Beirut, 2001
I am twenty-four years old when they amputate Baba’s foot. He will drag it halfway around the world for one more year, but for now he has no choice but to stop and convalesce, with me by his side.

The family apartment in Beirut has three bedrooms, ours flanked by two others. The one where my uncle, Amo Jamal, sleeps is on the left. He’s knocked out at noon, too much to drink the night before, the decades before. His liver will keep him supine, doused until it’s done with its daunting task of detoxification.

The one on the far right is where my grandmother, Teta Ibtihaj, lies staring at the ceiling. Her pasts are all catching up with her now, though she no longer wishes to remember. Lying in this haze thick as the smoke from that day when the tobacco fields turned to ash, she’s regressing to that time and place, wondering where she is and who I am when I check in on her. Thankfully her Alzheimer’s will protect her from one more year of great loss.

I am not paying tuition for you to read more stories.

The middle bedroom where Baba and I lie on two single beds is austere, or maybe it’s his austerity that is stripping the walls bare. There’s a cupboard, but the room is dim all around, and I no longer recall a window. Two plates of za‘tar manakeesh and sliced cucumbers arrive lacking their usual luster, or maybe it’s just me feeling blue. I eat while he reads the morning papers, then I bury my head in the papers, too. The South Lebanon Army has just collapsed and Hezbollah are advancing fast while Israel is withdrawing its troops from Lebanon six weeks before its July deadline. Lebanon’s faltering banking system. An op-ed about a country slipping and state failure. None of this is what catches my eye, though.

A year earlier my father was standing on a foot that was no longer breathing, and no one knew. I had just completed a degree in English & Comparative Literature and graduated top of my class. I told him I wanted to pursue my graduate studies.

In what?

In literature. Again?

No, a master’s degree.

He looked at me like he would a child pestering him about a toy in a toy shop.

I am not paying tuition for you to read more stories. What catches my eye now is an ad, a call for a scholarship and a chance to win a full ride at SOAS University of London. I broach the subject again, and he turns to face me. He’s unabashed by his debilitation, and his jaundiced eyes rimmed in red chill me.

You are not going anywhere.

But Baba, listen. I am a straight-A student. I’ll do—

No, you listen: You have three options. Either you go back to Cairo to live with your mother, come back with me to China, or stay here in Lebanon with Teta.

He reaches for his pack of Rothmans. I grab the lighter.

Please listen—my uncles, they’ve sent my cousins abroad to study. Maya is in drama school in New York City. And Zena she—

He tries to grab the lighter from my hand, but I get up, take a step back. He tries to get up too, but he can’t. His body looks more and more like the fossil of a dinosaur. His leg, now bandaged and propped on pillows, is missing five toes and the ball of the foot. He wants to walk and keep walking. He’s not built to stay in one place. Instead, he says,

And you want to be a whore like your cousins?

Shenzhen, 2000
Men from Bilad al-Sham use the word mara when referring to a woman. It is not a derogatory word in their culture, but in Egyptian, mara means whore.

It’s the year before the amputation, and I tag along behind Baba and his Palestinian client up the busy streets of Shenzhen feeling very much like a mara, though I’m halfway around the world, though I am nowhere near Egypt nor the Levant. Ever since the men met, they have closed ranks and left me out. Perhaps it’s because of my hair, my body. Perhaps it’s because of my breasts. Whatever it is, I am made to feel like dangerous cargo amongst these men, a discomfort.

It’s my second day in China and everything is novel, everything is a sensory overload, like I’ve tapped into an augmented reality. On my right, counterfeit designer merchandise is lined up along the sidewalk before storefronts decked with avant-garde streetwear: hip-hop inspired Chinese silhouettes, corsets embroidered with dragons and fish, anime and manga prints on vintage t-shirts. On my left, docks teem with freight ships and black smoke, heaving the moist odor of deep-fried chicken feet.

I want to interrupt, to tell him it’s hot and humid and I hadn’t packed for this weather, that I need flip-flops instead of these socks and sneakers, but Baba wants me to listen, sit quietly, invisibly.

Baba and his client enter a café and sit next to each other. I watch them order coffees and fill an ashtray with cigarette butts. I listen to them make deals, lock orders, discuss containers, shipments, commissions. I’m fresh off the boat. Only two days ago, I was in Cairo. I want to interrupt, to tell him it’s hot and humid and I hadn’t packed for this weather, that I need flip-flops instead of these socks and sneakers, but Baba wants me to listen, sit quietly, invisibly. They finish their meeting and a pack of Rothmans between them and carry their conversation back to the street. I spot a large container of vintage t-shirts. A cardboard sign reads, “3 for $1.”

