97 pages • 3 hours read
Farah Ahmedi, Tamim AnsaryThe Other Side of the Sky
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 18-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary: “Learning to Drive”
Ahmedi took driver’s education at school the following year. She learned a lot about traffic laws and the dangers of driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs, but she learned nothing about how to drive. The Litzes helped her get into a real car. First, Alyce found a rehabilitation hospital that had a special program to help people like Ahmedi learn to drive. Alyce also got the high school to pay for the program. The program entailed a modified car operated solely with the driver’s hands, not feet. Ahmedi found this too complicated. The instructor then tested her leg strength and reaction times and found them to be satisfactory. When they got into a regular car, however, they discovered that she was too short to reach the pedals. Litz found a mechanic who makes platforms that clamp onto the gas and brake pedals, and at last, she was able to learn how to drive. John Litz took her practicing until she got her license. Once she had her license, the Litzes got her a car, allowing Ahmedi to be more independent.
Chapter 19 Summary: “The Fashion Show”
During her second summer in the US, Ahmedi changed high schools. Her new school had an international club. At the end of the year, the club had a party and put on a show exhibiting the different cultures represented in the club. Ahmedi was conflicted about whether to participate in the fashion show. There was another girl in the club, however, who denigrated Ahmedi, telling everyone that Ahmedi could not perform in the fashion show because she walks with a limp. Ahmedi was crushed, but Litz encouraged her to do the show anyway, telling her that here in the US she is valued for who she is as a person. The show was a success, her mother and the Litzes were there to cheer her on, and afterwards, Ahmedi says she felt like at last she was wearing the high-heeled shoes that the Afghan doctor promised her many years before.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Looking Back, Looking Ahead”
In the last chapter, Ahmedi shares how her mother has adapted to life in the US, She describes her mother as “sort of blank now and can’t remember much” which is hard for both of them (245). At first, her mother would keep to the apartment as much as possible; she was on edge every time they had to go out. She also did not sleep much, cried frequently at night, and was mostly silent during the days. It saddens Ahmedi to recall the vibrant woman that she was back in Afghanistan before the war escalated, but her mother is getting better.
Her mother is beginning to have a bit of a social life of her own. She gets together with some other Afghan women in the neighborhood, and they get together with other Afghan families to celebrate the holidays. Her mother is even taking ESL classes. As Ahmedi puts it, “she is like a plant that is finally getting some water” (247). Ahmedi closes her memoir with her aspirations for the future. She hopes to go to college and has many different interests that she would like to pursue, such as becoming a doctor or an engineer who designs prostheses. She also has aspirations for her people back in Afghanistan. She hopes to be able to talk to parents there and tell them to send their children to school and to celebrate them when they do well.
Chapters 18-20 Analysis
Ahmedi writes about experiences common to American young people, from learning to drive to handling tensions and pressures from peers. Her transition to becoming an American teenager, however, remains marked by what she has survived as a war refugee. Drivers education classes featured videos of car crashes and images of trauma and death that caused Ahmedi to revisit what she endured and witnessed in Afghanistan and in the Afghan hospital. In the fashion show episode, her classmate mistook her leg injuries for disability and ridiculed her for it, and the taunting broke Ahmedi’s heart. She cried all day about it, feeling “sorry about being only half a woman” (240). Ahmedi recounts this experience matter-of-factly, but she also hints at the deeper costs of trauma that she carries with her daily. She writes, “That girl finally succeeded in getting through my defenses and poking me right where it hurt the most and where I would always hurt” (240).
Although the purpose of the international club’s fashion show was to honor each student’s unique cultural heritage, it did so by walking a tightrope between celebrating the beauty in each student and reproducing stereotypes about femininity. Clearly, Ahmedi was aware of these messages about feminine ideals. She does not dwell upon it or elaborate in the pages of her memoir, but her classmate’s taunting hit upon deep-seated fears about her future place in the world as a woman.
Ahmedi also relates the generational divergences and tensions common to immigrant families. Arriving in the US as an adult is different than coming as a child, and those differences play out as immigrant parents try to parent in the culturally specific ways they brought with them, while many immigrant children more quickly adapt, out of necessity, to their new cultural surroundings. Sometimes, when Ahmedi would return from the store with a new clothes item, her mother would tell her to stop shopping. When Ahmedi plucked her eyebrows because she thought it made her look pretty, her mother would tell her to stop. Naturally, her mother worried every time Ahmedi went out, thinking Ahmedi was out looking for a boyfriend. As war refugees, however, there is a particular kind of trauma that shapes this immigrant experience. Ahmedi believes that her mother may still be in some kind of shock.
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