by Sara Saedi
By 1982, with the hostage crisis finally over, but with no end in sight for the Iran-Iraq War or Khomeini’s rule, my parents decided to peace out of the Middle East. They feared that Iran was never going to be the same again, and didn’t want their children growing up without the freedoms they’d been afforded. There was only one problem: the borders were closed and no one was permitted to leave Iran. But my parents decided to take any means necessary to get us safely out of the country and to the United States. They chose the United States because they’d already lived there for a period of time, while my dad was in college. It also helped that my uncle had settled down in California and was willing to take us in. I suppose they had other options. They could have bided their time until the borders eventually reopened or gone through legal channels to get us green cards before we left Iran, but that would have likely taken years. With the country in upheaval, waiting would have meant putting their children’s lives at risk—a gamble they weren’t willing to take. Luckily, my dad had a friend with government ties who could secure us passports and special permission to leave the country, for a grand total of $15,000 (for my family, this was a small fortune). Only my mom (aged twenty-seven), my sister (aged five), and me (aged two) would apply to leave the country, since it was far more likely they’d grant us permission. If my dad were to have come along, the government would have assumed we were leaving our homeland for good. If he stayed behind in Iran, they figured my mom would return to her husband. The plan was that my baba would eventually find a way to follow us to America once it was safe for him to leave. In the back of their minds, I know they hoped the unrest in Iran would settle down, and we might be able to return to the country before our US visitor’s visas expired.
Due to the perilous nature of our trip, we weren’t allowed to inform family members we were leaving until the eve of our flight. I don’t remember our departure, but I can only imagine what it was like for my grandmothers to hug and kiss their grandchildren farewell with no assurance that they’d ever see us again. My mom said good-bye to her husband of eight years and the love of her young life, neither of them wanting to acknowledge it could be months or years before they’d be reunited in America.
Looking back on the stories I’ve heard from that time, I often wonder how my maman survived it all. She left behind her home, her entire family, and her life partner in a war-torn country to give her children better opportunities. And even though she barely spoke English, she got us all to California (by way of Paris and Zurich, where we spent weeks trying to secure a US visitor’s visa) in one piece. She’s basically the Persian Wonder Woman. Once we arrived in the States, we squatted at my dayee*3 Mehrdad and aunt Geneva’s house in Saratoga, California. My sister and I tried to find common ground with our half-American cousins, but that took a while to pan out. It didn’t help that we’d infiltrated their space and that my sister’s favorite pastime was sending me off to bite them. I guess the rumors are true. Undocumented immigrants are violent and dangerous.
The days without my dad were also seriously confusing for me as a two-year-old. My life was kind of like that children’s book Are You My Mother?, where the lost baby bird tries to find its mom. I developed a habit of pointing to male mannequins in shopping malls and asking if they were my father. But three long months after we left Iran, my dad joined us in the Bay Area. The borders had reopened, and he left the country on a “business trip” to Italy. From there, he’d obtained a visitor’s visa to the United States. But by the time my dad made it to America, I didn’t recognize him. It would take weeks before I would agree to go near him. He says my sudden shyness was one of the most heartbreaking symptoms of being separated from us for so long. But at least we were back together, and our future in California was wide open. Once our visas expired, we applied for political asylum, but after two years without progress, we were told there was no record of our application. What followed was a series of messy, arduous, and complicated attempts at becoming US citizens. And a lifetime of figuring out how to fit in and be cool, without being a total traitor to my race.
God bless capitalism.
* * *
*1 Maman means “mom” in Farsi.
*2 Islamic law (also referred to as Sharia) is a set of moral laws that come from the Qur’an instead of legislation by the people. Some aspects of Islamic law are observed in Iran’s legal system, but today the country mostly operates under civil law, ratified by the parliament.
*3 Dayee means “uncle on your mom’s side” in Farsi.
Lately, I’ve been so ready for Samira to go back to UC Davis. It’s cool when she’s away. I’ll miss her, she’ll come for a weekend, annoy me, then I’ll miss her. I do love her so much, I adore her, I admire her, part of me wishes I was her without the bitchiness, without the stuck-up-ness, without the shallowness, and materialism. But who am I to judge?
—Diary entry: August 7, 1996
I didn’t grow up in a household where the word “hate” was banned from our vocabulary. My parents were far more offended by the word if it was uttered in English and not in our native Farsi, which they tried to encourage us to speak as much as possible. But regardless of the language it was articulated in, I’m not sure how anyone can survive life as a teen girl without dropping the occasional (or frequent) h-bomb. I felt things deeply, and I needed to express those feelings. For instance, I hated swimming during PE and considered it a basic human right to use my menstrual cycle as an excuse to stay out of the water. My PE teacher was a dude and missed the memo that tampons had been invented and that periods didn’t last for three consecutive months. I also hated the fact that my parents permitted me to rollerblade only if I wore a helmet and kneepads. How was I supposed to look cute and athletic with such oppressive pieces of sporting equipment strapped to my body? But most of all, I hated my older sister, Samira. Sami was moody and bossy and didn’t want to have anything to do with me. We fought over everything: who could control the TV remote, whose turn it was to use the phone, and who had dibs on marrying Leonardo DiCaprio. (Spoiler alert: neither of us grew up to be supermodels, so Leo was never an option.)