Baba, can I have a dollar? I ask.

He stops, inconvenienced, and starts to haggle with the old woman. He wants all three t-shirts for fifty cents. She waves her hand, a firm no. He chucks the t-shirts back in the container and walks off. I stand in place, waiting to see if he’ll turn back, acknowledge me. He doesn’t.

I follow him until we reach his Shenzhen address, an office apartment on the thirty-third floor of a skyscraper. At the entrance, the security guard gawks. We’re a rare sight, I get it—especially me. It’s the year 2000 and Chairman Mao might be long gone, but it’s still the early days of China’s global emergence. There are no tourists in sight. Middle Eastern traders like my father might’ve started to trickle in in search of business opportunities, but me? I have no business being here.

I pick up the pace, ask Baba to slow down. I want to go back, I have some needs, I tell him, and he should stop and attend to me. He tells me, you are here to learn the ropes of the business, but instead all you want to do is shop. He’s shouting, and I hate this scene playing out in front of the security guard. I want him to stop. I use the Egyptian word for shouting: ga‘ar. My father mistakes it for the verb to bray, like a donkey.

You’re calling your father a donkey, you little shit, he says and, before I know it, slaps me right across the face. The elevator shoots up like mercury in a thermometer, and I am feverish. I am prepared to set everything on fire, and apparently, so is he.

You can’t. You can’t do this. You can’t hit me.

You’ve fucked us up, fucked us all up.

Me coming to China was your last chance to make it right.

I’m going back to Egypt.

I want my mum.

Yeah, you go. You’re her children.

I look at you and see nothing of me.

Don’t even understand your language.

Your mother’s language.

Stop.

Fucking Egyptian.

He rages at a distant point beyond him and me, at the burnt fields, at the bombs once dropping down from the sky into Ayn al-‘Asal spring. He rages at the dynamite under Teta’s kitchen once ripping the vine leaves and women’s banter into a million shreds, at the fact that he will always be a renegade. Even amongst his family, a renegade.

Thirty-three floors up seem like ground floor to eternity, and I can never un-hear what he’s just said. His words are dark, unnatural, shambolic, and this tight elevator we find ourselves trapped in is all these words, burning.

I am homesick, whatever home means.

On the thirty-third floor, the elevator doors finally open. Baba unlocks his office apartment. I storm in, into

his scant kitchen stacked with canned fava beans and hummus, his bedroom for two, his office. I am howling, my voice is a deep earth rumble, and I begin to destroy. I smash everything in sight, his fax machine, his computers, throw all the files on the shelves on the floor. I unhinge his desk drawers and rip away at business cards, invoices, contracts, bank transfer slips.

Then I call +2 02, I call Egypt, my mum. I want to tell her what he’s done, what he’s always done, that he’s done it again.

Sweetheart, I am sorry. Please.

He holds my small shoulders in his big hands to steady me, but everywhere is shudder, clatter. I redial and redial, but this mist over Shenzhen is boundless and the line won’t connect. Please. I am sorry. Please. This mist, it won’t let me dial home. I am far, stuck, cut off. I am homesick, whatever home means.

Acre, pre-1948
I have never been to the place where I am from, but I can imagine it for us, Baba, for you and me. Memory might fail us more than seventy years on, but I have read all the stories you denied me, tinkered with all the words, stored endless images I can now mix and match to piece it all together. I know what antiheroes are made of and that their journeys are on a perpetual loop. I know that in a story, space can be the one character you can never forget.

Don’t believe it when they tell you the Garden of Eden is a celestial place. It is not.

Your home—you were four years old when they chased you out through thousands of orchards. May 21, 1948, was the last time you saw Umm Ahmad, your nanny. Before that, you were used to her carrying you everywhere she went, coiled close to her chest like you were in a womb, and the village folks mistook you for a girl. Yes, you had a nanny and long hair. You had cooks who pickled your olives and cleaners who cleaned a ten-bedroom family home, washerwomen who soaked your soiled clothes in hot water and bay leaves, and farmers who sowed your land and milled your grains. The whole village was at your service, once.

Do you remember that man who arrived in al-Kabri with a map? He opened it before a farmer and asked him to show him your father’s land, Faris Serhan’s. The farmer folded the map and gave it back to the man, it was of no use, and said, all you see, as far as the eye can see, belongs to Faris Serhan.

