Aarti Shahani on Family, Resentment and the American Dream

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, we turn to the story of one immigrant family’s fight against the gaping holes in the American justice system. Aarti Shahani was born in Morocco and came to Queens, New York with her family in the 1980s. At 16, she was visiting her father who was in New York’s infamous Rikers Island Prison. He was serving time for a crime the Shanani’s say he was unwittingly involved in. In Shahani’s new memoir, “Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares, she comes to terms with the 14 year legal battle that her family faced and the resentment that she felt at being brought to America in the first place as a child. She spoke to our Michel Martin about how this all shaped what the American dream looked like from her perspective.

(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN: I just think it’s important for people to know that we do know each other.

AARTI SHAHANI, AUTHOR: We do, yes.

MARTIN: Because we worked together at NPR, and I have to tell you that I remember, because you covered Silicone Valley, and I remember that when you sent an e-mail around to the staff, saying that you were taking a short leave of absence because you were going to write a book about your family. And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. And then this line comes where you say about the time my father was arrested and I went, wait, what? I’m guessing a lot of people did not know that that part of your story.

SHAHANI: Right. I mean, you’re going to right to one of the reasons that it started to feel so important to me to write this book is that, I joke, if you heard my voice before, I’m Indian I.T. lady. I give you the important news about Google, about Facebook, how artificial intelligence works, this information campaign’s disrupting democracy, very important stuff. But, there is real disconnect between my public voice and what’s actually inside me. And at a point that disconnect became unbearable for me and I kept feeling like, girl, you have a megaphone and you can talk to your entire country and you’re not sharing the story that’s the most important to you, which is family’s immigrant journey.

MARTIN: Why did you father get arrested?

SHAHANI: Yes, so my dad was a shopkeeper. He started our family business on 28th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, which was the exact same block where earlier as an undocumented immigrant he shoveled snow for $4 an hour. We had gotten our papers and that put dad on the path towards his American dream. My father was a brilliant man, he spoke six languages. He was not formally educated, but he lived around the world. Anyway, he starts this store, things seem to be going really well. Things are going so well that we move from Queens to New Jersey, which is like every immigrant parent’s dream. And one day we get a call that my father has been arrested and is at Rikers Island, which is a really horrible jail.

MARTIN: Notorious. Notorious.

SHAHANI: Notorious. Very violent. In New York City. He’s been arrested and according to New York State he has sold watches and calculators to the Cali drug cartel. And my view, in the 90s, I mean, the Cali cartel was the most notorious trafficking ring in the city. Horrific violence, dead bodies, and so, you know, the case was .

MARTIN: So, the authorities thought he was money laundering, right? He thought he was part of their scheme to hide —

SHAHANI: Exactly. But he was —

MARTIN: — their ill-gotten gains.

SHAHANI: — yes. And here’s — here’s like the really interesting thing about how the case work and I’ll tell you about the sort of the emotional journey about it, but just the facts of the case. I remember the first time going into court, Michel, my father and uncle were in case together, I was a kid, I was 16-years-old, and they talked about my dad, as well as his little brother, my uncle was helping to run the store, they talked about them as though our family business was just a front for a cartel. It’s like, you know, it just — it didn’t really make sense, because my father kept saying, I’m doing what everyone is doing. I’m selling watches and calculators to anyone who will buy them. We hire private defense lawyers and the private defenders say, Mr. Shahani and Mr. Shahani, listen. No one really thinks that you’re cartel ring leaders. No one things that, but they started a case and they want a conviction out of the case. Just agree to an eight month sentence. They’re offering you eight months. Take it because if you don’t take it and you will go to trial, you will face the trial penalty. What’s that? Oh, if you exercise your constitutional right, you’ll face a decade. You’ll face longer than a decade. So small time shop keepers, what do you want? Eight months you can get if over with or gamble? Well, the criminal justice system is not about innocence and guilt. It’s about risk and reward. And so, my parents – my father and uncle did statistically what everyone does – take the plea. So they agree the plea bargain of eight months each. They each took the guilty plea. The prosecutor agreed to let one man go, then the other man, serve sentences –

(CROSSTALK)

MARTIN: Consecutively.

