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News in Washington I'm to Iran 2 House committees are debating a Republican plan to overhaul the nation's health insurance system the bill is designed to replace the Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare N.P.R.'s Allison Kojak reports the hearings began in contention Democrats and Republicans both tried to make their case in their short opening statement Democrats saying that the bill would take people's health care away from them and Republicans saying they needed to fix Obamacare but things devolved really quickly into bickering over every little thing how long their statements could be how many amendments they could offer and even whether the bill should be read aloud in the chamber the Republican proposal would eliminate the requirement that people health insurance and buy health insurance it would replace federal subsidies with tax credits it would also allow insurance companies to charge extra to people let their insurance lapse the Senate is asking the Justice Department to turn over any documentation supporting President Trump's claim of being wiretapped by President Obama N.P.R.'s David Welner reports the request comes from the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate panel that oversees the Justice Department's criminal division the 2 senators South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham and Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse acknowledged that President Trump wants the congressional intelligence committees to investigate whether the Obama administration abuse that's executive branch powers but they say their judicial Subcommittee on Crime and terrorism is more appropriate since it oversees the Justice Department division that obtains warrants for wiretaps that requesting copies of any warrant applications or court orders related to wiretaps of trump his campaign or Trump Tower they say they take any abuse of wiretapping authorities quote very seriously but would also be alarmed if a court had found enough evidence of criminal activity or contact with a foreign power to issue such warrants David Wohl n.p.r. News Washington the u.s. Based aid group Mercy Corps says. The Turkish government has revoked its permission to carry out Syrian aid operations through its territory N.P.R.'s Allison Hughes reports that decision could cut off half a 1000000 Syrians from help Mercy Corps says the withdrawal of its very just ration forces and immediate shutdown of cross border operations the Us based aid group has carried out one of the largest aid mission in Syria for the past 5 years delivering emergency assistance like food and shelter to hundreds of thousands of people each month Mercy Corps says it is seeking dialogue with the Turkish authorities to resume operations as soon as possible Turkey launched its own military offensive in Syria last summer and it's consolidated control over the border town of joint outposts including through the direct provision of lecture City News and p.r. News favorite right before the close on Wall Street the Nasdaq was up 3 points and the Dow was down 68 You're listening to n.p.r. News from Washington from k.q.e.d. News I'm Paul lan core North Bay Congressman Mike Thompson says the new Republican health care bill is moving through Congress way too fast Thompson a Democrat sits on the House Ways and Means Committee which right now is debating the bill called the American Health Care Act Thompson emphasize that the Congressional Budget Office has yet to provide financial estimates of the proposal I can't understand why it is were insistent on having this hearing today without the information before us to make sure that we can cast the best approach for the people that we represent the budget office is expected to release its report next week Republicans hope to pass the bill out of Congress before they recess in April San Francisco's police commission is scheduled to get an update this evening on a new effort to deploy psychologist to calls involving mental illness the pilot program involves 5 newly hired clinicians who will advise police officers on the scene. Angelica almeda is the Department of Public Health Director of outpatient treatment she says the clinicians may also bring a dose of prevention beyond a critical incident we want to make sure that we are preventing any future and students from happening so want to be able to plug individuals into our already robust system of care that they may not otherwise have tapped into previously made and police officials are hopeful the program will reduce the more than 4000 calls San Francisco police respond to every month involving people in psychiatric crisis for more Bay area coverage you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter on Paul and Corey k.q.e.d. News thank you Paul support comes from Cal Performances presenting Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater March 14th through the 19th that Zellerbach all Cal Performances dot org Support for n.p.r. Today comes from the Walton Family Foundation working to prepare all students for a lifetime of opportunity by ensuring access to high quality k. Through 12 choices more information is available at Walton k. 12 dot org And by the listeners of k.q.e.d. Mostly sunny this afternoon with highs today from the low sixty's to the low seventy's when I westerly winds between 5 and 20 miles per hour and looking ahead toward tonight we'll see mostly clear skies this evening they'll become partly cloudy later we're expecting overnight lows from the mid forty's to the low fifty's with northwesterly winds between 10 and 20 miles per hour. This is Fresh Air I'm Terry Gross My guess most an homage has written a novel about immigration that was described in The New York Times as creating a fictional world that captures perils of the world we live in now with wars like the one in Syria turning cities into war zones with political crises warp speed technological changes and growing tensions between nativists and migrants the novel is about a young couple in a city slowly being overtaken by militants and extremists beheadings are becoming common the city isn't named but it resembles Lahore Pakistan where Hammad lives the novel examines the difficulty of knowing when it's time to flee how it feels to leave family behind and what it's like to arrive in another country that's hostile to immigrants most an homage was born in the war Pakistan but spent part of his childhood in California where his father was studying at Stanford Hammad returned to the u.s. To study at Princeton and Harvard Law School he lived in