Inside Your Yemeni Deli
Two brothers, a bodega, and their father’s legacy
On a cold, rainy Tuesday morning in late March, the delicious smell of hot sandwiches filled Deli 360, the convenience store on 360 West 110th Street. It’s the deli nearest to my apartment building and the one I frequent most often. On that morning, Don McClean’s “American Pie” blared from a hidden speaker as I shook the rain from my wet umbrella and greeted Omar Alsaedi, one of the two Yemeni-American brothers, who run the store. “Salam,” I said. Omar responded with a nod and a smile as he continued to help the customers in line.
After spending a few hours at the store, I noticed that their afternoon rush hour was lighter on that day. Omar told me that business is always better in warmer, sunnier weather because people are more likely to be outside and come across the store. But come rain or shine, the brothers can always depend on lotto customers. They come in holding fistfuls of cash and numbers they hope will win them one of the several prizes flashing on the screen attached to the lottery machine. On that day, there was a slow trickle of them.
“One Mega?” Omar asked an old woman as she approached, predicting her order. A single Mega Millions ticket costs $2 and tempts customers with a range of prizes from $2 to the coveted jackpot starting at $4 million. The woman said yes as she handed Omar scraps of paper with numbers scribbled on them. Ping! Ping! Ping! Omar entered her numbers into the lottery machine. Just as she was about to leave, she began studying the pink and green rolls of lottery scratch cards lining the wall behind Omar. On a whim, she bought $70 worth of cards and slid them into a transparent New York Lottery sleeve with “Now Playing” inscribed in big, bold letters. The winners would be announced later that night.
The Alsaedi brothers often work in the store together, but it’s usually Omar who wakes up at 5 a.m. to make the drive from Queens in time to open the store at 6:30 a.m. Shareef, who is the younger of the two, follows at 3 p.m. and takes the evening shift, leaving at 10 p.m. They have one employee, a 50-year-old chef from Casablanca, Morocco, who helps them prepare meals in the daytime. Even though they could use the additional help, they rarely ask him to stay into the evening. They can’t afford to pay him for the extra hours. Not yet, anyway.
Deli 360 is still relatively new. The fledgling store has been open since late 2016, but the deli station was closed for more than six months while the Alsaedis refurbished their kitchen. Omar is hopeful that their revenue will begin to increase now that they have started serving food again. They recently printed new menus and listed their business on online delivery applications like GrubHub, DoorDash, and Postmates. The chopped cheese burger is their best seller — if you’re wondering.
The brothers inherited the vocation from their father, Faisal, who is the legal owner of Deli 360 but is not involved in its day-to-day affairs. Faisal left his hometown of Ibb, a city in southwestern Yemen, at the age of 10. His father, like many Yemeni immigrants in the late 1960s, had secured a job working on a farm in California. Faisal was raised to value education and got his master’s in international relations from San Francisco State University. In the late 1980s, Faisal decided to pursue a doctorate in New York City. His father and brothers had already moved there and convinced him to join them in running convenience stores. Business was booming. Faisal started with a store in Hamilton Heights and later opened two more, both on the Upper West Side in the 1990s. Faisal closed the three delis in the late aughts.
Omar, who is 29, was born in Yemen and came to the United States with his mother, in 1996, when he was six years old. Shareef, who is 22, was born in the US, as were two more siblings — a brother and a sister. They were all raised in Queens. Growing up, the brothers were expected to help out at their father’s stores after school. In high school, Omar worked at the two delis on the Upper West Side. Shareef did not because he was too young.
“I’ve always worked in my father’s stores,” Omar told me. “But it never was this hard.” Because the stores were by then more established, there were more employees and the shifts were shorter. “I worked my hours — eight, ten hours max,” Omar said. But until Deli 360 grows into a neighborhood staple, Omar and Shareef are forced to pick up the slack. “Now I’m doing 12 hours and more,” he said.
Omar is soft-spoken and patient with customers. He has kind eyes, crowded teeth, and a light reddish beard. The first time I met him in February, I noticed his attention to detail. I had been in the store for some time and watched Omar as he affixed a poster to the side of the counter and smoothed its edges to perfection for about an hour. The poster, which included the deli’s logo and some illustrations of burgers and sandwiches, had also been designed by Omar. In his early twenties, Omar had attended LaGuardia University on and off, where he’d learned web design and programming. But the recession had just started and Omar was worried for his future. He started working at one of his father’s newly established delis, in Washington Heights. “The economy was doing bad,” he said. “I had to focus more on the business.” He left school with only one semester to complete before graduation. The deli shut down three years later.
