by Sara Saedi
*4 Khaleh means “aunt on your mom’s side” in Farsi.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #3
Why do Iranians keep watering cans in their bathrooms?
Well, this is embarrassing. If you’ve ever visited the home of an Iranian and noticed that they keep a watering can in their bathroom, it’s not used to tend to our houseplants, though that was the lie I would tell my friends when they came over. Sometimes, I even went as far as hiding the watering can under the sink so that none of my friends would even see it. Here’s the real truth:
We use them to clean our butts.
In European countries, most residential and hotel bathrooms come with bidets. The sole purpose of a bidet is to wash your ass, but they don’t have them in America. I suppose Americans like to have dirty butts? Using our engineering prowess, we found a way to replicate the bidet by using a watering can to splash water on our asses. My uncle even travels with his. Now that I’m an adult with my own home, I decided to get in touch with my roots by purchasing my own watering can for my bathroom. Every time I look at it, I feel like a proud Iranian.
Tonight, Kia’s kindergarten put on Peter Pan. Kia was Smee. He was so cute and good. I was so proud of him. Maybe one day, he’ll be an actor…then I’ll be so jealous.
—Diary entry: May 8, 1995
Truth: my younger brother, Kia (named before the car became popular in the States), wasn’t actually an anchor baby.*1 He was more like an accident. Fine, he was neither. If he had been an anchor baby, then my parents would have had him a lot sooner. Instead, they waited eight years after I was born to add another child to our family. Minus the fact that there had been no progress in our immigration status, my parents finally felt settled in the United States. They had their own business, a home, two daughters who could now speak English better than they could speak Farsi, and enough financial stability to afford another kid. Here’s where President Donald Trump might tweet that they were financially stable because they were taking shortcuts and not paying taxes. For anyone who thinks that, let me assure you it’s a bunch of malarkey. My parents received Social Security numbers and work authorizations when they lived in Louisiana during my dad’s college years in the seventies (before the hostage crisis and back when they handed those puppies out like lollipops at a rave). They paid taxes just like everyone else and paid for private health insurance for our family. They were also able to own a business and eventually buy a home (and pay property taxes), which paved the way for a bundle of joy.
Little eight-year-old me cried tears of happiness when I learned my mom was pregnant and I was going to have a little brother. It didn’t quite click that getting a new sibling meant I would give up my coveted spot as the baby of the family. Instead, I would be demoted to middle child. Otherwise known as the forgotten kid. But even without my downgrade in the birth order, Kia was a huge disappointment once he entered the world. When Samira and I arrived at the hospital to meet him, he’d taken a wet poop in his diaper, and his belly button looked like a giant, grotesque scab. The wails and screams that escaped from his tiny mouth sounded like those of a dying litter of meerkats. The hospital room smelled like shit and regret. My sister was so disturbed by the whole thing that she puked her guts out.
Kia and me. (This is also the last time I pulled off bangs.)
Gradually, natural selection kicked in. Kia got cuter, and I decided he could live. My parents like to claim that after he was born, I frequently locked myself in the bathroom and very loudly plotted schemes to run away from home, because no one paid attention to me. But I don’t believe their lies. The way I remember it, I was quickly obsessed with Kia.
During his daytime naps, I’d wait for my mom to take a shower, and then I’d carefully scoop him out of his crib so I could cradle him in my arms. He was so light and precious, and since I had eight years on him, I already felt like he was my responsibility. But no one told me that as the years went on, I’d actually be in charge of raising him. I would be a teen mom and a virgin. Arguably, the world’s most depressing combination.
By the time Kia turned seven, he and I were the only ones left in the house. Samira was off at college, and my parents worked long hours to keep their struggling luggage business afloat. It was on me to pick Kia up from school and walk him home. We’d arrive to an empty house, and I’d make him a snack and force him to watch Days of Our Lives or The Oprah Winfrey Show with me. He was a regular fixture in my life. If friends wanted to hang out after school, it was always with the understanding that my little brother would tag along.
Back when you didn’t know how a selfie would turn out. We were so brave.
