Inherited Hunger
On Silence, Privilege, and the Specter of Zohran Mamdani
1973. Sweat dripped from Mohammad's brow, the smell of glue and leather clogging his nostrils while he stitched shoes he could not afford to buy.
He was twenty years old. Almost 5pm in Miami. He declines an invite to the bar from coworkers; he doesn't drink, but he doesn't explain why. Silence is safer.
He earned $2.10 an hour, and the memory of the 1962 Burmese coup d'état, where his family lost everything, is a constant drumbeat in his head. Hope, the kind that was indistinguishable from desperation, brought him to the factory floor in America.
Labor in exchange for existence. That was the deal.
1974. While Watergate dominated the headlines, Mohammad found a foothold in Chicago, working a nuts-and-bolts job that paid better but demanded more. Daal and rice for sustenance. Occasionally, haleem from a local aunty. Often, he skipped meals entirely.
The years blurred. When his father passed away from cancer in '77, Mohammad didn't have the money to fly back. The airfare cost three months' rent, so handwritten letters would have to do.
This was the first great installment he paid on my future: he traded his final goodbye to his father for the stability of his unborn son.
It wasn't until 1982 that he could afford to return. Allah's plan, he would later say - plus a fortuitous immigration delay - reunited him with Amina, an old neighbor turned medical student. They had first met in their teens: she had been cleaning, tossing mop water out of the window. He had only chosen an unfortunate time to be rounding the corner.
1983. They returned to the U.S. together, now married, the jolt of possibility arriving the moment the wheels slammed against the tarmac.
Together, they were a study in American contradictions: He was a mechanic for American Airlines at O'Hare, callused hands and a blue collar; she was Dr. Rahim at Cook County Hospital, complete with a white coat and stethoscope on Chicago's South Side. But despite the difference in their stations, they operated on the same bedrock agreement: Keep your head down. Work until your hands ache. Do not make waves.
Earn, eat, pray, repeat.
Their "blessings," as they called them, arrived in 1985 and 1994, named Rahim and Karim. And so the slow, arduous climb to the middle class continued.
Earn, eat, pray, repeat.
But the world did not always reward this quiet diligence.
2001. When the towers fell, the anonymity my father had cultivated for decades evaporated overnight.
The world broke, and the quiet agreement of the American dream - work hard, stay safe - broke with it.
For sixteen years, my father had worked at American Airlines. He wore the navy blue uniform with the pride of a man who had grafted himself onto the spine of American industry. But in the weeks following the attacks, the airport transformed from his workplace into a gauntlet.
The colleagues he had shared coffee with for a decade suddenly found it difficult to hold his gaze. The "random" security screenings became an almost-daily ritual, a statistical impossibility endured without complaint. And then, the dead rat in his lunchbox, a message delivered in silence.
The weight of a nation's fear on a mechanic's shoulders.
I, however, knew none of this. I was seven years old. I saw only a father who came home tired, took off his boots, and asked what I learned in school. I did not see the grit in his teeth or the humiliation he scrubbed off in the shower.
Instead, he did what he had always done: he lowered his head, swallowed the indignity, and went to work. He acted as the shock absorber for our family, taking the hits so the chassis wouldn't rattle. He absorbed the suspicion of a terrified country so that I could remain a child concerned only with Harry Potter and basketball.
This was the second great installment: his dignity for my innocence.
And he understood endurance alone was no longer a strategy; he needed an exit. While he absorbed the blows at the airport, he urged my mother to leave the grinding shifts at County. She was the brilliant physician, the bread-winner, and the engine of their professional rise. The system was wearing her down. He saw a different path for her, and for us.
That same year, they took the terrifying leap to open their own practice. They named it RK Medical Centre - for Rahim and Karim.
For them, it was survival. In hindsight, it was a declaration: If America wouldn't protect us, they would.
For fifteen years, I watched them grow that practice from a single room in a hospital into a thriving clinic with four doctors. The American Dream, straight from a textbook.
2016. They sold their practice the year I graduated college. But I know now that the "RK" above the door stood for more than just our names. It was a fortress built on sacrifice. That sacrifice fed me, clothed me, and put me through school.
Earn, eat, pray, repeat.
I am a product of that fortress - not just of their faith, but of their tenacity. I grew up protected by the walls they built, insulated from the precarity and turmoil that defined their youth. I followed the path they paved with the precision of a secular religion: I gathered the degrees they coveted, collecting honors and majors like talismans against poverty.
While my father had spent his twenties sweating in the humidity of a Miami shoe factory, I spent my twenties in the climate-controlled altitudes of corporate America. I entered the glass towers of finance and the sprawling campuses of Big Tech - places where the air is filtered, the coffee is free, and the silence comes only from concentration.
