by Sara Saedi
But here’s what my parents actually helped me discover by driving me to theater school every week: I totally sucked at acting. How did celebrities make it seem so easy? There were kids in my class who’d been taking courses at A.C.T. since they were toddlers. They could do Swahili accents and had mastered the Claire Danes chin tremble on cue. They thought improv games were fun, and dropped lines from Tennessee Williams plays in casual conversation. I was just there to get famous and win an Oscar someday. The most riveting performance I gave during the twelve-week session was portraying a stoner at a party. I suddenly began dreading the drive into the city. So when the course ended, I didn’t sign up for more classes. I’d walked away learning a very important lesson: it’s no fun to do things you’re crappy at.
If my parents hadn’t gone out of their way to let me take acting classes, then it would have taken me much longer to learn I was more comfortable (and hopefully more competent) as a writer. My mom and dad failed to point out that writing wasn’t exactly the most stable career, either. Some might say they were supportive to a fault. To prove it, here’s a cringe-worthy (and terribly written) diary excerpt:
March 7, 1997
The other night, my dad told me to write something in my journal. He told me to write: “Tonight at 9:28 p.m. on March 5, my dad told me I would be successful.” Who knows.
— Stereotype 2 —
Iranian parents are REALLY strict.
Like most immigrant parents, my mom and dad made it abundantly clear they had high expectations of their offspring. A common refrain in our household was “We didn’t move all the way to this country so you could ___________.” Fill in the blank with any number of deeds: get C’s on your report card, talk back to us, or leave the house dressed like a cheap hooker. We had a curfew set for 11:30 p.m. and were always told to call whenever we arrived at our intended destination. But we were also permitted to leave the house and go to parties and sleepovers. It might not be the most popular parenting style, but they really believed if they trusted our judgment, then we wouldn’t have the urge to rebel. My sister was the resident troublemaker in the house, but even she was tame compared to most teenagers. She drank and smoked pot occasionally, but she was also an A student and widely known as the most responsible girl in the squad. The one who was most likely to help her friends after they’d passed out from a night of drinking (okay, except at that Aerosmith concert), and the person who usually volunteered to be designated driver.
Most of my American friends had way stricter rules in their households. For instance, my best friend, Izzy, wasn’t allowed to spend the night at my place, because her mom felt there wasn’t enough adult supervision in the Saedi home. That wasn’t entirely untrue. My parents were social creatures, and they figured if I had a friend spending the night and keeping me busy, it gave them the perfect opportunity to go to a nice dinner at the Olive Garden or bust a move at a family party. After all, they trusted me.
But really, my parents abandoned everything they knew and loved because they didn’t want their daughters to grow up with a strict religious code. Why inflict the same rules on us in America? They wanted us to cruise through the quaint streets of downtown Los Gatos with friends. They wanted us to go to dances and parties that included members of the opposite sex. They were okay if we drank, as long as we drank responsibly and never drove. Most of all, they wanted us to take advantage of every opportunity afforded to us by living in the United States.
In my not-so-humble opinion, I believe that immigrants are the true American patriots. We never take living in this country for granted. We still had family in Iran, and we knew how complicated and difficult their lives were under the new regime. Back then, we heard stories of teenagers who were beaten by the police for attending a coed party. My own cousin was arrested and whipped by police for getting caught socializing with the opposite sex. They detained him until my aunt and uncle bribed the police for his release. And that’s precisely why my baba and maman tried to give us the space to live our lives. Why bring their kids to America, and not let them enjoy the freedoms they wouldn’t have been permitted in Iran?
— Stereotype 3 —
Iranian parents are conservative zealots.
Yes and no. My parents were terrified by the thought of their daughters dating, making out with boys, or—God forbid—being sexually active. These were rights they didn’t think I needed from the tender age of fourteen to twenty-five. But even when it came to talks of dating or future spouses, my sister and I were never pressured to marry someone Iranian. My parents knew the dating pool was already small enough and that the only way we’d connect with an Iranian guy was if he’d been raised in America like us. They loved the idea of a guy entering our family who could speak Farsi, but they even warned us against future Iranian in-laws.
