Right when I was about to leave for work at 8:30 a.m., he stepped out for a smoke in the front yard. I smiled as I headed towards the car. We spoke little since I didn’t know French and he spoke little English. I backed out of the driveway and as I drove away, I thought about his impression of our family. I wondered if our habits- Maman’s sudden outbreaks of song and the rest of us following, my brother adding his own lyrics, my grandmother’s desperate gestures to try and communicate to none-Farsi speakers, our dirty jokes that became too hard and sometimes too inappropriate to translate- shocked or amused him. I was sure that a part of him probably understood us, that despite the language barrier, we were just like any other family that gets together and drives one another crazy. We learned that his mother was fond of the Shah’s wife, and had an interest about Iran’s history. These details perhaps helped us connect with him, and even put us at ease in that we weren’t so strange and incomprehensible to him after all. His mother was a small, but yet an important connection.
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Having always had the immigrant perspective, I am constantly wondering what the other person thinks upon meeting my family and or learning about Iran. I feel that I have to explain cultural differences. I feel responsible for the other person, especially if he/she is a guest at my house. Do we laugh too much? I wonder. Are we too loud and obnoxious? Why do we burst out in song and why do we always speak in metaphors? There are times, though, that I realize how much I admire our differences, how much I love it when a stranger hears my mother sing. I admire that we are hospitable, even if we take it too far sometimes, like when we beg strangers to eat food and keep asking them if they wouldn’t like to have some more on their plate. I enjoy watching my sister take elaborate care to set up the table and prepare brunch, making sure everyone has plenty of tea and coffee, for instance. There is always a positive end to being an immigrant, but only when you learn to love and accept who you are and what your culture is. When you are 11 and you’ve been forced to move from home to a country whose language your mother and father barely understand, loving yourself isn’t easy. It is after years of embarrassment and self-pity that you begin to love again, that you decide to introduce your mother rather than hide her from your friends. After years of being unable to explain where you come from and what exactly you are, you find an urge to break the silence and say, this is who I am, this is my family, this is my culture.
While certain habits may be hard to translate, explain and or understand, I believe it is these very differences that make one memorable. Our non-Iranian guests and friends may not understand everything, but they get to see us for who we are, right in our very own living room where we drink tea a dozen times and break out in Persian song late at night. Sometimes, when the songs get too sad, just hearing my mother’s voice change, you know everyone understands the depth of its sadness. You don’t have to know the lyrics to understand that for a woman of 60 who has left her homeland for 11 years, these songs invite years of memories like a flood that fills up the entire house and buries you with it. And it doesn’t matter if you speak French or English for you to know how painful it is to still sing the same song while detaching yourself from what it once represented.
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I came home after work and he was on the couch, reading a book. He asked if I had a good work, to which I smiled and said yes. I went into the kitchen, searched for left over lunch, and again wondered, had we both knew one language to communicate with, would we have still understood our differences? Later that night, when everyone began retelling past stories, laughing and then singing in Farsi, I saw his expression from across the room and I knew that he felt something, and that he was happy to have joined our strange, but amusing realm.

The view from where I sit on the porch with my family as we drink tea is always pretty. The summer sky is purple, sometimes blue, sometimes orange. The flowers and the trees in the yard make you feel like you’re in a fairytale. My family is generally happy. They all look happy, at least.
I am the only unhappy one.

When I was little, Barbie dolls made me happy. My brother would send them from Europe. I dressed my dolls, gave them baths and washed their hair. I used to imagine that one day I would buy them a nice house and maybe even a car. I had kitchenware and some toy furniture, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted them to have more clothes, more things, just more and more of everything. When I was little, family trips to the Caspian made me happy. I loved watching my mother pack for me. I liked dancing in the cabin and watching grownups make fires. I always got car sick on the way back, always.
When I was little, I was probably a lot happier with little things. When my Baba and brother left, I began feeling sad. I didn’t know how to cope and the sadness built up and then I hated school. I cried everyday and even as I said my prayers, I kept crying. My other brother who was still there tried to talk to me. He read me stories some nights before I went to sleep. I guess everybody tried to help me be okay.
I am too old to be read to these nights, but I am sad and don’t know what to do about it. I get sad looking at Baba. I get sad looking at Maman and her tired eyes. I get sad that my brother is starting to feel the struggles of being a new immigrant. I get sad that my sister has moved to her nice house, but is no longer around me everyday. I get sad that there are people whose children are still away from them and they work two jobs to make ends meet and have it a lot worst than I do. I get sad that I am like this instead of being a really happy young woman.
When I was little, I knew how to be happy.