New York in his twenty's and London in his thirty's but moved back to Lou who are with his wife to raise their children his other novels include The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia His new novel is called Exit West most intimate Welcome back to Fresh Air You had no way of knowing that the publication of your novel about migration would coincide with President Trump's 2nd version of an executive order blocking migrants from several Muslim majority countries do you think your novel addresses that ban without mentioning it by name in the sense yes because the ban is about trying to. Determine you know who belongs and who doesn't belong in a place above all of course it also has the effect of restricting certain people's movements and in some cases like refugees with potentially deadly effect but above all it's about who has the right to move and who doesn't have the right to move and I think that when we take the long view. The notion that some people are deemed you know less worthy of being able to move to not have the right to cross borders over time that's going to seem to us as outmoded and as as unfair really as racial discrimination or other kinds of discrimination so so yes the book does address the bad without specifically addressing about I'm really interested in hearing what the discussion is like in Pakistan now about trans anti immigrant policies the discussion both among your friends and family but also in the press. Well my 7 year old daughter was frightened that I was going to America and she had come to New York with me and my wife and our other child our son in August we stayed for a month and she loved it and if you asked her and perhaps September her favorite place in the world she might have said New York but when I was coming to America just now from Pakistan she was saying you know Bob I don't go and among the 7 year olds in her class there's a fear that there's this person out there she knows his name is Trump and she thinks that he hates Muslims that he is not nice to women that. In a sense that he's a villain and and I think that sentiment at the level of a child because she could probably name no other international political figure. That's that's becoming quite widespread the notion that there's a person who is the head of the most powerful country in the world who dislikes so many people around the world and naturally that that creates a sense of resentment and dismay there's a fair among a lot of Americans that trans policies will radicalize people and radicalize Muslims who might otherwise be very pro-American supportive of of American values do you see any evidence of that. Well. I think the there perhaps 2 parts to it outside of America there are many people myself included who championed values that in some senses could be thought of as traditionally American the idea that everybody is equal that the rights of women and men should be the same that there should be no discrimination on religious or sexual orientation that. Democracy and rule of law and due process are the ways in which society should govern themselves and minorities should be cared for. These In a way are values that America has championed internationally not exclusively of course America has a mixed history but I think for many people around the world the sense is that they've lost an ally that this very powerful force that used to speak for these things is now silent and that's the different from radicalization at the same time I think radicalization works in a slightly different way when people particularly young people and especially young men can't imagine themselves as heroes in narratives that they construct for themselves they look to be heroes in some other way so young men in America let's say Muslim background only a tiny tiny minority so small as to be almost 0 are likely to ever commit terrorist acts but what goes through the mind of somebody like that you know very often if you look at the kinds of communications that they're getting in an ISIS recruiting video that the videos that you know that one hears of radicalizing them these are like action movies and so in the sense it's that by closing off the idea that young Muslims and critically young Muslim men can be American heroes it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero and that I think is entirely counterproductive. Let's talk about your novel exit West which is about a young man and a young woman who kind of fall in love in Pakistan and eventually decide when I should say Pakistan it's an unnamed country that Islam is modeled on Pakistan because that's where you live. But anyways they they kind of fall in love or they think they've fallen in love and slowly things in their country start to get to the point where it's becoming increasingly dangerous to live there and the question is always in the background how do you know when it's time to leave and then the novel things start changing slowly it's tolerable at 1st and then then a turning point is the 1st time that a person you know is killed and you're right in time of violence there is always that 1st acquaintance or intimate of ours who when they are touched makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly Iveson rating the real and for these 2 people one of the things that makes the danger real is that they know a middle aged local man who ran a small side business who was beheaded with a separated knife to enhance his pain then his body was strung up by one ankle from an electricity pole so was there a 1st person for you who who you know who was touched by the violence of the Taliban in Pakistan. Well not necessarily by the Taliban but certainly by by extremists. The 1st person that I knew personally that I can think of in this moment I had lunch with the governor of our province and he was the husband of my mother in law's best friend and he had been campaigning to remove or change the country's blasphemy law which he argued was being used to victimize religious minorities particularly Christians and this is an unpopular position among you know certain strands of the religious right in Pakistan. And his own bodyguard assassinated him and you know I remember meeting his family and coming for the funeral and this is a person was alive and speaking you know the day before and then the day later when they later was gone. It was it was incredible shock it's always a shock when somebody dies but in this case really it marked a change it felt real and and also he was pointing out that you know so often people say well. You know why don't most films you know speak out and why don't they and I think people