SABAA TAHIR ON THE EDGE OF A DESERT

ABAA TAHIR STILL REMEMBERS classmate at her high school in California’s Mojave Desert probed her about whether she had a green card. The Pakistani American author remembers countless mispronunciations of her name. She remembers violent threats. Tahir’s family owned an 18-room motel off the main road of their isolated, majority-white town. Her parents’ accents and the family’s religious traditions made them different. “We felt it every day,” says Tahir, now 38, “the things kids said to me at school—asking questions that indicated not just a lack of knowledge, but disdain.”