I’ve always had a sort of a knack for languages, but it was really difficult to be - within two weeks of arrival here I was enrolled in regular English classes as a freshman. I spoke a few words, a few phrases, but I had to learn English essentially on the fly. RFE/RL: Did you speak English when you came to the U.S.? PHOTO GALLERY: Refugees struggle to rebuild their lives: That said, I think they also had a very healthy sense of perspective in that we were among the extremely fortunate Afghans who were allowed to restart our lives in America, whereas millions of Afghans ended up living in refugee camps in Pakistan, lived as laborers in Iran or elsewhere in the world. But I think it was an even more difficult adjustment for my parents to be uprooted and to have lost everything they had worked their lives for, and to have to restart their lives essentially from scratch and to try to restart a life in an environment that was dramatically different from the one they were accustomed to. You know, being a teen is difficult anyway. Hosseini: I was 15 when I moved to the U.S., went straight into high school, and you know, for me, I think the adjustment was difficult because of the age.

RFE/RL: What was it like to move to the United States as a teenager? And there was - the refugee crisis began, and we knew people who were in prison, and tortured, and beaten, and killed.Īnd so my father applied for asylum to the United States, and instead of returning to Afghanistan my family moved instead to San Jose, California, in the fall in 1980, where most of my family has lived ever since. While we were in Paris, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and a war began, and things became very unstable back home. Hosseini: We left in 1976 because my father was assigned to a diplomatic post at the Afghan Embassy in Paris, and it was supposed to be a four-year assignment. RFE/RL: How and why did your family leave Afghanistan? So I feel very fortunate to have lived through the final few peaceful years of recent Afghan history. So it was a very, very different picture of Afghanistan than the one you would think of today if somebody said the word Afghanistan. Kabul was a growing, thriving, cosmopolitan city. My mother was a Farsi and history teacher at a large high school for girls my father was a diplomat at the Foreign Ministry.Īnd, you know, Afghanistan was a country at peace with itself, with its neighbors. Both of my parents were university educated. Khaled Hosseini: I was born there in 1965, and I grew up essentially in the pre-Soviet war era in Afghanistan.

RFE/RL: Can you tell me about your childhood in Afghanistan? RFE/RL correspondent Courtney Brooks caught up with Hosseini at the United Nations on World Refugee Day, where he spoke about the plight millions of Afghans face, both inside and outside the beleaguered country. Hosseini and his family sought asylum in the United States and ended up in California, where he became a doctor and eventually wrote “The Kite Runner,” which was an overnight literary sensation. Hosseini told RFE/RL that when he left Afghanistan in 1976, Kabul was a 'growing, thriving, cosmopolitan city.' By the end of his father’s four-year post at the Afghan Embassy in Paris, his country had been invaded by the Soviet Union. Today, he is a doctor, a United Nations goodwill ambassador, and author of two internationally acclaimed books, “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” Novelist Khaled Hosseini came to the United States as a 15-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who knew only a few words of English.

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