Don’t believe it when they tell you the Garden of Eden is a celestial place. It is not. Those four rivers running under Man’s feet, they were all right here in your village, once. A spring in Arabic is called ayn, as in eye. Look back and you will see. The eyes of al-Kabri: Ayn al-‘Asal, Ayn al-Mafshuh, Ayn al-Fawwar, Ayn Kabri. Together they watered the whole of Acre and formed the largest water source in Palestine. Ayn al-‘Asal was five meters wide by your father’s mill. It was ice-cold in the summer and steaming hot in winter, like bubbling honeycomb.

At night, Umm Ahmad sang to you while the waters flowed through the meandering fields and formed a sweet, lulling sound around the village. In the morning, she dipped your feet in and you splashed your happy legs the way geese splashed in the glistening sun, droplets forming diamonds on their feathers.

There were lots of mills along those springs: The al-Rayyis mill by al-‘Asal, one by Ga‘aton near the ancient ruins, al-Shufinneyeh, al-‘Assafiyyeh, al-Drabseh, Umm al-Far, al-Minwat by Abu Laziq canal north of the village, and al-Serhan. In the meadows of Galilee, north of al-Kabri, was a water tank. It was twenty meters deep, ten meters wide, and held all the winter rain that watered the tobacco fields on the hills. It was where the cattle went to quench their thirst.

There was enough water for all there, Baba, for the wild carobs Teta turned to syrup for her winter home desserts, for the bitter orange infused in your cold drink, for the catnip along the banks that she plucked from its white flower to mix in a cool summer salad. All kinds of fruit, too. Seven kinds of figs, the all-summer sweet, the one with black skin and red flesh, the sour one with light skin, the one with green skin and a rectangular seed. The women in your kitchen mixed the figs with walnuts, almonds, and sugar then boiled it all and stored it in clay pots for breakfast.

It might seem to you that life is an inferno you cannot escape, but there once were four seasons.

Three kinds of olives, too, covered the eastern and northwestern hills: the big black ones with a small pit, marinated in Acre sea salt and lemon or pressed for extra virgin olive oil, the ones with big pits, and the green ones with small pits. All those olives soaked in winter rain right on time for the harvest in October. The farmers beat the branches with long sticks and shook them until the olives dropped. They dropped on large bamboo mats rolled out for them. The farmers loaded them into sacks and headed to the olive oil press, your press east of al-Kabri. When they were done, they made rosaries out of their pits to sell in Jerusalem and used the tree branches to make beams for homes and village walls.

It might seem to you that life is an inferno you cannot escape, but there once were four seasons. Look back, wherever your eyes fall, your heart drops too: In winter, rain poured like a waterfall, bringing the mudbrick. Your brothers, with bouncy locks and brilliant teeth, stripped down and jumped in the spring. Their bodies made of mud, washed in mud, drifted with the water and soaked in the rain. They soaked with the jojoba and oak trees that left a trail of perfume in the breeze.

In spring, a multi-colored terrain of citrus yellow and henna red, and a green flying carpet to the east and northwest. You were on the rooftop under a fountain of stars on your father’s lap watching the older kids jump from neighbors’ roof to roof.

Summer, nature’s wedding and harvest time for lentils, sesame, and corn. At sunset, lights the color of peach orchards, and the road was lit with candles made of honey wax. At dawn, the farmers loaded the trucks with the land’s bellyful of flowers and headed out to sell to the neighboring towns.

Fall, a northern wind brought dust and dry leaves. The villagers raised their hands in prayer, asking God to calm the gust for the sake of the bobwhite, the starling, and the fowl. The fowl each laid ten eggs a go, enough to feed your entire household every morning.

Your house, Baba, Acre’s command post of old Jerusalem stone, with delicate arches and tall pillars, was surrounded by cinchona trees. Their flowers, red, rose above the courtyard and the divan where the village elders met, over the ten balconies and the stairway windows.

There were enough views for all ten bedrooms. The ones for you and your siblings and the ones for all your uncles and aunts and all your cousins: Ahmed Serhan, Amina Serhan, Zakiyyeh Serhan, Amto Fatimeh, Amto Khayriyyeh, Amto Umm Yassir, Amto Umm Bassem, your grandmother, Sitti Umm Faris, and the tenth room, reserved for the village chief and his wife, Faris Serhan and Ibtihaj al-Qadi.

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Excerpted from I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir by Mai Serhan, published by the American University in Cairo Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.