During Storytelling Club, a student said that whenever the power would go off back home in Afghanistan, her family lit candles and her father would tell stories while they crunched sunflower seeds. I was about to finish a semester at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong Bangladesh, where students come from all over the world, so I asked for more context to understand what she meant. There’s often a distance between parents and children, she said, but as she watched him light up while she listened to him describe being a soldier traveling all over the country and a rebellious child like her, she thought, “Oh, I really want to know this man. I’m curious who this man is.” She tried to choke back sudden tears and apologized, but we encouraged her, “It’s ok to cry.”

Another student from Afghanistan jumped in to explain that on the winter solstice, Yalda, the longest night of the year, families gather to tell stories while they eat watermelons and sunflower seeds and the last of the good food they gathered in the summer, so I told all my students to meet me on the rooftop of our classroom building on the last night before I left Bangladesh.

I pulled down all the red curtains from my apartment and spread them across the roof, set with candles and watermelons. We told stories as the sun went down to celebrate Yalda early. From Bangladesh, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Bhutan, Cambodia, each shared both what set them apart and what brought us together.

Sahar shared that, while studying, she had noticed a single leafless tree that autumn through the window of the library surrounded by all the lush green of Bangladesh and remembered with a rush how the leaves fall in Afghanistan, full of longing to be home, without fully comprehending what she was feeling.

When she called home, her mom pointed out, “You are the tree!” Sahar was numb, unable to shed tears about having moved so far away. “Everyone needs to cry sometimes,” Sahar told us, “the same way trees need to shed their leaves, but I couldn’t bring myself to cry with my mother because I didn’t want to burden her.”

But the next time her mother called, she herself was suffering and didn’t want to explain because she didn’t want to burden her daughter. Sahar suddenly shed her leaves. Her mom let go and sobbed too.

“We never felt so close,” Sahar said.