Baba has been asking how I am lately. He notices when I am not okay. I sat next to him the other day when I was upset. I put my arms around him and rested my cheek against his smooth face. For a while, neither of us said anything. Then he said, “why are you upset? I am unhappy when you are upset.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. All I wanted to do was cry, which I later did when I went back to my room.
My Baba has a lot of doctor visits these days. He had a cataract surgery recently. I drive him and sit with him at the various offices. He likes that I go with him and always thanks me. He is anxious, a lot. He keeps losing weight and worries about his health. He gets nervous in the car. I try to convince him that he will be okay, but he focuses on his worries.
My Baba ages everyday that I am with him. Last night, I looked at his old photos when he was much younger, much healthier. He was a different person in the photos, always wearing the best outfits, the nicest suits with a matching tie, always around people, colleagues, friends, traveling, laughing, attending events, meetings, giving speeches. He looks important in these pictures. His hair is jet black and gelled up in a chic style. He even has nice abs in some of his beach pictures.
Aging is inevitable. I guess I can’t stop it from happening. I just have to be here when I am, be present and hopefully happy so he is happy. My Baba asks how I am and I want to say I am the happiest girl because I have him.

I have, like my mother, sister, brothers, and many other Iranian men and women, buried a lot of memories. But because I have an exceptionally good memory for details, I only bury them. I can’t completely suppress them, and being a writer, I wouldn’t want to.
As an immigrant, I have buried the first three, maybe four years that I began my American life. I buried them only because I was ashamed, then. Because I was close to nothing. Because my mother and father embarrassed me. Because the three of us together anywhere in public meant confusion, miscommunication, and sometimes followed by stares of strangers. I buried them because I felt inferior to my peers. I was the one who barely spoke English. The one who was so quiet, smart, but quiet.
My family, along with many others, have been through tougher times. Times that required them to not only bury, but suppress memories. Memories of war, prison, execution, revolution, protest, and many other bloody ordeals. These are the times that force suppression. Being an immigrant, compared to their pains, is almost incomparable.
A lot of times, feeling inadequate to their sufferings and troubles, I tried to make myself suffer in my own ways. I tried to live hard so that I could too try to feel their sorrows. I tried to really become significant in my own existence. I wrote and wrote and read and read and cried and began to suffer. But in the end, my mother was still a more troubled victim than an 11 year old who owed nothing to the world, but had only begun to take a lot from it.
To the 11 year old, the little troubles of adapting and changing and learning a new language, were hard, but with the promise of better things in a very near future. To a mother who had lived most of her life in pain, and raised four children, suffering was simply too great to reach.
Today, we, my family and I are trying to unwrap many of our buried memories. I am trying to go back to those years, write them out, even the most embarrassing memories that I thought I would forget but never did. I remember so well I can attach a face to each one, sometimes even a name. But the people whose names I remember will never know me because I was invisible then. So invisible I didn’t even see myself.
We are invisible no more. We, as a nation, as Iranian women and men will no longer be invisible. We may know how to suppress and bury memories, how to keep secrets, how to seal our lips, but we also know how to raise our voices when the time comes.