SHAHANI: Exactly. So our business, the so-called’s cartel front, wouldn’t collapse. Well, if we’re drug traffickers and our businesses is a front for a cartel and that’s why these men must go away, then why are you bending over backwards to structure a plea deal so that one can stay out at each time? Didn’t quite make sense, but we got the point. The point is they wanted a conviction. The state wanted a conviction. My uncle goes in first. He’s supposed to do his time, come out. My dad will go in. Matters should be behind us. That’s not what happens. The eight month sentences ended up spiraling into a 14-year legal battle because deportation by the feds came in as a second surprise punishment. My uncle did not do eight months. Because of an administrative error by New York state he did two and a half years. The day he was supposed to come home to us, I mean, we jumped hoops to get him out, the day he was supposed to come home to us, he goes missing. For four days we have no idea where he is. The homecoming party turns into a search party. That’s when we discover that deportation is going to be a second punishment given to my family.

MARTIN: Because your parents had – your family had green cards at that point. They were citizens.

SHAHANI: Well some of us.

MARTIN: And so –

(CROSSTALK)

SHAHANI: My dad and uncle were lawful permanent residents, green card holders. Some of us were naturalized U.S. citizens, and that was part of the surprise is that, you know, we thought, but wait, we’re legal. What do you mean you’re going to toss them out? It made no sense to me, you know, that two men who’d served their time, who were long-term residents, who already had their papers, who had family members who were U.S. citizens would be subject to automatic life exile, but that was the law. And I needed to tell that story.

MARTIN: I have to tell you one of the things about your book that I so love is that you’re so honest about this whole range of emotions.

SHAHANI: Yes.

MARTIN: Your resentment –

(CROSSTALK)

SHAHANI: Yes.

MARTIN: — and having to deal with this.

SHAHANI: Yes.

MARTIN: Your resentment that this whole situation really dominated your teenage years and your early adult years because you didn’t just let it go. You did not let it go. You basically – I don’t know how to put this. You became an immigration activist. You became kind of – a jailhouse lawyer isn’t quite right, but you really educated yourself –

(CROSSTALK)

SHAHANI: I’ll take it.

(LAUGHTER)

MARTIN: — about – to master all the details –

(CROSSTALK)

SHAHANI: Yes, I wasn’t locked up, but –

MARTIN: — you basically marshaled their legal defense. I mean, you organized your father’s legal defense basically starting when you were 16-years-old.

SHAHANI: Well, it’s interesting actually, and I would say I started in earnest when I was 19. I remember the exact turning points –

(CROSSTALK)

MARTIN: Sure.

SHAHANI: — but I have to say this. You know, when I was 16 and I visited dad for the first time at Rikers and I was so ashamed of him and I’m like how could you do this to me, I remember going to visit him with my mom and my brother, going into a huge, open air gym where you have families visiting their loved ones, I remember looking around and just a sliver of a thought I had. The sliver I thought was where are all the white criminals? Why don’t I – New York doesn’t have white criminals? And it’s not that that thought dominated. The shame dominated at the time. Over the years when the case dragged on, when eight months spiraled into here’s a surprise second punishment, when horrible things were happening in the case and sort of administrative errors were constantly, you know, screwing us over, that shame, thankfully it shattered and just indignation rose, and that’s when I got incredibly involved in advocating for my father.

MARTIN: Talk to me, if you would, about the shame because this is, again, something that I don’t think a lot of people hear about. What was the shame? Was it the shame of your father being locked up or was it the shame of not being this kind of model — the model minority that we keep hearing so much about.