“They’re too involved with their kids,” my maman would say. “They’ll just try to stick their noses in your business. You’re better off marrying someone American.” This was a huge relief, since I had officially moved on from Leonardo DiCaprio and had plans to spend the rest of my life with Ethan Hawke.
My parents also considered themselves atheists and raised us as such. They were both brought up Muslim but came to America as infidels. In their opinion, religious rule had damaged the country they once loved. Even though they would say things like Khoda nakoneh (God forbid) and Inshallah (God willing) and Cheghad Khoda Rahm Kard (God was really watching out for us), they didn’t necessarily believe in God or Allah. And they also didn’t understand why we had so many friends who tried to convert us into becoming Christians.
When my brother was five, he returned from a church barbecue he’d attended with a friend and announced “Jesus is in my bones.” My dad was like: “Um, no. Jesus is not in your bones. Marrow is in your bones, and calcium and collagen.” I knew my parents respected other people’s beliefs, but they also considered religion a way to comfort oneself from the inevitable: the eternal abyss of nothingness, obviously. Which is why I had a habit of debating my most religious friends in high school. I couldn’t believe they thought I was going to go to hell unless I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
“But I’m a really good person,” I would remind them.
“All we can do is just pray for you,” they’d respond.
“Fine, while you’re at it—pray that my boobs come in, and that a halfway decent-looking boy with a good heart and kind hands will want to touch them,” I was tempted to respond.
But they did more than pray for me. They actually tried to convert me. It almost worked, thanks to the undeniably holy powers of a hot guy with a skateboard. Our near romance started when one of my best friends, Rebecca, invited me to go to a weekend sleepaway camp with her youth group. She promised it wouldn’t be overly religious, so I agreed to check it out. She lied (which I’m pretty sure was against her religion). It turned out I had signed up for a weekend of prayer and singing hymns about Jesus. But everyone was so generous and welcoming that I tried to keep an open mind about my potential as a Christian. That said, none of the members of the youth camp caught my attention as much as a smoldering boy named Eric, who didn’t seem to know any of the lyrics to the hymns we were singing, either. We made solid eye contact at least four times throughout the weekend, so I think it’s pretty on point to say that he was in love with me. I decided that if he asked, I would 110 percent convert to Christianity for him.
When I came home from the weekend and told my parents I wanted to permanently join the youth group, my dad said I wasn’t allowed. Before you criticize him for discouraging me from Christian theology, keep in mind that he and my mom had negative experiences with organized religion. Their decision to raise us as atheists was no different from another family’s decision to raise their kids Christian or Jewish. Strangely enough, my religious friends were the ones who were either doing all the drugs or having all the sex in high school. Meanwhile, my uterus was lined with dust and cobwebs, and I was certain if I ever tried LSD or m
ushrooms, I would die from an instant heart attack. But according to my religious friends’ strict beliefs, I was the one who would go straight to hell. I still struggle to see the logic in that.
