San Jose
San Jose, California, became the central American home for Amir and Baba after they fled war-torn Afghanistan. For Baba, the city was a place of mourning and diminished status; for Amir, it was a place to bury his memories and build a future. It was in San Jose that Amir graduated from high school, attended junior college and later San Jose State University, began his first novel, and confronted the legal system in a failed attempt to adopt Sohrab. The city thus serves as the primary stage for the second half of Amir's life, encompassing his education, marriage, career, and the beginning of his quest for redemption.
Baba's Decline and Amir's New Beginning in San Jose
Baba loved the idea of America but living in it gave him an ulcer. In San Jose, he worked as an assistant at a gas station off Washington Boulevard, pulling twelve-hour shifts pumping gas, running the register, changing oil, and washing windshields. Amir would bring him lunch and find him with drawn, pale face under bright fluorescent lights, his eyes watering from fatigue. The same day he was hired, Baba and Amir went to their eligibility officer in San Jose, Mrs. Dobbins, an overweight black woman with twinkling eyes and a dimpled smile who sang in church. Baba dropped a stack of food stamps on her desk, refusing "free money" and declaring, "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work." Mrs. Dobbins, who had been doing the job for fifteen years, said nobody had ever done that before. For Amir, America was a place to bury his memories; for Baba, a place to mourn his. When Baba became ill, Amir took him to the county hospital in San Jose, where a sallow, puffy-eyed second-year resident found a spot on Baba's right lung and referred him to the pulmonary clinic.
Education and Literary Career
Amir graduated from high school in the summer of 1983 at the age of twenty, by far the oldest senior tossing his mortarboard on the football field. He enrolled in junior college classes that fall, majoring in English with a focus on creative writing, a choice that Baba questioned, asking how he would earn money while waiting to "get good and get discovered." Amir later transferred to San Jose State University, where he declared an English major and began his first novel while working a security job at a furniture warehouse in Sunnyvale. Soraya joined him at San Jose State the following year, enrolling in the teaching track against her father's wishes. Amir's first novel, a father-son story set in Kabul, was written mostly on the typewriter General Taheri had given him. He sent query letters to a dozen agencies and was stunned when a New York agency requested the completed manuscript. Six weeks later, a man named Martin Greenwalt offered to represent him, and a month after that, Amir learned he was going to be a published novelist.
The Legal Struggle for Sohrab
After rescuing Sohrab from Kabul, Amir brought him to the American embassy in Islamabad, where Raymond Andrews, a short fellow with small hands and perfectly trimmed nails, told him bluntly to "give it up." Andrews explained that the petition faced significant obstacles: Sohrab was not legally an orphan without death certificates for his parents, Afghanistan had no American embassy to cooperate, and the INS strongly discouraged U.S. citizens from attempting to adopt Afghan children. When Amir asked if Andrews had children, the man was silent. The secretary later revealed that Andrews's daughter had committed suicide. Andrews advised Amir to get a good immigration lawyer and recommended Omar Faisal, who worked in Islamabad. Faisal, a chubby, dark man with dimpled cheeks and a gap-toothed smile who had grown up in Berkeley and attended Woodstock, confirmed the difficulty, explaining that in the aftermath of disaster, it was always hard to ascertain that a child was an orphan, and that Islamic law, Shari'a, did not recognize adoption. He told Amir that his best shot might be to relinquish Sohrab to an orphanage in Pakistan and then file an orphan petition, but Amir refused, having promised Sohrab he would not send him back to an orphanage. Ultimately, it was Soraya's uncle Sharif, who worked for the INS, who found a way to get Sohrab a humanitarian visa, allowing him to enter the United States.
