9th Place Winner: Khan Shoieb

New York City

We are accelerating past 60 on the bridge, headed from the depths of Queens into Manhattan. The dusty meter is switched off, windows rolled down, wind raging through my hair. I am sitting in the front seat of a battered and archaic Ford Crown Victoria. The car is bright yellow. My father is driving, and I see fatigue in his eyes, but I am only eleven and thrilled finally to be tagging along. The cab smells of manufactured lilies from an aerosol can, always overdone and stuffy, and the engine drones on while I fiddle with the cold metal of the ashtray. Nestled in the grey leather of my father's taxi, I coyly peer out across the river at an ethereal city that has stolen my heart. Tonight, when Manhattan is doused in a steamy fog, the metropolis seems more and more distant as we drive closer. I fail to make out any of the skyscrapers through the impenetrable mist; instead, every few seconds, like the revolving beacon of a lighthouse, a few white flashes emerge from the soupy haze of the night, daring me to come forward.

My father is not a simple man, but a man who keeps it simple. Work hard, he says. Grab the opportunities that come to you. As I get older and we grow further apart, however, this seemingly clichéd counsel of his gradually contorts itself into an agonizing burden.

I learned his story in fragments from my mother. Refusing to heed the warnings back home, he immigrated to New York City at the age of twenty-three, leaving behind his widowed mother and a promising career as a journalist to try and give his children a better life. He settled in the city, but far from the "city" as I would come to know it, for Manhattan is not the origin of dreams, but only their destination. Instead he found a small tenement in Queens between the Spanish and the Greeks, and temporarily took up driving a taxi twelve hours a day while he raised his family and tried to reboot his career.

What was once "temporary" has become permanent and what was once an American Dream has become an Immigrant Reality.

I can recall very little from my early childhood with any clarity aside from a few moments with my father. I remember he used to work a double shift on Sundays and took Monday off to rest, so that every once in a while, if I was lucky enough and had behaved myself, he might reluctantly take me atop the Empire State Building. We would arrive just as the sun was setting. I was too young to have been able to see anything, so he would hoist me up high and let me clutch dearly to the diagonally crossed wiring before us. Far above the concrete streets, where ordinary hopes and dreams suddenly seemed trivial, I asked my father everything about New York. It was there, grasping that fence on the 86th floor, that I truly learned of my city, more from the sound of my father's voice than the actual words he spoke. And if I was patient enough, he would whisper to me in native tongue of his one reporting assignment in Casablanca and the day he started to dream of a world beyond his homeland, and in particular New York. The city, it seems has a way of simultaneously promising everything and nothing.

My father has never voiced a complaint about what has become of his fate in New York. But in stark contrast to our days atop the city – a time when more possibilities lay ahead for him – today I can sense the slightest tinge of regret in his voice. He has grown quieter as he has aged, perhaps from the strain of unforgiving work, but also perhaps because he has begun to think in hypotheticals. Whether he regrets his decision to come to New York, I will never know for sure, but one fact alone stands. My father never went back.

The words "work hard" warrant a different meaning when they come from someone who has sacrificed that much for you. The guilt continues to drive me apart from my father, probably because I am not the man he is. I can tell that he silently hopes to live out his American Dream vicariously through his children. I am scared to shoulder that kind of responsibility, to try and live out a glorious American Dream for my father, but too ashamed not perpetually to want to do it for him as well. His sacrifice, however burdening, will always serve as a powerful source of inspiration for me.

The days of me tagging along while my father drives his taxi and the two of us going atop the Empire State Building together are long gone, but whenever I think about what lies ahead, the memories are suddenly resuscitated. I cannot help but hope that one day for me, unlike my father, New York City stands as a symbol of all that I could do and not all that I couldn't.