If you think having a kid or three at CAC / MES / BISC / CISE / NCBIS / whatever presents a cultural challenge, try raising a refugee.

Two New York Times reporters do justice to a young immigrant Syrian girl’s dreams and curiosity — and to her parents’ conservatism (including the daylight appearing between mother and father) — in a piece that’s also fundamentally about personal and national identity. It’s one of the most sensitive portraits of cultural adaptation we’ve ever read.

“As soon as Bayan Mohammad, a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, arrived here last winter, she began her transformation. In her first hour of ice-skating, she managed to glide on her own. She made fast friends with girls different from any she had ever known. New to competitive sports, she propelled herself down the school track so fast that she was soon collecting ribbons. Bayan glued herself to the movie ‘Annie,’ the ballet ‘Cinderella’ and episodes of ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ all stories of metamorphosis. As her English went from halting to chatty, she ticked off everything she hungered to do: An overnight school trip. Gymnastics lessons. Building a snowman — no, a snow-woman. ‘I just want to be Canadian,’ she said. …

The family, the Times writes, is being re-shaped: “rewriting roles and rules they had always followed. Abdullah and Eman found their marriage on new ground, the fundamental compact between them shifting. Bayan, their oldest child, was going from girl to adolescent, Middle Eastern to North American all at the same time. She was the one most likely to remember their now-obliterated life in Syria. On some days, her parents believed that she could meld her old and new identities; on others, they feared her Syrianness was being erased.”

Read Wonder and Worry, as a Syrian Child Transformsin the New York Times (leaky paywall).