who say that have no idea what's going on in countries like Pakistan where there are thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people millions speaking out and in the case of my family friend people who risk their lives to stand up for the rights of Christian minorities in Pakistan and in fact I've been to the funeral of somebody who who did that so it was enormously jarring and and shocking. And also a reminder that many good people around the world are willing to risk everything to live inside a decent society. What do you think your profile in Pakistan is. It's hard to say I mean I my books are read by young people in Pakistan and in particular on university campuses when I go many young people live read them. I'm perhaps most likely to be recognised if I go anywhere in the world it's in Lahore across your places in Pakistan there's an interesting phenomenon in the 1st 50 years of Pakistan's history perhaps a 1000000 students graduated from university that entire time now there's about a 1000000 students enrolled in university in Pakistan other words instead of a few 1000 or tens of thousands a year there's hundreds of thousands who graduate every year and many of these young people. Read novels because in the novels not just of not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers they encounter ideas notions ways of thinking about the world thing about their society that are different and and fiction functions in in a counter-cultural way as it does in America if you and certainly as it did in the sixty's and. And so. I would say I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan but that said it's still a small minority that reads novels literary fiction but but it isn't necessarily a small minority of wealthy elite in the city of Lahore it can often be and I often do mean that literary festival of students who've written about 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak. We were talking a couple of minutes ago about people you know who have been assassinated or killed or or wounded by militants in Pakistan in your novel exit west there's a reference to how as things get more overtaken by the militants that funerals have become smaller and more rushed affairs because of the fighting Has that begun to happen in Pakistan. No I mean well it depends I guess the short answer I think what's very important is you know novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories and so and so the the themes that we're discussing here of course are layered into the book but but they are encountered in the specific context of these 2 people and and I think it's important to highlight that because . Say the now the are 2 main characters living in the city which is a lot like Lahore initially the city where I live in Pakistan and it begins to become much more fraught say the now the are navigating their world and they're 2 different people now the has left her family lives on her own is not particularly religious say that is very close to Stanley lives with his parents has a strong spiritual side and and as the city begin to change around them many of the things that they take for granted in their in their day to day life. Like being able to surf the Internet on their phones being able to score we do or order loosening genic mushrooms via courier service listen to music go out and hang out in restaurants these things begin to fall away and and funerals which is what you just mentioned those do begin to change that. For them as people are more more frightened of public space and more and more retreating into the private worlds even the act of saying goodbye that if you know represents becomes very different and people are frightened to come and fight and come to funerals that even even expressing one's respects to those who have passed isn't enough to get people into the public space and and in Lahore where I live. There are perhaps some of the beginning elements of this but it hasn't. Down the path the city hasn't if you're just joining us my guest is writer most an homage his new novel is called exit west it's about migration we're going to take a short break and then we'll be right back READY READY READY. This is. Joining us my guest is novelist. His new novel is called Exit west and it's about a couple a young couple from an unnamed very much like Pakistan. Where Muslim Hammad lives and they decide that things have gotten so bad the militants have made so many moves restricting freedom that they need to migrate so it's about. Their experiences in the city. And the countries they go to. And I. Grew up in both Pakistan and the u.s. He spent his twenty's in the u.s. And. Pakistan. One of the decisions that this couple has to make is no really want to leave but should they leave even though. Father isn't going to go with them. And I think that's something that must be very difficult for all people who become immigrants are you saying goodbye to your family who's staying behind you saying goodbye to them forever and one of the reasons why the father decides to stay behind in this unnamed city and not emigrate is that his wife the main character's mother was shot in the head and killed by a stray bullet and so I'd like you to read. A short excerpt from your novel about the father's decision to stay behind and his encouragement of his son to leave say that I asked why his father was doing this what could possibly make him want to stay and said Father said Your mother is here Sayed said Mother's gone his father said not for me. And this was true in a way Sade's mother was not gone for him saves mother was not gone for sage father not entirely and it would have been difficult for said Father to leave the place where he had spent a life with her difficult not to be able to visit her grave each day and he would not wish to do this he preferred to abide in a sense in the past for the past offered more to him but Sates father was thinking also of the future even though he did not say this to save for he feared that if he had said this to his son that his son might not go and he knew above all else that his son must go and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent's life when if a flood arrives one knows one must let go of one's child contrary to all the instincts one had when one is younger because holding on can no longer offer the child protection it can only pull the child down and threaten them with drowning for the child is now stronger than the parent and the circumstances are such that the utmost of strength is required what made you think about this about how sometimes things get to a point were not for the child to sur