Amal’s first three weeks in Philadelphia are spent with a rich, generous host family. The urban environment, the easy and inconsequential lives of her hosts, and the differences in how people say thank you are some of the many aspects of her new surroundings that surprise her. She feels out of place but is eager to fit in, and she has all the paperwork ready on time to start the term at Temple University.

Amal spends her first year in dorms, making no real friends but achieving excellent grades. She eventually makes friends and shares a house from her second year until graduation. During this time, she denies her past and culture, throwing herself into becoming “an unclassified Arab-Western hybrid, unrooted and unknown” (173). She doesn’t write to anyone back home, and she drinks, dates, and works in a dangerous part of town, West Philly. The crimes that happen there don’t faze her, and she eventually finds a place and acceptance in that community. She carries shame, however, thinking she has betrayed her family and herself.

The Yom Kippur War of 1973, the signing of the Camp David Accords, and other turbulence in Palestine go by without Amal’s response. She enjoys her freedom from oppression and fear, her first swim in the ocean, and her anonymity.