers. After six months, he had made enough money to join his brother in Toronto while finding time to study English by reading the newspapers and forcing myself to look up all the words I didn't know in the dictionary. There are two versions of what happened when he met up with his younger brother: According to Walid, I said, You're the older brother, you take over, I'm going to school.
' According to Wais, it went more like this: It's my duty as the elder brother to take care of you, and take responsibility for our expenses. You're not made for factory work. But make me a promise that you'll go and make something of yourself.
It sounds to me more like something you would hear in the movies, but Wais still possesses that all-knowing older-brother oratorical style, to the constant admiration and occasional exasperation of his younger siblings Wajma, who is 18 years younger and a product of Canada much more than of Afghanistan, complains that no one will listen to her longings for greater independence ( What kind of outgoing 26-year-old wants to live in nuclear-family Maple? ) even as her brother is intent on advising her on the need to act modestly within the Afghan community. I'm just trying to educate a generation that never experienced Afghanistan so they can make a better judgment, he says with the kind of thoughtfulness that often goes unappreciated by the young.
In any case, the Soroors' fortunes began to turn when Wais devoted himself to the family cause. On a day when there wasn't even money for bus tickets to be found in the brothers' basement apartment, he walked 15 kilometres to a job interview and got hired as a dishwasher on the spot. It was this kind of determination that enabled him to bring the remainder of his family to Canada in 1987 when we first met them while working his way up in the Cara Corp.
, where he started by peeling potatoes at a prep kitchen and now is the co-owner of a Swiss Chalet in the Toronto financial district. His goal is to open Canadian-style restaurants in Kabul and Kandahar, which is a long way from his original dream of being a heart surgeon but still makes him feel like he's helping humanity the best he can. There's a potential for Afghanistan to go forward and get out of the present confusion, he says with the patience of someone who makes a point of phoning in his views to talk radio and trying to personalize this country's Afghan mission with his Canadian friends.
But peace and stability are not a short-term goal. It's a long and very twisted path and, in my opinion, the only way people can come together is for jobs to be created in Afghanistan. One of the things that interests me most about the immigrants who have befriended me is how many-sided they seem, in contrast with my minimalist all-Canadian life.
Some of this is survival you have to be adaptable and unafraid to take on challenges. But in part it may be that the younger generation, though pressed into doing work that will bring money and status sooner, still has a wish to pursue personal dreams. In the Soroor family, this versatility is even more exaggerated, because the powerful desire to achieve is improbably coupled with a genetic compulsion to be an artist.
Even in the family's difficult early years in Canada, they found time to put on a concert at the University of Toronto, where the children did their best Afghan version of the Von Trapp family, performing in front of a banner that read, Russian Tanks Have Broken Our Homes But Not Our Spirits. Which makes me realize that had I been Afghan, I never would have dreamed of dropping out of law school ( I owe it to my family, my community needs me ) but I still would have been a writer. And so, besides studying the latest regulations on food handling for his Swiss Chalet, Wais composes songs for his wife, Zohra, a famous Afghan singer under her stage name of Hangama.
One of their collaborations, , is a plaintive tribute to the suffering women of Afghanistan that she performed on a highly emotional visit to a Kabul women's shelter last year. Khan admits to struggling with the greater permissiveness of Canadian society when it came to raising his daughters. But he turned himself into a model Canadian multitasker in the workplace acting in films (he flashes a picture of himself with Sylvester Stallone); interpreting in the court system; teaching ESL students; writing a book about Afghan theatre; collaborating on the CBC radio drama series (a ground-level view of Canada's military effort in Afghanistan); lobbying on behalf of minority actors; and presenting daily newscasts about his homeland through his one-man company, Ariana Telephone News Service.
Walid's career as a wedding videographer got off to a bad start when he tried to film a bride from the altar, not something his Muslim traditions had prepared him for the priest ordered him to leave. Now, he boasts of his award-winning wedding narratives. But he has also toured the world as a musician and will return to play in Afghanistan this summer.
Waheed teaches chemistry at a Toronto high school and has co-written a report for the Ontario government on the mental-health problems of Afghan youth the more recent immigrants grew up in much harsher environments than the Soroors did, and have not made the transition to Canadian life nearly as confidently. He has also just released his second CD, a lively world-music blend recorded in his own studio, and was pleased to discover one of his songs was the first played on a Canadian Forces radio station aimed at young people in Kandahar. Waheeda, 37, the only member of the family not to live in Maple, qualified as a teacher before getting married and moving to Germany.
Kice, the youngest at 21, is a customer-service representative for American Express and hopes for a career in human resources while pursuing clubland fame as a rap artist. He also taught English to students in Afghanistan two years ago while visiting the family homeland he never knew he was born in India. And Wajma returned to York University after five years working for Rogers, aims to be a lawyer and recently worked as an actor and dialect coach in a Toronto production of the Tony Kushner play How well do you know Canada?
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