Our maman seemed mostly unfazed by the bitch-slapping, door slamming, and dramatic decreeing that we’d never speak to each other again. She encouraged us to love each other, but that was like asking Beyoncé and Becky with the Good Hair to hug it out.
“One day, you’re going to be best friends. You’ll see,” she’d say with as much conviction as the Psychic Friends Network.
I worried these assertions could mean only one thing: my mom was secretly hitting the crack pipe. An affinity for street drugs was the only explanation for what were clearly the rantings of a strung-out lunatic.
“She will never be my best friend,” I usually said in response. “I want her out of my life! FOREVER!”
No matter how regularly Samira and I brought each other to tears, my mom swore we’d grow up to realize we couldn’t live without one another. But I wasn’t buying the bill of goods Shohreh Saedi was selling. She didn’t get it. She was the youngest of seven children and had three older sisters who adored her. I was confounded by their relationships. At one point, we even lived next door to one of my aunts and down the street from another…by choice. When you’re a kid and live under the same roof as your siblings, you’re forced to tolerate them. But why would anyone choose to live near their siblings if they don’t have to? If that wasn’t the definition of insanity, I didn’t know what was.
But in typical wise-sage-mom fashion, she turned out to be right. The three-year age difference between Samira and me seemed insurmountable until my freshman year of high school. It was the fall of 1994 when we spent our days on the same campus for the first time since attending grade school together. The country was still reeling from Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the infamous White Bronco chase. The only Kardashian we knew about was Rob Senior. Grunge music dominated the airwaves, with bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden performing mosh-pit-appropriate track
s. Flannels, goatees, and combat boots were in; bodysuits, Hypercolor, and perms were on their way out.
Samira was a senior at Lynbrook High School, and from the moment I enrolled as a ninth grader, her protective-older-sibling instincts kicked in and she took me under her wing. The junior high I’d opted to go to didn’t feed into Lynbrook, but my parents insisted that I attend the same high school as my sister. Plus, Lynbrook (the alma mater of seven of my cousins) was one of the best public schools in the now-famous Silicon Valley, and even though my family couldn’t afford to live in the district, we weren’t going to let our less desirable zip code keep us down. Iranians are nothing if not resourceful. Since my dayee Mehrdad lived in the coveted and ritzy Saratoga neighborhood within Lynbrook’s district, we used his address to finagle our way into the school. It was one of the many secrets that my sister and I kept from authorities. We weren’t living in the country legally, and we weren’t residents of the swanky Bay Area suburb our classmates lived in. If there was anything that terrified us as much as getting deported, it was that the principal’s office would discover our address scam and send us down the road to the rough-and-tumble streets of Cupertino.
While our friends were in on our address fraud, my sister and I preferred not to advertise our undocumented immigrant status to them. I was too afraid of how girls who’d been born in America would judge me if I confessed that I wasn’t supposed to be living in the country. There was one Canadian member of my clique, who always blathered on and on about how her parents had taken the appropriate legal channels to move to the United States. It wasn’t fair that other people lived here illegally, she would say. I didn’t bother pointing out that Canada wasn’t in the throes of a war or revolution. Her family had the luxury of time on their side, because, well, their lives weren’t in danger. I was also fairly certain if she learned about my illegal status, she would enlist her parents to call the proper authorities. I tried not to resent the fact that my friends were all allowed to live in the country. They may have had US passports, but at least I was the only one with the cool older sister.
To simply say Samira was “cool” would be the understatement of the century. My sister and her friends had reached legendary status at Lynbrook. They took #SquadGoals to epic heights. They were a group of eight girls, one prettier than the next. They had cool American names like Jocelyn and Rachel and Ann Marie. They were outgoing and confident, and transcended every high school clique. They had boyfriends who played guitar and sang in bands with names like Liquid Courage. I had a secret obsession with them that predated my days at Lynbrook. For years, I studied my sister’s yearbooks and covertly read the messages her friends scribbled in the back pages. I knew who was dating whom. I knew everyone’s high school crushes. I knew the names of hot senior guys I’d never met before. Seeing them in person was like being surrounded by my favorite celebrities. If Facebook and Instagram had existed back then, the rest of the school would have died of jealousy from the #NoFilter window into their social lives. I know I nearly did.
And though I’d studied them meticulously, I never quite understood my sister’s goddess-like qualities until we walked the halls of Lynbrook together. She moved with a confidence that I had yet to master. She didn’t need a green card to fit in. Everything about the way she carried herself said, “I belong.” I wanted to bottle her poise and bathe in it daily. And when I walked alongside her, I ceased being known as Sara. High school seniors now solely referred to me as “Little Sami,” and I wore the nickname like a badge of honor. I was Little Sami. To me, it was the highest of compliments.
