Summary: Chapter 1

The period is December 2001, and our narrator, who tells his story in the first
person, recalls an event that occurred in 1975, when he was twelve years old
and growing up in Afghanistan. He does not say what happened, but says the
event made him who he is. He follows this recollection by telling us about a call
he received last summer from a friend in Pakistan named Rahim Khan. Rahim
Khan asks our narrator, whose name is Amir, to come to Pakistan to see him.
When Amir gets off the phone, he takes a walk through San Francisco, where
he lives now. He notices kites flying, and thinks of his past, including his friend
Hassan, a boy with a cleft lip whom he calls a kite runner.

Summary: Chapter 2
As children, Amir and Hassan would climb trees and use mirrors to reflect
sunlight into a neighbour’s window, or they would shoot walnuts at the
neighbour’s dog with a slingshot. These were Amir’s ideas, but Hassan never
blamed Amir if they were caught. Amir lived with his father, Baba, in a lavish
home in Kabul. Meanwhile, Hassan and his father, Ali, lived in a small mud hut
on the grounds of Baba’s estate, and Ali worked as Baba’s servant. Neither
Amir nor Hassan had a mother. Amir’s died giving birth to him, and Hassan’s
ran away after having him. One day while the boys are walking, a soldier says
to Hassan that he once had sex with Hassan’s mother, Sanaubar. Sanaubar
and Ali were an unlikely match. Ali was a devout reader of the Koran, the
bottom half of his face was paralyzed, and polio destroyed the muscle in his
right leg, giving him a severe limp. Sanaubar was nineteen years younger than
Ali, beautiful, and reputedly immoral. Most people thought the marriage was
arranged by Sanaubar’s father as a way to restore honor to his family.
Sanaubar openly detested Ali’s physical appearance. Five days after Hassan
was born, she ran away with a group of traveling performers

The soldier refers to Hassan as a Hazara, which we learn is a persecuted ethnic group
in Afghanistan. The Hazaras originally came from further east in Asia, and their
features are more Asian than Arabic. Hassan’s parents were Hazara as well. Amir and
Baba, on the other hand, are Pashtun. Once, while looking through history books, Amir
discovered information on the Hazara. They had an uprising during the nineteenth
century, but it was brutally suppressed by the Pashtuns. The book mentions some of
the derogatory names they are called, including mice-eating and flat-nosed, and says
part of the reason for the animosity is because the Hazara are Shia Muslim while the
Pashtuns are Sunni Muslim.

Amir, a man of thirty-eight who lives in California, has received a phone call from a
friend who asks if Amir can visit him. The friend, Rahim Khan, is calling from Pakistan,
he tells Amir he knows of "a way to be good again".

The phone call brings back memories of 1975, when Amir was twelve, it was that
winter which made him the man he is now. He sees some kites flying in the sky and
thinks of his childhood playmate Hassan. Hassan is the boy who Amir remembers as
the kite runner.
Hassan was the son of Ali, Amir's father's servant, who was born one year after Amir in
1964. Amir's father was a wealthy man who owned the most beautiful mansion in the
Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, Afghanistan. The two boys had a lot in common,
such as they both had absent mothers; Amir's mother died giving birth to him and
Hassan's abandoned him when he was five days old. The same woman nursed them.
This act, according to Ali, formed a bond between the two boys which couldn't be
broken.

The differences between the boys was just as strong as the similarities. Hassan is of
Hazara ethnicity, while Amir is Pashtun. The Pashtun oppressed and took the Hazara
land, which made them outcasts in their own land. The history of the Hazara was
barely taught in schools and they were taunted and ostracized in Kabul. Hassan is a
Shi'a Muslim and Amir is Sunni Muslim, these two different sects do not agree, which
was a reason for the fighting and the Hazara being ostracized.

Hassan and his father lived in a mud hut behind the mansion Amir and his father lived
in. Ali was partially paralyzed from polio. He was tormented by the local children who
called him Boogeyman. He never retaliated against those who teased him, because he
found joy in his son. Hassan suffered taunts about his mother, who was a woman of
low morals.