SHAHANI: I think it’s a dissonance that a lot of people feel in this country because there’s — you know my book it’s called — it’s “Here We Are,” statement of fact, and the subheading is my thesis about America.”American dreams, American Nightmares.” I have lived the American dream and the nature of that dream is you get to walk into rooms you never knew existed. You get topped for things that are beyond your dreams, beyond what you could imagine. And you leap in ways that would not have happened in other places. That is the dream that I have lived in. My father lived the nightmare. Once you are targeted, once you are tagged, you are never let out of the box that defines you. In my father’s case its quote, unquote, criminal alien.

MARTIN: Why did your parents come to this country to begin with? I mean this is no easy thing. I mean you were born in Morocco and I remember at one point in the — in the book you talk about some of the conditions of, you know, like just saying this is your American dream to work 14 hours a day to not be able to eat meat, to have, you know roaches crawling up your clothes.

SHAHANI: Not just on the clothes, by the way. I woke up more than once with a roach on my bare skin, I mean that was my childhood.

MARTIN: So why did they come here to begin with, with three small children?

SHAHANI: That was — yes, you know that’s actually — it’s funny because that’s like an investigative aspect of this book is mom would always say we did it for a better life for you kids. I was working through a lot of resentment when I was writing this book. Not just resentment to my country but to my family. And I was like, mom, we had a really crappy life. What do you mean a better life for us kids. And I was very angry when I was asking her about it. And then she finally told me that the specific reason my parents chose to leave Morocco where I was born and my siblings were born, cross the Atlantic, over stay Visas, be undocumented, raise three little kids that way is that she herself was fleeing a really abusive situation. Back home in many countries many of us have what are called joint families. So the wife marries a husband and then lives with his parents and brothers. Mom had that arrangement in Casablanca where I was born. Turns out, and I didn’t know this, that her mother-in-law, my grandma, was a really abusive woman. My grandma would throw plates at my mom if she didn’t like the food that was prepared. She wouldn’t allow my mom to open the refrigerator without permission or leave the house without permission. She wouldn’t allow my parents to sleep in the same room. This is actually a very embarrassing facts to share but my — my father’s mother made him stay in her room and made my mom sleep in the living room. My mom is the most resilient human being I know. I don’t know anybody with more capacity and appetite for life than my mother and it was only in the process of writing this book I learned that she actually attempted to take her life because something pretty horrific happened. And my father finally agreed, OK, let’s take the kids and go. And this is the funny thing about so many of our immigrant stories is crossing the ocean and living in America is in some ways easier than going to try to live across the street because if you’re close to your family you have to be right there with them. But if you’re in America you can say, it’s for the kids. And here’s the thing is that my mother hungered for dignity, for freedom for herself and for her daughters; two daughters, one son. And she wanted for us to have a life that she could not have.

MARTIN: Well, what — what was the toll on you and — and also on your mother?

SHAHANI: I stopped going to college. I stopped going to college so I could fight to keep my father here. I will say this though, there is a lot of pain I am recounting in this book. But something I realized while writing it is part of what fueled me in my fight is first of all, the confidence that America has given me that we belong here. The laws say one thing but the culture says another and that culture emboldened me to fight the way that I did. And two, I have a super loving family. The thing is that when you’re going through such tremendous ups and downs, when you’re going with it — through it with people you love and who love you, I mean that’s a blessing. That’s actually a blessing. You know this — this book gave me a working definition of love. Everyone — you know we think about it, it’s the greatest question on earth, what is love. For me, love is that process when your turn toward as opposed to away from someone who is in pain. When you can do that, when you can be fearless, when you can not worry that their crisis will hurt your life, be bold, you get some of the most joyful experiences you can every have, you know?

MARTIN: I’ve got to ask you about this crazy scene, it comes early in the book where you actually meet the judge who sentenced your father.

SHAHANI: During a trip to New York I would take the train out to Queens, I go to his chambers, knock on the door, he opens the door. Hadn’t seen him since I was a teenager sitting the pews, first words out of his mouth, your father and your uncle should never had taken that guilty plea, what a mistake. And I —

MARTIN: Shocking.