So if this chapter had a thesis statement, it would be “SURPRISE! My parents are cool!” But I can’t neglect the other 25 percent of that pie chart. Their views on sex and drugs are worthy of their own chapter, but there were a lot of other things we didn’t agree on. Starting with:
— 1 —
My best friend’s cleavage
Izzy McConnell wasn’t one of my religious friends. She came from a family of bohemian hippies. At least they seemed bohemian compared to my parents. I loved Izzy’s mom and dad and spent endless hours hanging out at their house. But I found Izzy’s mom to be a contradiction in terms. I once heard her whisper to Izzy that I had left bread crumbs in her porcelain sink. She was notoriously compulsive about keeping their home spotless, and yet every nook and cranny of their house was filled to the brim with tightly organized clutter. (I’d never seen that many Beanie Babies in one place.) Izzy was not allowed to drink, under any circumstances, but Mrs. McConnell had no qualms about Izzy staying behind closed doors with her French-exchange-student boyfriend (a polar-opposite parenting style from my parents). She didn’t allow Izzy to drive in cars with anyone who’d recently gotten their driver’s license, but on the flip side (and unlike the rest of us), she was free to wear whatever she wanted. There was never a “no daughter of mine will leave the house looking like that” conversation in the McConnell home. Izzy was an incredibly talented artist and treated fashion like another form of self-expression. Since Izzy’s mom never threw anything away, she’d kept every article of clothing she’d owned in the sixties and seventies. And since those decades were back in style during the nineties, we had a bevy of bell-bottoms, embroidered hippie tops, and flowing floral dresses to share between us. Some people thought Izzy dressed “weird,” but I thought she was a trailblazer.
Izzy was also well endowed in the boob department and preferred to sport as much cleavage as possible without revealing areola. My parents definitely questioned why Izzy felt the urge to show so much boobage when their daughters never opted for low-cut tops. To be fair, I didn’t have any cleavage. To be less fair, my sister did and she preferred turtlenecks, T-shirts, and flannels. I became so stressed out about Izzy’s boobs that I would pray to a god I wasn’t technically supposed to believe in that she’d choose a less revealing top when she came over to my house. I know, I know, I know. It’s not fair to judge a woman for owning her sexuality. We are not allowed as a society to criticize a person for topless selfies anymore. But back in the nineties, selfies didn’t exist. We lived in a different world. A world where too much cleavage on a high school girl was still disarming. I was never embarrassed enough to ask Izzy to nix the cleavage when she was around my family, but when she did come over in her low-cut tops, it’s possible that my parents started to wonder if Islamic law wasn’t such a bad thing.
I don’t think it was Izzy’s boobs that were the problem. It was what her boobs represented. The fear that my nearest and dearest American friend might influence me in ways they didn’t want me to be influenced. And they were right, because if it weren’t for Izzy, I wouldn’t have loved shopping at…
— 2 —
Thrift stores
My parents never openly discussed their money struggles, but I knew we didn’t have disposable income. Our idea of a vacation was two days of car camping, or a night spent at the Napa Valley Embassy Suites so we could swim in their indoor pool. For most of high school, I had to go over to Izzy’s house to type my papers, because we couldn’t afford a computer. And yet my parents thought I was mentally incompetent for buying clothes at Goodwill. Why did I need used clothing when they were happy to give me a weekly allowance and when, thanks to finally having a Social Security number, I was making my own money? More important, why did I have an affinity for velour sweaters that resembled my dad’s 1972 wardrobe and smelled like someone had taken their last breath in them?
“You don’t get it,” I’d tell them. “Grunge is in.”
The only thing that disturbed my mom more than my clothing choices was my tendency to overaccessorize. Izzy loved rings and wore one on every finger, so I quickly did the same. Subtle and delicate was not the jewelry trend back then. Instead, we wore massive silver rings with brightly colored jewels and plenty of marcasite. The trend continued into college, and my mom’s head nearly exploded when I went to an appointment at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)*1 sporting my collection of sterling silver. I politely told my mom to pull it together. After years of living in the country illegally, I had a sneaking suspicion that my tacky taste in jewelry would not be grounds for deportation.
— 3 —
Bad manners
Iranians give the Brits a run for their money in the polite department. We’re trained to give up our seats to anyone older than us, and to refer to our elders with titles of respect. We never talk back to our parents. There’s like five hundred different ways to say “thank you” in the Farsi language. One of our more common phrases is “Daste shoma dard nakone,” which literally translates to “May your hand not hurt.” You generally say this when someone has cooked you a meal. The worst crime you could commit as a Persian human is to not have hot tea, pastries, cucumbers, nuts, and a basket of fruit at the ready when someone enters your house. Not to generalize, but being OCD about manners isn’t exactly considered a quintessential American trait. And it wasn’t for my high school social circle.