The city wraps me in its arms. The subways take me on an underground journey. Faces pass over me. Their reflections in the dirty windows. My reflection: a sad girl. I am floating, wrapped in the arms of a stranger. This is my home. This is not my home. As the subway shakes and we collide against the rails, against time, against energy, I lose myself. I think of the first time I started living here in the city of my dreams. Not anyone else’s dream. I know this city is most people’s dream. But it’s a different dream for me. Or it was. For me it was about me. I had to do something big. I had lived the immigrant life. I had learned to love two cultures inside me, two parts of me that collide everyday, that want to fight me. I love the parts in me that are different. I love the Farsi I have kept, the mother tongue that I speak, the way I can also write poetically in three languages if I let my heart speak. I also love my dreams in English. I love that it’s still a learning process, that I find new challenges everyday, as a writer, as a bilingual, as a woman. But in order to dream big I had to challenge myself even more. I had to break away from family because I had to feel like I could do it alone. I had to let go of my mother’s hands. My mother, who was with me every step of the way, as we climbed together, as we taught each other how to speak the new language. When I cried, she cried with me, she felt my pain, she told me I could do it, she believed in me. I had to dream big, not just for me, but for her. I dream for my father, the man who made me want to love the America he was in love with. The man who broke away to give me something better. The man who is many years my senior, but who always follows close by, always by my side, always on my side. Many people dream. I made mine come true. I took the city by the fingertips and I hoped to become something. I was in the biggest delusion. I was dreaming bigger than I intended. I dreamed for the wrong reasons. Maybe.
The subway takes me underground. Everyday. I am doing the same thing. I am repeating myself, over and over, everyday envisioning that I may be growing. But I am not so sure that I am. I am seeing nothing new anymore. I am just moving, the same, the same. This sameness, this repetition makes me bored, makes me hate myself, makes me feel like I am letting myself down. I have to do something. BIG. I have a gift. It would be insulting to my mother, to my father if I kept living like this. If I became no one. If I did nothing.
What have I become?
I have to take a new route. I have to walk a different street. But then what? What will I see? How will my perspective on life change? How will I become better? How can I help society? What am I supposed to do? Keep writing? To what end? For what cause?
I do not belong. Anywhere. Nowhere on a map, there is nowhere I can point to and say, this, this right here is mine. Nothing is mine. Not Tehran. Not Madrid. Not Virginia. Not New York. Not Brussels. Not Paris. Not the places I visit, not the places I live, not the places I am. I am no one. I am something. I have no home. I am…
When did I stop dreaming? Maybe I took it too far, with this dream. Maybe I have to wake up and change something. Again. Change.
To what end?

The immigration cycle. The ones who come, again, to start a new life. We have new people in the house, with new dreams. I am seeing it all over again, what they are going through. The first weeks are exciting. There is vibrant energy. Then nostalgia hits, memories are reminisced, bad, uneasy feelings surface. I have been there. I have felt it, in my way. And now they are going to feel it. Those of us who’ve become citizens point them to a direction, give them hope, and help them move forward. This American dream is so bizarre nowadays. These fresh minds who come from an abyss of dictatorship and censorship. They come and write, uncensored. My father says that your homeland is where you are respected, where you are loved. I disagree with my father. I have many homes and while I’ve felt respected, I have also felt alienated and bitter and yet I have called it home. I don’t know if our newcomers have felt alienated yet. This is a cycle. People coming into our house with bigger, broader, more perilous dreams. They come and as soon as they step in, it’s a dream for them. They want to start right away, begin things, write things, dream in English. Meanwhile, I envy them for dreaming in Farsi. I cannot remember the last time I dreamed in my mother tongue. These newcomers want to feel loved right away in a country that doesn’t know them yet. They want to dream for themselves. They want so many things and I am afraid that the excitement will end, that they will soon see flaws, that they will feel desperate. I have felt all kinds of things and don’t want to see them go through those feelings.
Why do we keep dreaming? What happened to our homeland? What happened to us?
I am conflicted, but this conflict is not new, nor is it troublesome. It is something to think about, discuss, and analyze. Perhaps our newcomers will resolve their conflicts before I do, and perhaps then they can help me. I am hopeful for them and I know they will find everything soon. But it will take time. They have to be willing to struggle and go through the pain. They have to learn before they can start dreaming in English.
And I will be here. I will help them. I will hope with them. I will have my dreams in English, converse with them in Farsi. I will be the translator. I will be the interpreter. I will hope that one day we no longer feel obliged to speak a particular tongue, that we can just be ourselves, that something else other than a new land will excite us.

