Teenage rebellion against immigrant parental control takes shape on the school bus

Evidence

And so Lina meandered down the balance beam between her home life and school life until she fell off and began her full-blown rebellion. First she picked up smoking. Next came makeup, never applied at home but on the bus. Foundation, eyeliner, eye shadow, and lipstick were all carefully painted on with the help of a mini-compact on a bumpy ride. The trip home was taken up with wiping the various shades off her face. Then she would walk into her house and her mother would ask her why she smelled like cigarettes. “My friends were smoking at the bus stop,” she would lie. But her mother always outsmarted her. “Let me smell your fingers,” she would demand. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 599

Categorization

• XREF: The bus as a liminal space of identity formation between home and school — resonates with how adolescence itself becomes a borderland, paralleling the parent-child dynamics in The Namesake.