Even when we leave them, our cities never leave us. After her Dutch mother’s death, Sorayya Khan confronts her grief by revisiting their relationship, her parents’ lives, and her own Pakistani-Dutch heritage in a multicultural memoir that unfolds over seven cities and three continents. We Take Our Cities with Us ushers us from Khan’s childhood independence forged at her grandparents’ home in Lahore; to her adolescence in Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad; to Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, where Khan finds her footing as the mother of young, brown sons in post-9/11 America; to her birthplace, Vienna, where her parents die; and finally to Amsterdam and Maastricht, the cities of her mother’s conflicted youth. In Khan’s gripping telling of her immigrant experience, she shows us what it is to raise children and lose parents in worlds other than your own. Drawing on family history, geopolitics, and art in this stunning story of loss, identity, and rediscovery, Khan beautifully illuminates the complexities of our evolving global world and its most important constant: love. 

Sorayya Khan is the author of the novels City of Spies, Five Queen’s Road, and Noor. The daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, she was born in Europe, grew up in Pakistan, and now lives in Ithaca, New York, with her family.

My mother was white and my father was brown, my mother Dutch, my father Pakistani. If she'd had a choice, she would have been brown. She tried, sitting near swimming pools during short summers when we lived in Vienna and long ones when we lived in Islamabad, but her attempts came to a full stop with basal cell carcinoma, when sunscreen replaced sun as her best friend. My father's brown was constant, except that when he grew older and gray, in a certain light and on a certain part of him, his color lightened. I am in between. I pretend I didn't know I was brown until we moved from Austria to Pakistan and I saw it all around and made it mine. But my truth of color and country is complicated.

Color is a fact for my American-born children. We didn't wake up one morning and decide our children were ready for the news: You're brown. Almost as soon as they could talk, they put their little arms next to mine and decided they were darker. They were always right, because when summer came and my color deepened, so did theirs and our skin tone never matched. Next to their father's, their arms and legs were not a match, but close enough.

"That's okay," our sons said about my outsider status and patted my arm because they must have thought I needed comforting.

Before long, they asked, "Where are we from?"

I'd say, "You are from where we are from, Pakistan. And from where you were born, here."

Naeem, my husband, would remember my mother and add, "Also from Holland, where Nani is from," which would surprise me because I had forgotten.

There is no flag for their combination and, anyway, the white in that equation, the one-fourth of them that is my mother, was ignored even then. "Nani is the brownest person we know," I heard them say once, as if they'd always known that color was a state of mind, not pigment.

My mother's allegiance to brown was resolute. She was forever on the side of the underdog, as if she'd lived it coming of age in Amsterdam during World War II as the daughter, granddaughter, and great granddaughter of white Catholics. She'd half-joke, "I'm ab-so-lute-ly positive I have Arab blood in me," and then react to our skepticism with, "Now, don't you forget about the Arabs in Spain or the war between the Dutch and Spanish!" She threw around history the way all of us had been thrown around
the world.

I knew then that history lived alongside us, but until she was gone, I didn't understand that her history lived there as well. She was right, you cannot leave history behind. But when you are the daughter of my mother, Thera, you cannot leave her behind either.