From an early age, I liked to travel to new places because it broke the norm, and in many ways, set me free. The first time I left Iran, I was 10. Mom and I spent three brutally cold months in Brussels. When I talk about it now, she says she felt uncomfortable. She hated being a burden to her son and couldn’t bare to see him struggle. She didn’t like how tiny his place was. She felt, as any mother would, that he deserved better. For me, on the other hand, those three months, despite their coldness, were the most comfortable and gratifying months of my childhood. I have nothing but pleasant memories. I didn’t go to school and had brought all my books with me to teach myself. Mom helped me learn math stuff, but for the most part I did them on my own. My favorite thing was eating European food. I loved eating toast with butter and Nutella. I wasn’t a coffee drinker yet so I indulged in chocolate milk and a variety of European teas. I drank as many cans of soda as I wanted because in Iran they sold soda in plastic and glass bottles for cheap (the cans were pricier). I slept peacefully under layers of blankets because there was no heating. I had dreams about Leonardo DiCaprio because right before I’d left, the Titanic craze had bloomed and my cousins played a joke on me, saying he was going to marry me.
What I never forget is the view from the window, and the view of the lake. I remember the church bells, the first time I ever saw a church. The skies were different, dark, red, and mysterious. The smells were new and fresh unlike the pollution of Tehran. There was a subway train that ran in the middle of the street above ground. It was our main mode of transportation. The first time I witnessed kissing in public, French Kissing to be exact, was on this train. I was by the window and I noticed a couple kissing for a very long time. I didn’t want to stare so I watched their reflection in my window. I thought it strange, but not disgusting. I was just amazed that they could do that in public. When I was home alone, I loved watching T.V. because there were so many channels, uncensored, fun, entertaining programs. I watched television all day. My mother worried. She didn’t know how great it was for me to have such an advantage. We watched Teletubbies together. We thought they were cute and it was a good way to improve our English listening skills.
There was something extraordinary about this new place in my 10 year old mind. Something I couldn’t put my hand on, a feeling so great that wasn’t sad, but merely too great to express. Today, these feelings are more like nostalgia (when I see something beautiful that I know I can’t have). But at that age, this new sensation was just uncommonly good. I was in a place that I didn’t necessarily want, a place I hardly belonged to, but I was completely satisfied. I think that’s the word. I was satisfied. I didn’t want it. I just enjoyed it. It was probably the last time I truly enjoyed something for what it was. There was no nostalgia involved, no obsession to posses it, no desire to become part of it. I guess when you are 10, you don’t care about belonging.
I never felt quite like that ever again. I lived in places, met people, all the while hurting because I knew the moments were transitory. I always knew something would be over when it hadn’t even begun.

I am not in love anymore. I am not bewildered by the city, but by my inability to feel what I felt once. I hardly look up as I make way through puddles on streets and sidewalks. I have lost interest. I don’t feel protected or loved or wanted. I am beaten by an imaginary force. I am alone. I have no home of my own. I have become pieces of an indistinguishable territory.

I always wanted something different. Even as a child, my mind was elsewhere. In the happiest moments, I wanted something else because I knew how transitory that moment was. I looked at those around me and tried to understand how they were happy. I didn’t know that they may have been feigning it. I envied adults because in my eyes, they had everything. I envied my teachers because I assumed they liked what they did, and because they appeared confident.
During celebrations, gatherings, I joined in, but with a different mind. I laughed, but also wondered about what would happen when everyone left and the party was over. I wondered how I would go back to my routine. I wondered how the house would be quiet once again.
I am still in search of something that I can’t explain to anyone or even to myself.