Omar thinks of himself as more American than Yemeni. He communicates with his siblings in English and tries to socialize with people outside of the Yemeni community. Even though he’s not very religious, he still holds on to some of the traditions of his conservative Yemeni family. One custom he followed was having an arranged marriage. “I didn’t even think about it,” Omar said. “It was inevitable because I’m Yemeni.” Today, Omar’s wife and three-year-old daughter, Layan, are in Yemen. He hopes that one day they will be able to join him in the United States.
When Shareef arrived at the store that afternoon, he was sporting a black sweater. He immediately began ringing customers’ items at the register, while Omar moved quietly into the kitchen area and slung an apron around his neck. Shareef has a boyish face, a small neat beard, and expressive eyes. He talks with his hands and seems to know exactly what to say to everyone coming into the store. “I love the American culture. I was born and raised here,” he said. Shareef has only been to Yemen three times in his life: once, in the early 2000s and twice in 2013 and 2014, to attend Omar’s wedding in Sanaa.
Shareef isn’t interested in going to college like his brother. “It’s just not for me,” he said. Shareef is also not interested in an arranged marriage. He’d prefer to get to know his future partner first. But if his parents ask him to follow in Omar’s footsteps, he won’t challenge them. After all, he told me, he owes them a lot. Shareef and Omar still live with their parents and siblings but they don’t spend that much time together because of the brothers’ busy schedules. “We each do our own thing,” Shareef said. “We see each other when we wake up right before we leave the house.”
A few weeks before my visit, a new convenience store opened on the other side of Morningside Park across from the Alsaedi deli. I decided to ask Shareef about it. He sounded upset. “We would never do this,” he said. “We would never just open shop across from someone’s deli.” Shareef was especially irked because the owners of Morningside Deli were also Yemeni.
Deli is short for the German word delicatessen, which means “delicacies.” It was coined by the Jewish German immigrants who arrived in the US after the Civil War. They used it to refer to take-out stores that sold meats they considered “luxurious,” like pastrami and corned beef. These were meats that early immigrants didn’t have access to in their hometowns and shtetlach.
The first American deli opened in 1888 in New York. It was meant to serve Jewish men who were either single or away from their families and couldn’t cook for themselves, according to Ted Merwin in his book Pastrami on Rye. In the 1920s, the deli became a cultural and political space that facilitated the entrance of Jewish Americans into mainstream society.
In the 1950s and ’60s, the deli business in New York City was no longer exclusive to Jews and Germans. Early Puerto Rican immigrants transformed delis into bodegas, a word that simply means “wine cellar” or “storeroom” in Spanish. (Bodegas used to sell wine, which is how they got their name.) The bodega became a community space in Puerto Rican barrios, welcoming the growing Hispanic population to the city. To a lesser degree, there were Lebanese and Palestinian convenience stores, whose owners’ families had migrated in large numbers in the early 1800s.
We don’t know exactly when Yemenis started arriving in the “new world.” A 1975 research paper by Mary Bisharat suggested that it coincided with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Migrants, she proposed, boarded ships leaving from the harbor of Aden. The vast majority arrived in New York City without any papers and found refuge in established Arab communities. A few of these early immigrants acquired citizenship by fighting in World War I, according to a 1986 article by Jon C. Swanson, a social work professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor at the time.
Entering and residing in the US would become increasingly more difficult for Yemenis in the 1900s. Following the war, fear over national security encouraged Congress to pass immigration laws like the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants coming into the US and banned all immigration from Asia. During the 1930s, many Yemenis were deported by US immigration authorities for entering illegally, while others left to escape the severe economic downturn. Those who remained through the depression were able to help during the labor shortage of World War II and became legal citizens.
