august 1939

Early in 2010, the year we moved to Hong Kong, our three boys were 11, eight, and six. When we sat them down to tell them we’d be moving there for a few years, we tried to sell it as a challenging adventure. Their responses were mixed. Jake was anxious. Alex, our baby, was excited. But Matthew, our middle son, was inconsolable. He was having none of it.

“What about my friends!” he cried.

We tried to reassure him.

“You’ll be back … you’ll have your family … you’ll make new friends.”

Matthew looked at us with anguish and said, “And then I’ll have to leave them, too.”

My generation of sports fans learned early that the athletes we idolized were neither immortal nor invincible. I was 11 when Magic Johnson, my childhood hero, announced that he was retiring from the NBA after testing positive for HIV, then a seeming death sentence. Within a few years, Bo Jackson had suffered a career-ending injury, Mike Tyson had been convicted of rape, and O. J. Simpson was on trial for double murder.

These were humans, not superheroes. My friends and I all knew that by 1996, when Kobe Bryant, the first NBA superstar who was about our age, joined the league out of high school. Skipping college was so anomalous back then that lots of skeptics characterized Kobe as arrogant. I never doubted Kobe’s decision any more than he doubted the shots that he took as an immature rookie. And today, as fans celebrate a Hall of Fame career while mourning the death of the 18-time all-star, his daughter, and seven others in a helicopter crash, it is easy to think of all his basketball successes as foreordained and his on-court failures too inconsequential to dwell on. But to ignore those failures is to miss part of why many Kobe fans are mourning him so intensely.

Early last fall, I decided I wanted to become a person who makes soup. I didn’t have a specific recipe in mind, but the idea seemed inexpensive, delicious, and seasonally appropriate. Making soup from scratch would be the perfect Sunday project, I told myself. At 32, I also felt ready to be a person who does Sunday projects.

But my desires did not end at soup. In my new endeavor, I had finally conjured an excuse to buy myself a colorful, enamel-covered dutch oven. The stew pot I chose was just like those I had seen in the gorgeous Instagram photos of young, highly influential chefs such as Alison Roman and Molly Yeh. Similar ones had started to appear on the back burners of my friends’ stoves. My dream dutch oven would cost more than $300. Not cheap, but this was for my future as a soup person, after all.

One evening last week, I found myself dining in the House of Lords just as the “European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill”—the law that will finalize Brexit—was wending its way through the final stages of the British legislative process. When I arrived, the debate was paused; at suppertime, formally speaking, the Lords “Adjourn During Pleasure.”

The dining room was full, which is not always the case in the evenings. But that didn’t necessarily mean the formal proceedings attracted great interest. At some point, the screens scattered around the room showed that debate had resumed. At another point, they showed that it had ended for the evening (“House Up”). As far as I could tell, barely anyone got out of his seat.  

What happened to us? The question haunts us in the Arab and Muslim world. We repeat it like a mantra. You will hear it from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and in my own country, Lebanon. For us, the past is a different country, one not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings. It is a more vibrant place, without the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and seemingly endless, amorphous wars.

Though the past had coups and wars too, they were contained in time and space, and the future still held much promise. What happened to us? The question may not occur to those too young to remember a different world, whose parents did not tell them of a youth spent reciting poetry in Peshawar, debating Marxism in the bars of Beirut, or riding bicycles on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad. The question may surprise those in the West who assume that the extremism and bloodletting of today have always been the norm.