"Here's How it Goes" By Sophie Lamb

Here’s how it goes:

A boy who grows up on dirt floors deep in the Alborz Mountains learns to read from a scrap of newspaper. Eventually, he’ll have a child—a girl—and raise her in a tin-roofed house at the base of Tochal. They’ll plant a pomegranate tree in the garden. Every day, in the shade of that pomegranate tree, he’ll tell the girl to never stop learning.

A Persian girl arrives in Philadelphia. She doesn’t know English. Her father grew up in a house of dirt floors. Her mother walked barefoot to school. She trades her country, language, and story for a pair of architecture textbooks and a graduation cap. One day she’ll tell her daughter that trade is everything.

Here’s how it goes:

It is easier to live without the grief of history. My mom stepped on Philadelphian concrete and began to peel it from her skin, turning it whiter, her accent lighter, her hair straighter. The clothes she bought in the corner store in downtown Tehran grew too small and donated; the zipper suitcase she brought across the Atlantic broke; Grandmother’s pearls were lost and polaroids taken alongside the Caspian sequestered in fabric photo album. It was survival. Bits peeled by snarky professors and sales clerks who spoke to her as though she were deaf. By men following her on the street. By bosses who rolled their eyes. By her own daughter—American stamped across her skin, hair, and voice—floating up into Old Glory-American sky.

Here’s how it goes:

“I wanted to be a lawyer,” She told me. New York City was still and thick with heat. We sat and drank water in the shade of a small oak on Columbia’s law bridge, Amsterdam Avenue crawling beneath us.

“My pedar used to say that all the time. Katiyune, go to United States and become a lawyer. You argue too much.” I knew, from all the times she told me before, she didn't know enough English or have enough money for anything but art school. “I thought maybe I go to art school and then law school. But I graduated broke. And what was I thinking—what law school takes an architect?” Her laughs spiraled up the sides of the glass law building, the red brick dorms, the sprawling limestone library, between avenue and oak. I would give everything to be where you are.

Here’s how it goes:

A curly-haired Canadian boy learns to fly a plane over the farmlands of Ontario. The sky is his escape; he leaves high school early and hunts that escape through Alberta, Texas, and New York. One day, he’ll tell his daughter that he would give anything to return to the ground and go to college.

Here’s how it goes:

I’m going to college in three months. My dad, raised on pig farm and wheat field, didn’t even make it to his senior prom. With nothing but a flying license and fervor for escape to the skies, he would climb telephone poles across northern Canada; when masters students in California first stewed a shimmering mass of networks and data into the internet, he was deep in Calgary winter building the cable that tied it together. I often think, had his dad never discovered alcohol—had he grown up in a city like Toronto or Vancouver—he would have been one of those students in a startup in Silicon Valley, living in an apartment overlooking the bay, huddled over the transcripts of our future.

Here’s how it goes:

A few weeks ago, we went wandering through Princeton’s Engineering campus. The day was cool and pallid, the surrounding buildings silent and weary with learning. He was on the hunt for free pens. We had already snagged a few from the library: a rotating Princeton Library branded highlighter and a skinny orange ballpoint pen marked with the motto in the service of humanity. “I want an electrical engineering one” He grins to me as we pass the brooding mathematics tower. “Maybe aerospace engineering if we get lucky.”

We were on the dinky, sunlight train back to Manhattan when he pulled the motley collection of free merch from his backpack. I laughed at him—not only was he successful at snagging four engineering pens and pencils, but he brought along with him a water bottle and a bright orange poncho. “God kiddo. You can do it. Go there, work for NASA, Google, change the world.”

Here’s how it goes:

This is the closest my dad has come to college. For a day, he can pretend—however grey-haired, however removed from his days in high school tucked between fields in northern Ontario—he could walk through Princeton's campus armed with pens and water bottles and fliers and pretend. Get close enough to taste it.

Here’s how it goes:

My mom never teaches me Farsi. My dad never shows me his childhood. I never meet my family. They unburden me from history; tear it away and replace it with textbooks and summer camp, with straight As and the destiny of college.