Aarti Shahani, NPRs Silicon Valley correspondent, has a new book coming out, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares. Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle
Aarti Shahani opens the door to her Oakland home in Fruitvale with a wide smile, asks her 20-year-old nephew Akshay to please keep the noise down as he fires up a blender in the kitchen and then sits down in a comfy chair in the living room with her legs and bare feet tucked casually beneath her.
Its 9/11 today. How fitting, she says.
It does feel like a meaningful coincidence that Shahani, NPRs technology correspondent, whose voice is familiar to public-radio listeners from her on-air interviews with Silicon Valley tech titans, is discussing her new memoir, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares, on the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a flash point for the United States complicated view of immigrants.
Shahanis heartfelt, galvanizing new book charts the protracted criminal justice nightmare her own immigrant family endured after her father was arrested for mistakenly selling electronics to the infamous Cali cartel in the mid 90s. He suffered under threat of deportation for a decade after that. Shahanis deep, personal commitment to advocating for immigrant rights was profoundly shaped by those events, as well as the unfortunate aftermath of 9/11.
I write in my book about being on the front lines of a history thats really important to remember, and it includes aspects of post-9/11 life in America which were toxic and awful, and which we have to watch out for, like the near-immediate roundups of brown men, Shahani said. But seeing President Obamas tweet this morning about veterans volunteering to clean up Ellis Island, I found myself thinking that this day also reminds us of the sense of unity were capable of, the good things we find in service and in loyalty to each other.
That duality Shahanis abiding love for an adopted countrys inclusive ideals, and her scorn for those ideals being debased through policies that discriminate against immigrants and the poor is at the heart of the provocative book she says she ran away from writing for a number of years.
Here We Are begins in 1981 when 1-year-old Aarti, her two older siblings and her parents, both Indian refugees who had been displaced by the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh partition, arrive with just a few thousand dollars in teeming, multiethnic Flushing, Queens (one of the most diverse tracts of land on the planet), from Morocco, where Shahani was born, to start a new life.
Undocumented at first, the Shahanis received their green cards a few years later, but carving out a new life remained a steep uphill climb. Shahanis mother found work in a bridal sweatshop. Her father, Namdev, an introvert with a head for numbers, resigned himself to manual labor, until he was eventually able to start a wholesale electronics store with his younger brother in Manhattan.
Utopia was so close, Shahani, 39, writes in a chapter describing how that vision fizzled in 1996, the moment she arrived home from high school (she had won a scholarship to the prestigious Brearley School) to find that her father and uncle had been arrested for unwittingly selling watches and calculators to Colombian drug lords.
Led astray by a lawyer who convinced him a trial would be too risky, Shahanis father pleaded guilty to money laundering and was sentenced to eight months at Rikers Island. His conviction, followed by a rapid decline in his health and spirits, transformed teenage Aarti overnight from a brainy 12th-grader focused on Model U.N. and wanting to be supernormal into a tenacious young activist attuned to the injustices of a broken immigration system.
Shahani spent the next 15 years doing everything she could think of writing letters to the judge, speaking out publicly, lobbying Congress to exonerate her father and avert his deportation. In 2002, she founded the nonprofit Families for Freedom to defend other families facing deportation.
I spent my 20s regurgitating legal facts and talking points first time, nonviolent offense, eight-month sentence, the judge said on the record hes paid an inordinate price, et cetera because I was campaigning to make my father stay here, Shahani said. I had that rap down. What I had never explored was, What was it doing to our father-daughter relationship?
Her fathers residency in the U.S. was secure only after he became a U.S. citizen in 2009. He died not long afterward. Shahani herself became a citizen at 21 during the year she took off from the University of Chicago to work on her dads case.
Here We Are is a persuasive critique of the impossibly stacked deck against poor immigrants like Namdev Shahani who are pressured to take plea bargains (Aarti Shahanis explanation of the trial penalty he faced is indispensable), but its also a coming-of-age story of an ambitious, whip-smart daughter getting to know herself better as her Old World father comes into clearer view.
Its about me exploring, how did this guy who was basically a stranger growing up become my best friend in the context of the case that destroyed his life? Shahani said.
In conversation, Shahani is a sharp thinker and articulates with matter-of-fact candor the ins and outs of her fathers prolonged legal jeopardy. But her voice slows and grows quieter when she reflects on the deeper reason she wrote the book: I needed to give him a proper eulogy, she said. I think that he lived an extraordinary life, but the kind of life that often goes uncelebrated.