I relished the mornings before school started. My sister forbade me to have a first-period class, because she refused to drive me to campus at the crack of dawn, and I dutifully obliged. We lived in a two-story house, and my parents allowed us to take over the upstairs level. I realize now the proximity was just a clandestine plot to force us to like each other. Every morning, after getting ready for school, we hopped into Samira’s beat-up gray 1988 Toyota Camry, which had been passed down to her from our parents. Live 105 regularly played on the radio as we made the fifteen-minute drive to school. With the windows down and Eddie Vedder singing “Sheets of empty canvas, untouched sheets of clay,” we veered into the massive parking lot and snagged a spot in the front, where only the seniors were allowed to park. Even though I always got lost in the shuffle of tall, boisterous eighteen-year-olds, I loved moving through the quad with my sister. I wanted to stop time. I didn’t want the school year to come to an end. I knew my life would turn to utter crap once the class of ’95 graduated and I’d have to return to a state of complete anonymity.
But my freshman year of high school wasn’t just a significant turning point in my relationship with Samira. It also marked a pivotal breakthrough in our immigration case. Back in 1984, when we learned that our applications for political asylum had mysteriously vanished, we decided to apply for what’s called “adjustment of status,” which is another (albeit slower) route to obtaining a green card. Since my dayee Mehrdad was an American citizen, he was able to sponsor our application for permanent residency. Through that application, my sister and I each finally received an employment authorization card (also known as a “work permit”). The card allows noncitizens the opportunity to work in the United States, and it also enables them to acquire a Social Security number. In the pre–hostage crisis days, you could easily walk into the Social Security office, wait in line, fill out a form, and get a fancy blue card. But now we had to at least prove that we had a right to work in the country, and that was exactly what the employment authorization card stipulated. It had been only a year since I’d discovered we were undocumented, so I didn’t quite grasp the gravity of the day our Social Security cards finally arrived in the mail. My diary entry from November 24, 1994, describes it as “the best day ever.” A friend loaned me his Metallica CD, I flirted with my crush during an earthquake drill, I got an A on a science test, I didn’t have to run much in PE, and:
then, when I got home, I got my social security card in the mail…Days [of our Lives] was really good.
I gave the moment about as much weight as a strong episode of my favorite daytime drama. I had no idea the amount of legal fees and stress my parents endured in order for my sister and me to have government IDs. It had been twelve years since we moved to the States, and now the government finally knew I existed. This was both a relief and totally terrifying. If they knew I existed, then wouldn’t it be easier for them to track me down and deport my ass? Surprisingly, the answer was no.
Unbeknownst to me, we were actually in a temporary “safe zone” from getting deported. Since our applications for green cards were “pending,” the government wouldn’t give us the boot, unless our application was denied.*1 So the stakes were still high. If at any point our application was rejected, we wouldn’t be allowed to remain in the country. On the bright side, my sister and I were now legally allowed to work in the United States. Since immigrant children generally inherit their parents’ insane work ethic, I was thrilled that I could finally make my own living.
My first legally paying gig was at a Baskin-Robbins within rollerblading distance of our house. I thought I’d hit pay dirt. I made $4.50 an hour to eat ice cream all day. I was in high school now, and I had my own job. I was an independent woman. My parents brought home the bacon, and I brought home two free scoops of Pralines ’N Cream every day. I finally felt like a grown-up. I was mature and worldly. I knew how to make a milk shake, and scooping ice cream gave me biceps to rival Michelle Obama’s. The worst part of my day was being forced to wear a visor to work (the world’s ugliest fashion accessory, second only to the fanny pack). But other than that, life was coming up roses.
And from where my sister was standing, I was no longer the bratty thorn in her side. I was now her contemporary. It was obvious why I grew to love Samira once we went to high school together, but she also had reason to take a liking to me. Maybe it was the fact that on the mornings we ente
red campus together, I gawked at her like she was a movie star gracefully making her way down the red carpet. Or maybe it was the nights I kept her company when she received the devastating news that her friends had gone to a party without her. But mostly, it was my undying loyalty. Any of you younger siblings who are hoping to forge a better connection with your older brother or sister, here’s all that’s required of you: don’t sell them out to Mom and Dad. There are exceptions to this rule, but I stuck by it pretty hard.
As a child, I relished reporting my sister’s screwups to my parents. Like the time she called 911 just for kicks—with no thought to the fact that we were a household of undocumented immigrants—and the police showed up at our front door. We said we dialed the number by accident, and the police let us off the hook with a warning. When I wasn’t telling on Samira, I would regularly resort to blackmail, extortion, or torture. I suppose if SAVAK still existed in Iran, they could have hired me to be their first ten-year-old agent. I remember one particular weekend morning when my dad forced me to walk to the grocery store to buy my sister ginger ale, since she had a stomach virus. A virus? Ha. I could smell her hangover from a mile away. I cursed her under my breath as I carried the heavy liters of soda home, and even though she couldn’t keep any food down, I ate a stinky omelet in her presence. I’d seen the trick on a rerun of Roseanne when Darlene tormented a hungover Becky.
