In exploring the tension between American and Afghan cultural norms, the novel challenges the US’s reputation as a country that welcomes immigrants. By showing how American society bristles at Afghan cultural values, Sabit proves that American culture is essentially inelastic and hypocritical. It preaches freedom while paradoxically demonizing cultural traditions outside the white mainstream.

Throughout the novel, Sabit depicts the Sharaf family as simultaneously committed to maintaining their cultural heritage and to embracing their new life in the US. The welcome feast that other members of the Afghan American community bring to the Sharafs’ first apartment exemplifies this balance: It both celebrates their arrival in the US and suggests their joy in maintaining a connection to Afghan culture. Such moments suggest that the ideal of immigration—one in which people of many cultures and ethnicities also share in a larger societal project—is not unattainable.

However, those outside the Afghan American community see only difference when they look at the Sharafs. For instance, when Zorah starts attending high school, she observes certain practices that, in her words, do not go “against [her] culture” (113), such as wearing sweatpants instead of shorts in gym class. Her peers respond with tacit judgment. While recalling the incident concerning Zorah’s gym attire, Zorah’s friend Hannah comments, “[T]hat’s weird—like what culture is against gym shorts, yanno?” (113). Hannah’s response is indicative of the wider social environment that Zorah inhabits, where she’s made to feel that her cultural identity makes her an outsider. It is ultimately unclear how much of Zorah’s resentment of her family stems from that alienation, as opposed to the practices themselves, but what is clear is that it is an incomplete understanding of the Sharafs’ relationship to their adoptive country. From the perspective of the Afghan American community, the Sharafs are “more American than the Americans” (104), yet the Americans they reference are unable to see any resemblance.

This xenophobia becomes more marked in the aftermath of Zorah’s death. A news article from The Washington Standard strongly implies its cultural position with a telling headline: “Dead teen lived in constant fear of tyrannical Muslim parents; imprisoned for being ‘too American’” (281). The article goes on to depict Zorah at extreme odds with her family, though the voices of those from within the Afghan American community suggest that the opposite is true. These articles drive the anti-Muslim violence that marks the peak of the media frenzy around the Sharafs. On the other end of the US conservative-liberal political spectrum, Christine Hodge, who represents the progressive National Alliance to End Domestic Violence, doesn’t budge on her assertion that the Sharafs abused Zorah, even if the evidence to prove this assertion is tenuous at best. The two ends of the American political spectrum thus overlap in their villainization of the Sharaf family. In this way, Sabit shows that American freedom is conditioned on one’s cultural values reflecting dominant norms, which the novel implies isn’t really freedom at all.