When I was twenty, I returned to the United States after a year away. My family had moved back to Pakistan and I’d spent the year between Karachi, where they lived, and Cairo, where I was studying. Prior to that, I had lived in Houston for eight years, but the culture shock I felt when back in the United States was sudden, swift; I was standing inside a freezer aisle in Walmart, unable to comprehend how this much electricity could hum in one place. It was like diving into a pool, but only realizing the water was frigid once you were entirely submerged. I burst into tears. It’s not that I didn’t know the world was an unequal place, but seeing this level of excess made me feel dumb.

My friends— white, American, well-meaning— were horrified. I tried explaining to them that during summer in Karachi, we were lucky to have electricity for 8 hours a day. They were nonplussed. You’ve basically spent your whole life here, a friend said. I can’t really believe you’re this surprised.

At twenty, I didn’t have the language to tell them just how unmoored I felt. In Cairo, in Karachi, the largeness of a Walmart would have seemed obscene, surreal. I wanted to try and explain that I’d spent a year see-sawing between witnessing extreme privilege and extreme poverty, that knowing about it in theory was so different from seeing it in person. It wasn’t that I had been slapped in the face by the world’s inequality that had shocked me, it was the fact that my sweet, white, American friends could not even begin to wrap their minds around how the rest of the world lived.

This moment in the freezer aisle is what I think about when a student of mine tells me he’s interested in graduate school and wants to talk to me about student loans. The Fulbright, he says, is a last resort. “I don’t want to come back.” He’s not the first student to say this– for many of the college students I teach at Habib University, graduate school seems to be less about the education and diploma, and more about giving them a ticket out. I give this student the same advice I’ve been giving every college student: I’m still paying back my student loans, graduate school is better if you go a few years after your undergraduate degree, you really have to be confident that the school is providing you with some value. But then he says, “I just want to live somewhere better.” And in the tone of his voice there is something more than wistfulness; there is a thin thread of despair. Hearing that note, I think of myself standing in that freezer aisle years ago, confronted with the truth of what better looks like.

I do not tell him about the freezer aisle. I do not say: the things you are imagining about the West, about your life there, will smack you in the face and leave you as disillusioned as you feel here. I do not say that he will learn a whole new series of indignities, gain a vocabulary of disenfranchisement. That he will be shocked and stunned by the incuriosity and ignorance of the folks he sits in class with. That it will all feel like a weight.

According to data from the Bureau of Emigration & Overseas Employment, there was a 119 percent surge in “highly skilled” workers emigrating out of Pakistan. The number of overseas Pakistanis across the world has ballooned to ten million, a number larger than the population of many countries. In the first half of 2024, over 700,000 citizens of Pakistan have moved abroad. Our government oscillates between bemoaning this “brain drain” and cheering about the billions of dollars in remittances that are sent back to Pakistan. Remittances are the largest source of revenue for Pakistan’s national budget – seeing mass migration as a dire problem would mean admitting that our economy is propped up by exporting labor. But the fact of the matter is that as we gleefully send more people at one end of the socioeconomic spectrum abroad, we’re also seeing every aspect of the labor market shrink. And that means we’re losing almost an entire generation of students with advanced degrees and ambitious dreams.

When people ask me what it’s been like to move back to Pakistan after living in the United States for more than a decade,, I default to a series of answers you’ve all heard before: I miss going to a bar or a pub after work to sit with friends and debrief. I miss being able to walk places. I miss being able to wear whatever I want. I miss having access to libraries and public transit and reliable high speed internet.

Here’s what I do not say when people ask me what it’s like to live in Pakistan instead of the United States: that sometimes I cannot fall asleep because I’m thinking about all the people in charge and how little they seem to care about the people they’re supposedly governing. I don’t tell people that I am haunted by the fact that the good butter I use copiously comes from a dairy manufacturer that’s owned by the Pakistani military; that every year hundreds of people are dying in heat waves that begin in May and end in November and there is no plan to fix that; that my parents bought a plot of reclaimed land that is also owned by the military, that likely robbed indigenous fisher folk of their livelihood, and is precariously situated for any drastic weather event. I do not mention that new reports indicate that the lake that supplies almost all of Karachi’s water is slowly turning toxic.

At first, I didn’t mention these kinds of things because I worried that this wasn’t what people wanted to hear when they asked their question. I assume that folks ask this question so they can have confirmation of what they already believe. But now, I don’t mention these things because any veneer of moral superiority the United States ever had has come apart entirely. I cannot complain about the poisoning of our water without thinking about Flint, Michigan. I cannot think about our impending climate disasters without thinking about low lying areas in Miami, Florida. I cannot think about the military owned butter without thinking about all of the universities with endowments that make money off weapons manufacturers who supply to Israel as it carries out a genocide.

When my students talk about leaving Pakistan, these are secondary concerns for them– they’re rightfully concerned about wage stagnation, narrowing freedoms, and limited opportunities for success in creative fields. I hear young girls who spent a summer in Europe, in California talk about these places as though they are feminist utopias, brimming with emotion at the freedoms they’ve gained there and then lost again at home– staying out late at night without curfews, wearing tops that bare both their armpits and their midriffs, the simple pleasure of connecting genuinely with a barista, picking up thrifted clothing from sidewalks. The freedoms they are witnessing are not imaginary; they’re very real. But these short trips do not drive home the ways in which the bodies of women of color are policed abroad, the ways in which they will be marginalized and dismissed.

Of course they want to go back. For the young women, especially, the things they’ll gain seem so clear cut: a student who wants to write screenplays says she wants to leave because she is unable to imagine success for herself here. A student who is graduating tells me that even after a college degree from the UK where he studied finance, her brother is making only 60,000 rupees at a bank. He cannot imagine ever buying a house, she says, and she wants more for herself. I cannot blame them. I want them to have better.

It’s not as though the better I want for them is so lofty or unusual. I want the government to do a better job incentivizing entrepreneurs. For those in charge to stop limiting our internet freedoms so that our tech sector can grow. To invest in the kind of infrastructure that allows more remote workers. To come up with a plan for the environmental degradation that’s causing health issues to large swaths of the population. To provide young women with safe public transit. To stop banning any media that’s even sort of controversial so that the dreamers can make TV, movies, documentaries without fearing for their lives, without having to leverage their own privilege.

A student I run into on campus in late June wipes away a sweat mustache just a few seconds after I press my own index finger onto my upper lip mid-conversation. We are standing outside under direct sunlight; I am trying to have a benign conversation about our respective summers, a quick hi, hello before both of us are entirely drenched in sweat. Instead, she says: “Summer in Karachi always feels like an emergency. How can we keep living this way? I genuinely don’t think I could build a life here if I’m constantly worried about whether I will survive.” I blow out one continuous stream of air in response. I am unable to find any words. “Motivation for graduate school applications,” she continues, her voice upbeat. This is a student whose entire graduate school list is populated by art schools in the United States.

I think about this student for the rest of the week. She comes back to me unbidden while I’m washing dishes, while I’m fluffing the pillows on my sofa before escaping into a book, when I’m standing at my water dispenser, filling up a jug to make ORS. I think of her, of how she’s accurately describing a real emergency, when I see clips of Joe Biden during the presidential debate, when I see news of the US Supreme Court making homelessness illegal, when I read an explainer of what exactly the Chevron deference was and what it means that it’s no longer valid. How can I build a life here if I’m constantly worried whether I will survive, she asked me. I think about the 700,000 people who’ve left Pakistan in 2024 alone, of the futures young people could have created, of an alternate reality where living in Pakistan didn’t feel like an emergency. I think of myself in the freezer aisle, and the despair I felt about the unevenness of the world.

I want so much for these students to be able to continue on their ambitious journeys without believing that their only way out is through graduate programs in the West. I want their big ideas and their imaginations to not be stifled by the way the West requires us to compress and translate our experiences. I want them to never have a white classmate say something with such utter confidence that it erases their entire lived experience. It’s a tenderness shaped by grief. Their leaving means all of us lose a potential future; we lose a country expansive enough for all of us to thrive in.