The second wave of migration began in 1965, when a new law removed the 1924 quotas, giving immigrants from Asia equal opportunity to live and work in the United States. Yemenis took backbreaking jobs as farm laborers in California’s San Joaquin Valley and in the steel and automobile manufacturing industries in Detroit and Buffalo. Most of the immigrants were men who traveled back and forth and didn’t bring their families along. The majority of Yemenis in New York City today arrived in the period after the quota dissolution. However, the recession of the mid-1970s prompted immigration to slow. With the price of oil on the rise, Yemenis began immigrating instead to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich states.
In the early 1980s, with the American auto industry facing near collapse, Yemeni immigrants across the country sought greater stability. Many pooled their resources to open businesses and establish small stores. In New York, the Yemeni community, estimated to be around 1,500 at the time, banded together to purchase small grocery stores, newsstands, and candy shops in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where they also lived. Turning a profit required them to work at least 12 to 14 hours a day. Running a shop was not only time consuming but also dangerous for owners who kept their doors open 24/7. But the career choice was a popular one because it required little job training and few language skills. The Yemeni owners could also employ family members, which gave them peace of mind and a steady labor pool available to work for low or no wages to help them cut costs. Owners sent their profits to Yemen in remittances and helped newcomers get settled in the US by bringing them into their businesses.
In the 1990s, the fallout from the First Gulf War brought another surge of Yemeni immigrants to the United States. Throughout the Gulf region, approximately one million Yemenis had lost their jobs due to Yemen’s support for Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, in Yemen, the economy was tanking. Fearing economic destitution, Yemenis fled to America. A large Arab and Yemeni community began to form in places like Astoria, Queens, and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, but also in California, and Michigan, specifically Dearborn and the Detroit Metropolitan area.
Today, Yemenis own the highest concentration of grocery stores of any minority group and are more likely to employ members from their own community, according to a 2015 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But while they have worked hard to make their way in American society, the majority of Yemeni immigrants have resisted fully assimilating, keeping their roots firmly planted in Yemen and traveling back and forth. The 2015 war between the Saudi-led coalition and Yemen’s Houthi rebels may change that, causing Yemenis to deepen their roots in America instead.
Meanwhile, Yemeni-owned delis continue to serve as places for Yemeni-Americans to come together and share the news of the day, as well as establish their presence in US society — including in New York City, where nearly 12,000 Yemenis currently reside. Of the city’s estimated 10,000 convenience stores, Yemeni Americans own anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 of them.
Omar was managing the store alone on another rainy Tuesday, this time during the evening in late April. He stood behind the counter with his laptop open and showed me the new outdoor signboard he was designing. He hoped it would attract more people into the store. When he received a message from GrubHub about a delivery order, he quickly moved to the kitchen. Shareef, wearing a blue shawl draped over his head, came into the store with a begrudging look on his face. He told me he had been taking a break and napping in the car. That week, he and Omar had switched shifts. Shareef was unwilling to work in the kitchen, which made keeping up with evening orders difficult. Omar had been staying late to help. Going forward Shareef would manage the store in the morning, when there is an employee to help prepare food. As a compromise, Omar agreed to take the weekend shifts.
For the first month of the kitchen relaunch, the brothers would sometimes leave the register unattended. But, recently, while reviewing some of the store’s security footage, they noticed shoplifters taking advantage of their lapses in attention. Now they try to have at least two people in the shop at all times. Their brother Yousif, who is 26, recently started taking on a few shifts to help out. He wasn’t there that night.
Omar sliced pastrami as Shareef dozed off behind the counter. It was 9:40 pm. A line of people began to form. “Qum ya Shareef!” Omar told his brother to wake up, chuckling softly. Finally, Shareef emerged from his hiding place and began ringing up people’s items with a scowl. Then he turned to Omar and pleaded with him to close the store. “I need to wake up early to open,” said Shareef. “Can we close at ten?” “Yes boss,” Omar responded playfully. “We’ll close soon.”
As I stood by the register, I noticed that there were a lot of customers ordering sandwiches and drinks. But Omar told me he wasn’t satisfied with the number of walk-in customers they get on a daily basis. “We can’t rely on people walking into the store,” he said. “We need to build our online presence.”
According to the brothers, online orders bring in the most revenue. There’s only one problem: services like GrubHub take a 40 percent cut from every order. “We are barely making any money, just breaking even,” Shareef told me. The charge for delivery is between 10 and 15 percent of that cut, but until the brothers have a volume order large enough to justify hiring a driver, they are stuck. They currently get an average of 20 orders a day, and they’d like to increase the number to 50. “If I had enough orders,” Omar said, “I’d close the store and work in catering.”
