Three children and 20 years later, Aziza understands and speaks English with much more ease. She embraced the role of being a mother, and this is evident to anyone who speaks to her. During the interview, the sounds of her young daughter echo in the background, a touching reminder that the role of a mother truly never ends. Her presence brings warmth to Aziza’s words and reinforces the constant, unrelenting nature of maternal labor. It’s a quiet but powerful reminder to value the women who give so much of themselves every day.
And yet, despite her deep love for her children, Aziza reflects on the road not taken. She misses working—the independence it brought, the sense of self it offered. Her words are telling: “I worked a long time. I'm happy that I'm working. I'm happy now that I’m home… I feel good when I'm working. I working. I feel good.” Within these statements lies a familiar contradiction—one that resonates deeply with women worldwide: the tug-of-war between pursuing a career and finding fulfillment in motherhood.
Aziza’s days are full, overflowing with responsibilities she meets with strength and stride. “Now is I take a time with my family, you know, I take care I have three of children, husband, I cooking, cleaning, shopping.” Her life is a constant balancing act, shaped by a cultural expectation that has crossed oceans. Though she fulfills these roles with love, she is also clear-eyed about the toll they take—the unseen labor of nurturing, maintaining, and sacrificing. Motherhood, it appears, is a full-time job. She doesn’t sugarcoat it: “...woman is not easy. It outside working and come to home, take care family is not easy. It’s not easy.” There’s no need to elaborate—the lingering in her voice says enough. The traditional roles, the expectation of women to do it all, to be it all, have not dissolved in the diaspora. Instead, they’ve taken root in a new soil, translated into long days of unpaid labor and unacknowledged resilience. Her life echoes the generational and cultural pressures that many Bangladeshi immigrant women face—the deep, gendered expectations around work, family, and sacrifice. Her life is not a story of complaint but of quiet endurance. Her life is shaped by the idea of the nuclear family, by gender roles that persist across continents, by a longing for a life once known and a role she once played.
Aziza’s experience as an immigrant woman navigating traditional gender roles resonates deeply with Ayesha Chaudhry’s reflections in “The Colour of God”. Chaudhry critiques the false dichotomy often drawn between “Western” and “Muslim” women, one that pits them against each other rather than uniting them in shared struggle. She writes, “Rather than seeing women’s lives as universally devalued differently everywhere – patriarchy is complex, sophisticated and pervasive – this script pitted ‘Muslim’ women against ‘Western’ women, casting Muslim women as particularly disadvantaged, as suffering a qualitatively different kind of oppression” (Chaudhry, 56). This narrative ignores the more uncomfortable truth: patriarchy exists everywhere. It simply wears different clothes.
For Aziza, her identity as a mother and wife is not a sign of submission but of strength. She embraces these roles with love, grace, and quiet resilience. And yet, women like her—immigrant, devout, family—centered—are often judged, even by their own daughters, by second- and third-generation Bangladeshi American women who may have adopted Western frameworks of empowerment. There’s a tendency to look down on these mothers, to misunderstand their sacrifices as weakness rather than a different expression of endurance.
Chaudhry’s writing dismantles this narrow mindset. Truly, just because one woman’s dreams look different from another’s does not decrease the value of either. To declare one way of living more liberated than the other only fuels the very system that thrives on women’s division. In fact, this mindset has a name: “choice feminism”—the belief that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist. This has its own limitations, particularly when it places too much blame on the individual woman instead of the system that perpetuates the problem. But while it’s critical to question how those choices are shaped, it’s equally vital to honor that many immigrant women like Aziza are a product of their environment.
Western societies, for all their talk of equality, are far from free of misogyny. As Chaudhry points out: “... in North America women are valued less than men. Literally. Women are paid less than men, our labour is worth less. It allows us to turn a blind eye to the rates of intimate partner violence here, the statistics on rape and sexual assault, the lax repercussions for convicted rapists and the murderers of women.” (Chaudhry, 56). Perhaps instead of pointing the finger at individual immigrant women who opt to devote themselves to motherhood and the domestic sphere, we ought to look at how our own society operates first. The real task lies in challenging those structures, not the women navigating them. As Chaudhry wisely notes, “... as my mother likes to say, if you point your finger at someone, three of your fingers point back at you” (Chaudhry, 68).
As she reflects on her life in Brooklyn, Aziza's desire to reconnect with Bangladesh grows stronger. “Right now, you know, I miss it, my country.” But it is not merely a physical return she desires. It is the return to a space where her role as a woman is understood, and where society is structured in a familiar and welcoming manner. As she puts it “Sometime I wish I had to go back because this country uh I don't have any my culture.” Aziza’s awareness of the lack of connection between Bangladesh and America is a recurring pattern in the lives of many immigrants. It is why many of them carry within them a longing to return home.
Chaudhry captures this call to return to a place that is constantly evolving as the “Dream of Return.” To Chaudhry, this dream is quite devastating as she predicts, ”But the cruel fact of immigration is that once you leave, you never really have a home. You and the place you leave behind transform, ceaselessly, infinitely, so that when – if – you encounter each other again, you are unrecognisable to one another”(Chaudhry, 9). Despite Aziza's strong desire to return home, “... my mind wish it, you know, I have to every year going my country” she now faces the difficult realization that her country may not be the home she left all those years ago.
In Bangla, the language of Bangladesh, there is no direct translation for “to miss.” There are variations of this yearning feeling, but unfortunately, none as direct as the word itself. As Aziza and her children transform their lives around Brooklyn, there is a realization that they all miss their homeland. To compensate for this desire, Aziza tries to preserve the rituals of Bengali life, teaching her children about Pohela Boishakh (the Bengali New Year) and the traditions of Ramadan. To her delight, the brief trips to Bangladesh over the years have resulted in her son's strong interest in returning. “Now he tells me every year he wants to go there,” Aziza shares, referring to her eldest son. Perhaps, Aziza’s “Dream of Return” will live on through her successful attempts to inspire a love of Bangladesh within her own children.
Eid prayer in Washington Square Park, New York City.
Despite Chaudhry’s disillusionment in stating that, “The Dream of Return dies for most immigrants well before they are buried in the foreign land that will become the closest thing to home that they will ever know,” it remains to be said what the children of immigrants will decide when it comes to appreciating their heritage. (Chaudhry, 10).
Aziza’s story echoes that of all immigrant women and is marked by the ongoing negotiation of identity, culture, and motherhood. The intersection of these forces shapes her narrative as she creates a life that is constantly shifting between two worlds: the one she left behind and the one she now inhabits. As she continues to balance the responsibilities of raising her children in a foreign land, she holds onto the hope that, one day, she will be able to return to the Bangladesh that will always be her home, even if she comes to understand that the homeland she longs for may no longer be the same.