Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,29

and Texas, with many of its franchises opened by former nurses from the West Indies seeking a way to plug their skills for regimentation into better hours.

As the US population grew and diversified, so did fast food, which mushroomed like a fallout cloud over the Bikini Atoll. Between 1976 and 1986 alone, the number of fast-food restaurants in the United States would triple. In addition to feeding busy, burgeoning masses on the cheap, the industry also served as a channel for assimilation and acculturation among new arrivals. One of those new arrivals was Aslam Khan.

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Aslam Khan works out of a nondescript corporate park in Roanoke, Texas, a town that shares its name with that ill-fated immigrant settlement in modern-day North Carolina. That Khan owns nearly three hundred fast-food franchises, including the most outlets of anyone of Church’s—America’s fourth-largest fried-chicken chain—does not breach the top tier of the most compelling details about him. Aslam Khan is not just a Church’s evangelist, he is a guru and an initiator to the cult of the self; he is the Norman Vincent Peale of American striving, the Vince Neil of feel-good optimism. “It took me eighteen years to figure out how to get to the United States and thirteen years to become a millionaire,” Khan said in his spacious office on a Thursday afternoon in July 2015.

Khan makes declarations like this in a quietly self-assured manner. His thick Pakistani accent, his effective penchant for self-repetition, and his philosophical turns of phrase all lend Khan a certain magnetism. These qualities are not often found in someone running a self-fashioned fast-food kingdom from a nondescript corporate park in the northern burbs of Dallas. But there Khan sat, neither short nor tall, but physically compact, as if condensed by nature to contain all of his energies.

The next day, Khan would travel to California to drop his son off for his freshman year of college. Like his father, Ibrahim would study business. If Khan felt the woolly twinge of pride and wistfulness that such a milestone moment evokes, it didn’t show. To prepare his son for the world, Khan had placed him not in a Church’s store, where he might be coddled, but in the store of a competitor, KFC, where his duties included scrubbing the bathroom floors and mopping.

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Aslam Khan was born in the northwest hinterlands of Pakistan in a village called Fatehabad. “It’s in a mountainous area behind the capital, Islamabad,” he began, “and when I was born, there were no roads. There’s still no roads. We didn’t have running water. There was no electricity. There were no schools, so I used to go four or five miles one way every morning to school. Other kids didn’t want to go because we were expected to go through the jungle with monkeys and cheetahs and whatever the rumors were. The kids didn’t want to go, but I would pick up and shoot through the jungle to get to the school.”

Khan’s childhood was intensely deprived. His mother had given birth to nine children and died at thirty-five. He kept a story in his pocket about dancing around a fire to stay warm while she washed his only pair of clothes. “In my mind, I was thinking, ‘Why are we so damn poor?’ I didn’t know anything better, by the way, but I knew this: Normal necessity of life was not available here.”

At fourteen, Khan decided to leave home. The nearest high school was twelve miles away, and the family had no money for him to stay at school. His mind made up, he now had to break the news to his father, who begged him to stay and argued that a life’s living in Fatehabad would be good enough. Khan turned away and packed his spare set of clothes. He borrowed five rupees (less than a nickel even today) and left home. Khan walked several miles to the bus stop and bought a three-and-a-half rupee ticket away from his life and family in Fatehabad. “I never went to a city before, that was my first trip ever.”

He rode the bus all the way to its final stop, the railway station, where he slept his first night away from home on a bench. The next day, Khan found work washing pots and pans at a bakery, then started at a canteen that would let him work afternoons and evenings while he went to school. He earned $4 a week and slept nights in the back