Omar regularly visits delis across the city to see what they’re offering and to get new product ideas. Because of this, his own deli has a wide selection of chips, protein bars, and ginger ale, along with a variety of vape pens, Juul replacement pods, and CBD products. Business would improve if they sold alcohol, but early on the brothers decided not to. “Bringing alcohol would be a headache, and would bring in alcoholics,” said Shareef. The deli doesn’t serve pork either and that’s mostly for religious reasons. “We just decided we didn’t want to serve that. I want to eat from my kitchen too,” Omar said. No one seems to mind the lack of ham sandwiches or bacon on the menu.
A month had passed since I first asked Shareef about the new deli across the street. This time, he didn’t seem as concerned. “It’s not affecting us at all,” he said. According to Shareef, the deli had previously been a Pakistani-owned grocery that didn’t bring in many customers because it wasn’t well stocked. Some people think the new deli is the same store and avoid it for that reason.
Omar has a slightly different interpretation. “It wasn’t the owner’s fault,” he said, when I asked him about it. “The store is in a very bad location.” Omar explained that the park across them is practically abandoned. He’s convinced that if the park had been a residential building both he and the other deli across the street would be profiting today. When Morningside Deli began operating in early March, Omar visited inconspicuously and confirmed that the owners were Yemenis. “I already knew before going in that a Yemeni would buy it,” he said.
A few weeks earlier, feeling like a traitor, I visited the other deli. The store had fewer products and there was more room to walk down the narrow aisle. There was room enough, too, for staff to perch on chairs and stretch their feet behind the high counter. Mohammed Alahabi, 20, was there managing the night shift by himself, a service to his uncle who co-owns four other stores in the city. During the daytime, his cousin manages the storefront, while another Yemeni employee prepares food for customers.
The store hadn’t been getting much traffic, which made sense — it had been open for less than two months. But Mohammed told me he was optimistic. He said he expects that over time they’ll be able to attract more people to come in for a quick fix of Newport cigarettes, eggs, or fruit, or even for a conversation.
Mohammed lives in Harlem. He has a small goatee, long hair that he covers with a beanie, and a gap in his front teeth. He doesn’t think he’ll work at the deli for the long term but he’s comfortable with his job, especially because the store doesn’t sell any alcohol. “Alcohol attracts crack heads,” he said. “We don’t need that kind of trouble.” Mohammed hopes they never sell pork or lottery tickets in the store, and leaves a corner clear behind a wooden door to perform his daily prayers. He attends juma’a, a weekly prayer service on Fridays, at a mosque nearby.
Mohammed has lived in the US since he was eight years old. But he still holds on to the traditions and customs of his hometown, Ibb, the same city that Alsaedis hail from. He told me that many second-generation Yemenis are called “Western” by their families in Yemen. This usually has a negative connotation. Mohammed is the product of two cultures. Whenever he goes back to Yemen, he said, things there seem to have changed. But sometimes, he said in Arabic, “I think maybe I’m the one changing.”
Mohammed hasn’t been there since before the war broke out in 2015. The war has pushed Mohammed’s father to try to bring the rest of his family to the United States. Mohammed and his six siblings have all been able to get citizenship in the past few years, and his mother is in the process of applying for hers.
In 2014, Omar made his way from New York to Sanaa to ask for his wife’s hand in marriage (he wouldn’t share her name). He followed Yemeni customs, speaking with her father first and then waiting for her family to consult with her. She said yes, and within a few months they were married. While their story wasn’t the typical American romance, Omar had dreams of bringing her to America and starting a family of their own.
Omar began the process of applying for a US visa for his wife in 2015. Their first attempt was at the US embassy in Jordan, a few months after the start of the war. But Jordan was of no help. The US embassy designated to deal with Yemenis seeking asylum from the war was in Djibouti. At the time, Omar’s wife was pregnant and they decided that the journey to Djibouti would be too tiring for her. It’s a decision he now regrets. “I could’ve found a solution had I gone to Djibouti in those days,” Omar said. “They were filing people’s papers quickly and expediting the process. If I had done that I’d be here with my wife.” After six months, Omar returned to New York City and his wife returned to her family in Yemen.