For starters, I had friends who didn’t feel the need to say hello to my parents when they came over to my house. Perhaps they were intimidated by their foreignness, but I can still remember how my anxiety skyrocketed when my mom whispered to me in Farsi: “What’s wrong with your friend? Is she mute? Why can’t she even say hello?”
I had to train my friends to greet my parents the moment they saw them. There were also times I witnessed heated arguments between my friends and their moms that left me in a catatonic state. I couldn’t believe anyone could get away with telling her mom to shut up. I was smart enough to know you were never meant to say such words out loud. You were meant to scribble them in a diary, hidden under the confines of a mattress. But there were moments when my parents reprimanded me, and I tried to defend myself by talking back. Big mistake. HUGE.
“You’ve been hanging out with your American friends too much,” they’d say in their sternest of tones.
You might be thinking: “That’s kind of racist.” Or maybe “really racist.” But one of my parents’ biggest fears after we immigrated to America was that we would abandon the most significant qualities of Iranian culture: our morals, our loyalty to and love for our family, our hospitality, and the lifelong desire to be kind and polite to others. At any sign that these virtues were slipping away, they began to panic that it had been wrong to bring us here. Maybe we would have been better off staying in Iran after all. If you’re still not getting it, just picture what it would be like if you and your entire family abruptly moved to France. Let’s pretend your parents were die-hard patriots. If you came home waxing poetic about socialism and ménages à trois, then they might be a little freaked out, too.
My parents, circa 1996.
In the end, what I respected most about my parents was that when we didn’t see eye to eye on certain topics, we were permitted to have a respectful dialogue. They had brought us to America for the sole reason of giving us a better life, and they didn’t want that life to become an impediment to our relationship. The idea of their children growing up and no longer relating to them was a terrifying prospect. They knew the only way to avoid the inevitable cultural divide was conversation and compromise, even if it took a long and heated debate about the dangers of sterling silver jewelry to get to a place of mutual understanding. No topic was off-limits in our household. As much as their parenting philosophy was “We trust you,” it was also “You can
trust us.”
September 15, 1996
I stayed home tonight and ate Chinese with my baba. I love my family so much. They are extremely open-minded and easygoing. Me and Baba talked about things like boys and sex*2 for about an hour. We had the best conversation. I’m so thankful for my family. I’m so unbelievably lucky. It would be a blessing for me to grow up and become like my parents.
* * *
*1 In 2003, the INS was dissolved into three new entities: ICE, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
*2 I’m 99.9 percent sure the conversation with my dad about sex consisted of him telling me that it’s the only thing guys want and that I can’t fall for their crap.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #2
What do Iranians have against Sally Field?
Sally Field is widely considered one of the best actresses of our time, but she’s been persona non grata with Iranians after she starred in the overtly racist film Not Without My Daughter. It doesn’t matter that the movie was released more than twenty-five years ago, because Iranians have a flair for holding lifelong grudges. The film painted Iranian Muslims, particularly Iranian men, in a very negative light. It pretty much made them all seem like abusive pricks. It was also released at a time when a Gulf war was brewing and when there were no other representations of Iranians in TV shows and movies. There still aren’t very many representations, aside from the occasional terrorist character or the reality show Shahs of Sunset (also considered a form of terrorism to some).
In Not Without My Daughter, Sally Field plays an American woman trapped in Iran with a psycho husband who won’t allow her to leave the country with their young daughter. The film was based on the popular and controversial memoir by Betty Mahmoody, and was critically panned for its racist depictions and Islamophobic tendencies. Though many compared it to a bad TV movie, it had lasting implications for Iranians. In the 2016 New York magazine article “The Not Without My Daughter Problem: How a Sally Field Movie Became an Iranian-American Headache,” writer Gazelle Emami talks to Iranian writer and scholar Reza Aslan on how the film affected his dating life:
