He married me ten years ago, a girl from the Old Country, because he wanted to keep in touch with his culture. “I’m proud to be an Arab,” he said when we were courting. “And I’ve dated American girls, but they never understand my culture. I think they don’t really like it.”

I told him that I didn’t really understand American culture; I had only arrived a few months before. But I knew that there was an entire pack of Arab-American boys and girls, looking for spouses among us, the newly-landed. I wanted him to love me because I was myself, not because I represented some missing link in his life. But I took a chance on him, and I don’t regret it except in moments like this, when I wish I was American enough for my daughter.

He is always kind and eager to please me. We even spent our honeymoon back home in Ramallah, so that I could see my aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. During those two weeks, I introduced him to the sights and landmarks of a country he’d always heard tales about, but that he’d never experienced. He got upset when I took him to visit the refugee camp where I used to live. His hands shook when he saw the children playing in the open sewers, and the holes, like gaping mouths filled with jagged teeth, that opened the surfaces of many of the homes. “You lived like that?” he seethed for days afterwards. But I wanted to show him the good things too, so we went to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Manger Square in Bethlehem, and the old city of Jericho.

And when we returned to America and settled into our home in Philadelphia, he helped me. We saw the Liberty Bell, or “the bell with the crack,” as I reported to my family in my letter home. I also sent pictures of Michel and me in front of the Art Museum, sitting on the big steps. “Michel told me that they filmed a movie here, of a man running up the steps. They made a statue of him later,” I wrote. Sometimes, in the summer, we packed a basket and made a picnic by the Delaware River, on the stone benches of Penn’s Landing. We paid four dollars each and toured the historic ships anchored in the harbor, ships that hadn’t stirred in decades and now suffered visitors crawling inside their bellies. “I used to see all these places when I was a kid, on school trips,” he said to me in his still-stilted Arabic (he has improved greatly since then), “but it’s different seeing them with you. It’s nicer.”