The best thing about being taken out of my regular class—besides the temporary relief from being bullied—was the field trips we took to familiarize us with the city we now called home. We would go to the art gallery or venture out to High Park and watch morning joggers run by the ravine. Once, during the holidays, we went to a big shopping mall downtown. But outside of ESL class the humiliations abounded, whether I was teased for being Paki, as the girls in gym class liked to remind me, or for looking so malnourished and skinny, or for using the British English I’d picked up in Pakistan.