Screens and slide decks that determine the daily lives of millions, written in ergonomic chairs that cost more than my father's first car. I learned to navigate systems as complex as the ones that had once trapped my parents.
My work was rigorous, demanding a different kind of exhaustion than the one that callused my father's hands. I wrestled with global questions, digital ethics, and the architecture of modern economies, all from a desk in Brooklyn. But the privilege of my position was not just in the paycheck; it was in the nature of the worry.
For my parents, "worry" was the visceral calculus of survival: Is there food on the table? Will we be stopped at the airport?
For me, "worry" was an abstraction. My battles were fought in virtual meeting rooms. My crises were reputational, not existential. If I stumbled, I had a safety net woven from fifty years of red-blooded, bonafide American labor.
Only now have I come to realize I had reached Maslow's summit, only to find the air thin and disorienting. I had the safety they bought me. I had the voice they paid for.
But in the quiet of my apartment, far removed from the noise of the factory floor or the triage of a county hospital, a question began to fester: I am safe. I am capable. But am I useful?
They had endured the humiliation of the outsider so I could become the ultimate insider. A heritage of struggle, of grit, of necessity. A reality of theory, of comfort, of luxury.
And perhaps that was the problem. As Ismailis, we had Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III's words framed on the wall:
"Struggle is the meaning of life; defeat or victory is in the hands of God. But struggle itself is man's duty and should be his joy."
Haunted by ghosts of a struggle I didn't actually live. A man trained to fight, standing in a room with no enemies.
—
2021. And then, I saw the specter. A name that felt familiar, vibrating on the same frequency as my own: Zohran Mamdani.
At first glance, the reflection was almost too perfect. Like me, he was a son of the Khoja diaspora, bearing a name that required phonetic spelling on coffee cups. Like me, he was a beneficiary of the generational climb, armed with the kind of cultural capital that typically propels men like us into the quiet, climate-controlled corridors of finance or tech. He had the pedigree to be the "model minority" par excellence - to sit comfortably in the room I was standing in, enjoying the view.
But he wasn't sitting.
While I was managing reputational risk at a desk, he was on the pavement outside City Hall, engaging in a hunger strike for New York City's taxi drivers - men with the same tired eyes, callused hands, and broken spirits as my father.
The image struck me with the force of a physical blow.
My father skipped meals in the 1970s because he had no money; Zohran was skipping meals in the 2020s because he had a conscience.
I watched, transfixed, as he did something that violated the unwritten contract of our parent's generation. For decades, immigrant success meant accumulating enough power to insulate ourselves from the world. Zohran was suggesting a radical inversion: to use that insulation as fuel.
He was proving that the ultimate privilege isn't the ability to ignore the suffering of others; it is the freedom to confront it without fear of deportation or ruin.
He wasn't disrespecting the sacrifices of the generation that came before him; he was transmuting them into something even more powerful. He was using the floor men like my father built to reach for a ceiling I hadn't even considered.
I looked at his hunger strike, and then I looked at my screen. I looked at his fight for solvency - a deeply American tradition - and then at my abstract slides detailing "strategies for engagement."
The ghost in the room finally had a name. It wasn't guilt. It was hunger.
Not the visceral, involuntary hunger my father knew - the kind that gnaws at your ribs because the money ran out. This was a different strain. A moral hunger. The terrifying realization that while my stomach was full, my soul was empty.
Zohran didn't just study the taxi drivers' pain; he matched their emptiness with his own. He refused to accept that his safety was a natural law. He asked the dangerous question: "At whose expense does my comfort exist?"
That is the responsibility of inherited hunger. It is the refusal to be satisfied by safety alone. It is the understanding that a fortress with the drawbridge up is not a sanctuary; it is an abdication.
To be truly hungry is to lower the bridge, walk out into the open, and risk the very safety my father spent fifty years buying for me.
—
Today. For years, I treated my heritage as a backstory... From Burma to Brooklyn, a prologue to my own success.
I viewed my privilege as a prize to be hoarded, assuming that because my parents built a fortress, my only job was to pull up the drawbridge and protect it.
Inherited hunger is the willingness to lower that bridge. It is the refusal to accept "worry" as an abstraction when, for millions, it is a matter of life and death. It is the understanding that the systems I have spent my career navigating - housing, finance, policy - are the same systems that press down on the necks of men who look like my father.
My parents paid for my safety with their silence. I cannot repay them by remaining silent myself. The only way to honor a debt that large is to spend the currency they earned.
I must use the voice they bought me to ask the questions they couldn't.
My father stood on a factory floor, stitching shoes he could not afford to buy, dreaming of a future where his children would not have to choose between their dignity and their dinner.
Standing in the future he dreamed of, I am wearing the shoes he paid for.
The only question left is:
Where will I walk?