Asma Khan almost didn’t make it to her talk at the Santa Fe Literary Festival. The decorated chef and cookbook author set up a café in a Yazidi refugee camp in Iraq in 2019, offering training to girls who had been sold into slavery by Isis. It was an audacious thing to attempt, unusual for a chef who had only recently starred in the Netflix series Chef’s Table and set up her own restaurant in central London. “I asked for volunteers for chefs and the only girl who put her hand up was a girl who stammered a lot,” Khan says during a tea-and-conversation event in New Mexico. “She was 19 years old, and later on I discovered that she could speak, but because she was the only virgin in her village, she was passed around by [Isis members] — and she lost her ability to speak.” That teenage girl, who Khan summarily trained and who found meaning through working at the café, has never left her mind.
How does such worthy work lead to an immigration nightmare? Khan was surprised to be initially told that she wouldn’t be granted entry to the United States when she prepared to depart for the festival in Santa Fe. Because she’d travelled to Iraq, she’d been automatically denied, with no room for nuance or discussion. “I thought that after Trump, the rules would have changed,” she said, “but no.” It was only through the hard work of a number of festival representatives — and the willingness to jump on whichever flight she could — that she ended up in New Mexico this week. Although it was an ordeal, she says, it wasn’t entirely a surprise: “With a name like mine, immigration is always challenging. Even with a British passport, in England.”
