stories with the larger history of the community.
He has also continued to contribute regular col-
umns to the Japanese-American weeklies Rafu
Shimpo and Rocky Mountain Jiho.
Greg RobinsonHosseini, Khaled (1965– )
A novelist and practicing physician currently re-
siding in California, Khaled Hosseini was born in
northern Kabul, Afghanistan. The eldest of five
children, Hosseini grew up in a family that, though
not wealthy, enjoyed a comfortable life in the final
years of monarchal Afghanistan. His mother was a
teacher of Farsi and history at a girls’ high school
in Kabul, and his father was a diplomat who
worked for the Afghan Foreign Ministry. In 1976,
when Hosseini’s father was awarded a post at the
Afghan Embassy in France, the family moved to
Paris, where they lived until 1980.
Hosseini has stated in interviews that his early
childhood was “wonderful” and his memories of
Afghanistan very happy, until the fall of the mon-
archy in 1973, which unseated Zahir Shah and in-
stalled Daoud Khan as president of the Republic
of Afghanistan. During the time the Hosseini fam-
ily was away from Afghanistan, Daoud’s rule was
increasingly challenged by an emerging pro-com-
munist political movement. In 1978 Daoud was
assassinated during a national communist coup;
Nur Muhammed Turaki assumed the presidency,
signing a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union.
The Afghan guerrilla movement (mujahideen)
was founded in 1978; the following year saw the
assassinations of both Turaki and his successor,
Hafizullah Amin. In December of 1979, the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan.
In 1980 Hosseini’s father’s French diplomatic
post ended. Instead of returning to Afghanistan,
however, Hosseini’s father requested and was
granted political asylum in the United States. The
family relocated to San Jose, California, in 1980.
Khaled attended Santa Clara University (B.A. in
biology, 1988) and later the University of Califor-
nia San Diego School of Medicine (M.D., 1993).
He began his medical practice in 1996.
As a child, Hosseini was a fan of American films,
particularly the western movies of Clint Eastwood
and John Wayne. In his free time, he played a great
deal of soccer and especially enjoyed “fighting
kites,” an activity in which kite strings are studded
with glue and ground glass in an attempt to break
the opponent’s line, thereby cutting the kite loose.
This somewhat ironic blend of innocence and ag-
gression informs Hosseini’s first novel The Kite
Runner, published in 2003.
The book traces the friendship of two young
boys: Amir, the son of a wealthy northern Kabul
businessman, and Hassan, the son of Amir’s fa-
ther’s servant. Narrated by Amir, The Kite Run-
ner spans the years between the mid-1960s and
December 2001. As children in the final days of
the Afghan monarchy, Amir and Hassan are in-
separable despite the differences in their families’
backgrounds and social standings. However, an
incident in which Amir fails to protect Hassan
from a group of bullies raises questions about the
level of Amir’s faithfulness to his friend. These
questions become more complicated after Hassan
demonstrates his ongoing loyalty to Amir by as-
suming the blame for stealing money that Amir
himself has stolen, thus taking the very serious
shame of theft upon himself.
Amir and his father flee the country and relo-
cate to the United States in the 1970s. In the years
between the 1970s and 1990s, as rotating political
factions ending with the Taliban assume control of
an increasingly unstable Afghanistan, Amir estab-
lishes himself in the United States, becoming a suc-
cessful novelist and starting a family. Racked with
guilt over his failure to protect his friend, Amir
gradually loses contact with Hassan. In the final
section of the book, disturbing news—Hassan and
his wife have been murdered by the Taliban, and
Hassan’s son Sohrab has been enslaved—moves
Amir to fly back to Afghanistan in an attempt to
make amends for what he sees as the cowardly acts
of his childhood.
The Kite Runner was one of 2003’s most visibly
and highly praised novels. Many reviewers praise
its timely blend of modern Middle Eastern history
and examination of how cultural violence affects
the lives of everyday people. The Kite Runner was112 Hosseini, Khaled