Their daughter, Layan, was born in Yemen in late 2015. Omar and his wife decided they would try once more to apply for a visa, this time through Djibouti. To their dismay, the earliest appointment at the embassy was in November 2017. They scheduled it, and waited — Omar, in New York, and his wife, in Yemen.
Then, in late 2016, their prospects for getting a visa took a dire if unexpected turn. Donald Trump, who during his campaign had suggested banning Muslims from entering the United States, was elected president. Within a week of his inauguration, in January 2017, he signed an executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries including Yemen, Syria and Iran. Protests erupted around the country after 100 travelers were held in airports and a federal court put a hold on the order, ruling that the people detained should be released.
Some protests took place in New York. In February 2017, more than 5,000 Yemeni business owners gathered outside Brooklyn Borough Hall to protest the Trump administration’s first immigration ban. The media dubbed it the “Yemeni Bodega Strike” because more than 1,000 bodega owners closed their shops for eight hours that day. Deli 360 stayed closed the entire day.
In March 2017, the Trump administration announced a revised version of the travel ban. It was put on hold initially but later went into partial effect after a federal appeals court in California gave the green light to temporarily block the entrance of travelers form six Muslim-majority countries (Iraq was removed from the list). They made an exception for those with “bona fide” relationships coming to visit or stay with family members. Omar felt cautiously optimistic.
In September 2017, Omar and his wife reunited in Egypt, where they had planned to meet before making their way together to Djibouti. The couple spent 11 days in Egypt with their baby daughter, now a year old, before heading to Djibouti. But, during their time there, the Trump administration announced a third version of the ruling, which would block visitors from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, and Venezuela. The Supreme Court allowed the ban to take effect, shattering all hope for Yemeni families looking to reunite on US soil. Still, Omar and his wife traveled to Djibouti anyway to keep their appointment.
Omar’s second try to get his family’s visas failed because they were missing a required background check. “It was a new requirement that the Trump presidency started,” Omar said. “I didn’t know about it and had to reschedule my appointment.” With the appointment two months away, he and his wife decided to wait it out in Djibouti.
While they waited, Omar spent thousands of dollars on hotel rooms and transportation. He was lucky to meet a driver who helped him get settled in. Eventually he landed at a Yemeni-owned hotel, where most of the occupants were in situations like his own. There they found solidarity and a community that shared their values — and their troubles.
By the time the world was celebrating the new year, many Yemenis in Djibouti had started to lose hope. They began leaving the country. But Omar persisted. He checked his papers several times, making sure he had everything in order, and went to the second appointment in January 2018. There he was told that the embassy would not be issuing visas until the Supreme Court ruled on the ban. He would be forced to wait until June 2018. Omar and his wife separated again. In February, she and Layan returned to her mother’s house in Sanaa. In March, Omar returned to New York City.
The third ban, announced in September 2018, was definitive. It shocked the Yemeni community because the Department of Homeland Security had given Yemeni nationals Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 2015 and had recently extended the designation until 2020. Yemeni families’ only hope of reuniting is now an automatically generated waiver application for those seeking asylum. The applicants were told their waivers would be approved if they meet the requirements, which include enduring “undue hardship” and posing no threat to national security. However, many who have had waiver applications generated say it hasn’t helped.
“I got an email five months ago that the case is being considered for a waiver,” said Omar. “Everyone gets that, and now I’m waiting, just waiting.”
On a quiet Wednesday evening in May, Deli 360’s sign flashed red, purple, and green. Inside, an elderly man stood in the middle of the store, scratching a lottery card. He let out a sigh before returning to the counter. He asked for four more lottery cards. “Sometimes you go for a week and you get nothing,” he told me. “But sometimes you get a $50 or a $100 here and there.”
“The lottery brings a lot of people in, but they don’t buy nothing,” Omar said. “I can really say that. They don’t buy nothing.” The brothers decided to bring in the machine a few months after the deli opened. They thought it would help boost their revenue and bring more customers to the store. It has. But the New York Lottery lets them keep only 6 percent of their total revenue, which doesn’t go very far toward covering their rent and expenses. “The way I look at it, it’s haramand I can understand why,” said Omar. “I’m not religious but I feel like it’s wrong. I see the impact,” he said softly, so as to not offend his customers. “It’s worse than drugs.” Omar said they would be getting rid of it soon.