When I worked at Baskin-Robbins, he’d occupy a booth and do his homework during my four-hour shifts. When I got a higher-paying job at Gap Kids, he’d hang out at the mall, try on the latest in children’s fashions, and eat his way through the food court. Toward the end of high school, I landed a barista gig at a popular local café, and Kia came to work with me almost daily. I supplied him with coloring books and bottomless hot chocolates. And I also forced him to wipe down the tables and help me mop. The kid was better than cheap labor. He was free labor.
In many ways, Kia was the outlier of our family. He was the only boy, and far younger than my sister and me. He didn’t have to lose sleep over getting deported. He became an American citizen simply by being born in the United States. That, my friends, is a shortcut. But if our application for permanent residency got denied by the government and we were shipped back to Iran, then Kia’s citizenship status wouldn’t make a difference. There was no way we would leave him behind. He would have to come with us. His ability to live in the United States depended on our ability to live here. But that didn’t change the fact that he never had to put up with long lines at the INS, mountains of paperwork, and a baseline fear that we could get escorted out of the country at any moment. Even though he was only in second grade, he was technically free to backpack through Europe, or go on safari in Africa, and breeze through customs upon his return. He was eligible to run for president of the United States…though he’d probably have a better chance of getting elected if he’d been raised by a pack of wolves than a pack of illegal immigrants. Most of all, he didn’t have to go to any humiliating lengths to get a green card like I did.
If you want to see a teenage illegal immigrant’s already fragile self-esteem hit rock bottom, just take them to get their passport photo at a location where they might run into someone from high school. This wasn’t just any passport photo. It was a picture to renew my Iranian passport. Post-revolution, Iran had issued a new form of birth certificates, and we needed to secure replacements. In order to make that happen, I needed to send an updated passport photo to the Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was housed in the Pakistani embassy in Washington, DC. Those details aren’t important. What really matters about this story is that I had to sport a head scarf in the photo. I was filled with anxiety as my mom drove Kia and me to our local Photo Drive-Up. The store doesn’t exist anymore, but back in the nineties, you could go there to develop photos and rent movies—two activities that are obsolete today, hence its disappearance. I don’t know why Photo Drive-Up enjoyed torturing their customers, but they made you take your passport photo out in the open—so that anyone perusing the new-releases aisle could watch. Since my parents didn’t raise us Muslim, this was the first and only time I ever had to wear a scarf to cover my hair. I didn’t have anything against people who chose to wear a head scarf. It was a perfectly good solution to a frizzy-hair day. Plus, I’d grown accustomed to the eclectic collection of scarves Mamani used to cover up her gray curls. But my hair was one of my most acceptable features. It distracted people from my large nose and the signature Persian dark circles under my eyes.
My passport photo. (Fun fact: September 21, 1980, is not actually my real birthday. I’ll explain later.)
Maybe if I weren’t an atheist, God wouldn’t have punished me by having one of the most popular gir
ls in school walk into Photo Drive-Up at the very moment my picture was being taken. My heart nearly stopped from the public humiliation once she spotted me. I suddenly felt exposed.
Today, the photo no longer embarrasses me the way it did when I was a teenager. Sure, it’s not the most flattering image, and I wish I’d never gone through a dark-lip-liner phase, but there’s absolutely no reason to be embarrassed for sporting a head scarf. Muslims also had it somewhat easier back then. My grandmother never got harassed when she walked around our neighborhood in her head scarf during the mid-nineties. There had been enough distance from the hostage crisis of the seventies, and the Gulf War of the early nineties. September 11 hadn’t happened yet, and we were decades away from living in Trump’s America. The Muslims I knew didn’t have to be afraid to be seen in public wearing the hijab the way they are today. If I had to do it all over again, I would have proudly ignored the confused glances from the popular girl from school, but in the moment, the only thing that got me through the photo shoot was Kia standing on the periphery, giggling at me. He was so amused by my new look that it was almost impossible not to find the humor in the situation. Which only irritated the photographer and made the shoot take even longer, since I wasn’t supposed to smile in the picture.
Most days, I didn’t resent the fact that my brother spent a lot of time in my care. My parents didn’t want to be absent, but they weren’t left with much choice. They had a mortgage to pay, on top of college tuition for my sister, and that meant working overtime. Our setup was typical of most immigrant families: the mom and dad tried to make ends meet, while the kids took care of each other. And even with their busy work schedules, my dad was still able to find time to coach Kia’s soccer team, and my mom still chaperoned Kia’s school field trips and attended all his games.