She admits she put off the idea of writing about her familys painful past for years, out of fear of being engulfed by emotion. But in 2015, after she had transitioned to journalism and moved to the Bay Area (she decided to stay in California following a three-month fellowship at KQED) and started working for NPR, she decided to report New York v. Shahani (her fathers case) like any other assignment.
She dug into the facts and wrote a first draft over the summer of 2017, in the solitude of two separate Buddhist retreats. It felt very, very cathartic, she said.
It also felt like a timely act of resistance to President Trumps anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Following the 2016 election, many Americans were asking themselves, What am I doing for my country besides complaining? Well, Im a writer, and whether or not I wanted to admit it, I had become a person of some privilege, with a megaphone I never could have imagined having. How did I want to use it?
Sharing her familys embattled immigration story became my unique contribution at a moment when people like us, who are the essence of America, are under attack.I believe we have a president who wants to erase the fact of people like me, and its not accurate and its causing harm.I know Im not alone in having a sense that were in ahistoric moment where every voice counts.
Shahani said she hopes that by telling the heartbreaking details of her familys tortuous path to citizenship, shell open readers eyes to the fact that while policy debates put issues into separate buckets, immigration and criminal justice, for instance, our story is proof that theyre all interwoven. Working-class immigrants get caught up in these systems because of the things you dont know, cant access or cant afford.
I hope people read Aartis story and get a much better understanding of what immigrant families really go through, and are able to see how connected and at times arbitrary the criminal and deportation systems are, said Benita Jain, an Oakland attorney for the Immigrant Defense Project whos known Shahani since 2001.
Theres an unfairness to both of those systems that people are often not aware of unless theyre inside it. Aartis never-back-down approach, that she would cross any bridge to keep her dad here, is an inspiration.
Shahani didnt expect to be a journalist (as a young girl, she wanted to be a prosecutor), but has found an obvious talent and satisfaction chronicling Big Techs advances and misdeeds. She has reported on Mark Zuckerbergs congressional testimony, and recently interviewed Microsofts president, Brad Smith, on the need for regulation.
I chose tech as a beat because it felt like a safe distance from everything I had come from, she said, And yet its amazing to me how some of the issues I cover come full circle, for example the protests around companies like Palantir and Google helping with tracking and surveillance tools for the governments immigration enforcement agencies.
Tech reporting also threw into relief forShahanithe double standard of who pays the price in this country, she said. Its just amazing to me that (ousted Uber founder) Travis Kalanick has not been arrested. Reporting on Uber in particular, and Facebook secondarily, has really opened my eyes to how justice works in America. If youre wealthy, at most you face civil penalties. If youre working class, you face criminal penalties.
What impresses me most about Aartis coverage of Silicon Valley is that even when reporting on unhuman technologies, whether big tech or small startups, she manages to always tie her stories back to people, said NPR CEO Jarl Mohn. I didnt know her personal story when I first got to know her, but now that I do from reading her riveting book, I understand how her life experiences deepen her reporting.
Talking with Shahani, who has sharp observations about everything from the jail-to-deportation pipeline and tech industry malfeasance to the shared sense of humor that kept the Shahani family together through dark times, its clear why she describes her outlook on America in Here We Are as rage in the moment and hope in the long term.
I think its funny that Trumps family and mine both come from Queens, she said. We have very different lessons from there, and I would say mine is correct. Growing up, I had the United Nations working-class style. I was constantly being exposed to people from different countries, with different accents. My parents fled the partition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh because you had Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs killing each other. They moved into a building where those same people were exchanging milk and sugar, and babysitting for each other.
What more can I say?
As for Aartis lanky nephew, Akshay, who finally took his smoothie into his room to give his aunt privacy to talk about her familys saga? Hes her older brother Deepaks son, and he figures into Here We Are too, as an infant caught up in a dramatic residency struggle of his own after his mother kidnapped him to India and, yes, his tenacious aunt Aarti spearheaded working with lawyers in New Jersey and London, even Interpol, to secure his return.
Akshay now lives with his proud aunt and attends college. Hes hardworking, like us, Shahani writes in her books poignant epilogue, Dear Dad.
Life is just fascinating, she said. I think if youre open to what might happen, man, things can really happen.
Aarti Shahani: Author appearance. 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17. Books Inc. 317 Castro St., Mountain View. http://www.bookinc.net
1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19. Book Passage. 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. http://www.bookpassage.com
In conversation with Nellie Bowles. 6:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 21. The Commonwealth Club. 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, S.F. http://www.commonwealthclub.org
In conversation with Ezra Klein. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 7. The Battery. 717 Battery St. S.F. http://www.thebatterysf.com
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NPRs Aarti Shahani tells her familys immigration nightmare in Here We Are - San Francisco Chronicle