Omar told me he was beginning to feel burnt out. In addition to his weeknight shifts, he has also been putting in full-day shifts on weekends. “It’s not working like this,” he said. He and Shareef are now considering closing the store earlier on weekends, when fewer orders come in. “You overwhelm yourself,” Omar continued. “And then you start making mistakes.” Meanwhile, Morningside Deli had extended their hours from 10 p.m. to midnight.
I introduced myself to Kamal Afraj, the chef from Casablanca, who has been working at Deli 360 since the kitchen reopened earlier this year. Kamal moved to the city nearly ten years ago and currently resides in the Bronx. Having had terrible work experiences at other delis, he said he was very happy to be working for the Alsaedi brothers.
Kamal has light-brown eyes and a distant gaze. His face appears perpetually tired. While cooking, he wears a blue cap. The next morning I went to the deli again to speak with him. “They treat me well and we trust each other,” he said. He’s grateful to work with people that share his values, and to be able to speak Arabic with his employers because he doesn’t speak English very well.
But Kamal doesn’t mask his dislike for Omar’s helicopter-style management. Twice that morning, Omar repeated instructions to Kamal. And although the pair hadn’t been in the store together for more than four hours, Kamal had started to get aggravated. “You said a word — no need to repeat it two and three times,” a disgruntled Kamal said in Arabic. “Contrôle,” he muttered in French, referring to Omar, before going back to cooking patties, slicing cheese, and cleaning the griddle with a flat metal scraper.
Omar admitted he is something of a perfectionist. He’s also an auditory learner and can list aloud his customers’ usual orders before they’d taken two steps in the store. “I remember names, faces, even if it’s been years,” he said. That day, the woman who owns the threading salon next-door stood in line, knowing all the while that her order would be ready by the time she got to the counter. “One coffee, skimmed milk, two sugars,” Omar relayed to Kamal.
During a moment of quiet in the store, I asked Omar whether he thought Yemeni deli owners had been building political power. I was thinking of the Yemeni American Merchants Association, which had been founded by the organizers of the successful bodega strike in its wake. For more than a year, the association has been educating business owners in Brooklyn about their rights as immigrants and business owners and encouraging them to become more engaged in civic activities. “If you go into any corner in the city you’ll find a Yemeni deli,” he said. “If we all come together and take action, we can make a real difference.”
In mid-April, the association called for a boycott of the New York Post. The newspaper had printed a cover with an image from the 9/11 attacks, paired with a quote from Ilhan Omar, the Somali-American Democratic representative from Minnesota. The association criticized the newspaper for taking the “some people did something” quote out of context and said they would refuse to be “buyers and sellers of hate.” In her speech, she had said, “(The Council on American–Islamic Relations) was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
This wasn’t the first time Yemeni deli owners boycotted the New York Post. A deli owner in Bay Ridge told me that a few years ago, the newspaper had published an offensive image of Prophet Muhammad. Back then, deli owners had let the papers pile up in a corner out of sight, then send them back to the paper at the end of the week. This time, many deli owners cut the newspaper’s circulation through their stores. Omar told me that Deli 360 would have joined the boycott if they sold the Post to begin with. Selling newspapers doesn’t bring in much money, he said. Omar later admitted that he isn’t as politically active as he’d like to be. For now, working at the deli and staying in touch with his family take up most of his time.
As I was nearing the end of my reporting for this story, I brought Omar a copy of Sojourners and Settlers: The Yemeni Immigrant Experience, a collection of articles edited by Jonathan Friedlander. When there were no customers in the store — except for the one lurking behind the lottery machine — I laid it out on the counter. He inquired about the author; it was important for him to know who was shaping the narrative of his ancestors. He read a few of the historical passages and said he would purchase a copy for his father. “He’d remember the farms in California,” Omar said, flipping through the book’s pictures.
I asked Omar why he thinks Yemenis have continued to run delis for so long. “It’s what everybody does,” he said. “It’s the Yemeni business. We are merchants by nature.” But the long shifts were beginning to wear on him. He had started thinking about what else he could do for a living. “I’d always be my own boss,” he said. “That’s the Yemeni way.”