SHAHANI: — have to explain that as a journalist, oh, that would be a really interesting find. Tell me more, Judge, what do you mean? As a daughter, I felt like the soul leapt from my body and I needed to collapse. It hurt.

MARTIN: So badly.

SHAHANI: It hurt.

MARTIN: So badly, to know that all that you went through —

SHAHANI: Yes. And, you know, he was — it was funny, I sat —

MARTIN: Tell me why. Why shouldn’t he have taken that plea?

SHAHANI: I think you can find a way that they, as small business owners, were cutting corners. You could find a reason that they should be convicted of something, much like most small business owners and as I’ve come to learn as a business correspondent, big business owners. But the judge’s point was that, you guys did not play your hand right. You had so much more to bargain with than you realized and you could have done much better than you did, you just folded way too early. That’s ultimately what he meant, and I didn’t actually learn that that’s what he meant that first visit to him, I was incapacitated. He told me that, I sat on the sofa, I nodded politely with him. I wanted to get the hell out of his office. I got out of his office and I just wept.

MARTIN: What happened to your dad? You know, in the end, you were able to keep —

SHAHANI: Yes.

MARTIN: — keep him in this country, but then — but then what?

SHAHANI: Well, part of what I’m exploring in this book — again, I needed to write this book to figure this out for myself was, was it worth it. Was it worth fighting for dad? Ultimately we were able to keep him in this country. It was at a huge expense to him and to the rest of us. He’d had multiple heart attacks. He had lost all of his teeth. We had to do multiple amputations until finally they sawed off his leg. He was in a really deep depression. You know, I had a situation where I had life beyond this legal case. It was my first rodeo, it wasn’t his first rodeo. So, I can reflect back on this and thing, wow, what an incredible chapter in life. Amazing leadership training. For dad, it was destruction. What happens when you derive your purpose from working and you can’t work again? When your community has rejected you, people won’t return your calls, that’s what my father lived and he was a good man. I mean, he was a good man. So ultimately he was able to stay here, but I am reflecting on the cost of it.

MARTIN: I want to go back to the title of the book, “Here We Are” you’re here, American Dreams, American Nightmares. What are your reflections now about the American dream and what is the American nightmare? If you could — if you could sum it up.

SHAHANI: Yes. Yes, I mean —

MARTIN: Does the American dream still live?

SHAHANI: Yes, it does. It definitely does.

MARTIN: After all you saw. After all the screw-ups, all the unfairness, all the bigotry, corruption —

SHAHANI: My life is proof of it. My life is proof of it. I mean, my mother reminds me this. The nightmare is what my father lived. My father, as a migrant, having to start over each time he came into a new place, he was doomed or faded to a life of constant irrelevance. We were a low-end globalization, not high-end globalization, low-end globalization and dad had to pay the price each and every time, especial in this country. He told me one time I visited him in Rikers, he’s like Aarti, all the things I’ve seen in my life I haven’t even told you about, I have never seen something as bad as this. It’s the criminal justice system. We have a mass incarceration system, we now have a mass deportation system, that I’ve written about that’s built off of that system, one on top of the other. That’s the nightmare of this country. It’s a cancer in this country that we have to get past. We have to deconstruct and build a better system. The dream is that ability to leap and wonder into places where you didn’t even think you belonged. In most of the world people are forced to stay where they came from. OK. Very calcified social structures keep you there. My mother is the reminder to me to be grateful because my mother, no matter what happened to her husband, I mean she was there — she became my father’s nurse because he had fallen so ill in the process of facing these things. No matter what happened to her husband, my father — we had to amputate a leg. I mean he was literally decaying as this was going on. No matter what happened to her husband, she can tell her daughter, Aarti, be grateful for the life you have here because it’s much better than anything you would have had back there. Trust me, I know.