But as long as I was in charge of “raising” Kia, I decided I would also mold him into the world’s most sensitive boy. I didn’t want him to be self-involved and distant like the stoner boys I pined for in high school. If it were up to me, Teen Kia would treat girls with love and respect. He would be a stand-up guy. He wouldn’t string anyone along. And that’s why every time I was faced with yet another setback in my romantic life, I’d purposely break down in tears in front of Kia. I’d make him pinkie-swear that he wouldn’t grow up to be an asshole. I thought if he witnessed my rocky mental state, he’d come away with a unique understanding of the female psyche and would tread carefully with other people’s hearts. It probably just made him think women were certifiable.
I may have gone a little too far in the parenting department here. By second grade, Kia was a hopeless romantic. When I picked him up from school, his mood was dependent on how much time he’d spent with his grade school crush. If they flirted during recess, then life was good. If she paid attention to one of his friends instead, he was devastated. I tried to tell him that he was young and that there were a lot of fish in the sea, but it was little consolation. Thanks to me, even in adulthood, Kia has been known to call me in tears over a girl or a breakup. I didn’t tell him this, but there’s a good chance he suffered from PTSD from all the times I forced him to watch me sob over a boy while listening to the song “Foolish Games” by Jewel*2 over and over again.
If my sister was more guarded with secrets until I got older, then I was an open book with Kia. He hadn’t even reached double digits yet, and he had a detailed account of every high school boy I loved. He knew which girl from my clique I was most closely aligned with, and which girl was currently in friendship purgatory. But trusting him with the classified details of my heart turned out to be a rookie mistake. At fifteen, there were few things worse than your crush’s identity being revealed to the rest of the school. My girlfriends and I were very sly at keeping the objects of our affections on the down low. We never wrote their names in notes, in case the notes fell into the wrong hands. We resorted to secret code names like Wallace (for the boy who was obsessed with the movie Braveheart and William Wallace) and Checkers (for the boy who wore checkered Vans) whenever we discussed any of them aloud. And we made it abundantly clear that if any of us squealed to members outside of our inner circle, it would be a friendship ender.
Kia knew all about my love for Evan Parker (code name: Samson, for his long hair). Even my parents knew about Evan. I talked about him nonstop. I had no interest in other guys at school. He was the only person for me. But even though we never dated, our friendship was wrought with conflict. Whether Evan knew it or not, he hurt me on a daily basis by dating other girls or referring to me by unflattering nicknames. One day his gorgeous Asian girlfriend pointed out in Spanish class that I was the spitting image of Anne Frank, and he enthusiastically agreed. Don’t get me wrong: Anne Frank was a hero. Her diary entries were far more profound than mine, and bravely put a face to the millions killed in the Holocaust. But I still knew that when you referred to a girl as Anne Frank, it probably didn’t mean you wanted to get into her pants.
Either way, aside from the few lapses in sanity when I considered revealing my true feelings to Evan, I was mostly desperate to keep my love for him under wraps. I was terrified that if he knew how I felt about him and didn’t reciprocate my feelings, then we’d cease to be friends. My besties guarded my secret feelings with their lives, but it was my little brother who accidentally let the cat out of the bag. School was done for the day, but I’d brought Kia back to campus so I could hang out with Izzy. We ran into a boy named Ben, who happened to be one of Evan’s best friends. I had hoped cozying up to Ben would give me some indication as to whether Evan had any interest in me, but Ben wasn’t exactly the most verbal of boys. He mostly talked about his love for playing the drums and why Neil Peart was a rock god. I never brought up Evan on my own, because I worried it would be obvious that I liked him as more than a friend. But since Kia had witnessed a bevy of my mental collapses, he considered Evan a raw wound. He was trying to be a supportive younger brother, but he totally blew up my spot instead.
It happened so fast that I didn’t even see it coming. Ben mentioned Evan’s name, and before I had time to react, Kia piped in with:
“How dare you mention that name in front of my sister?”
It was my fault. If I hadn’t made him watch so many episodes of Days of Our Lives, he wouldn’t have developed a nasty habit of speaking in the vernacular of a soap opera villain. I was caught. I was mortified. It was obvious by Kia’s melodramatic tone that the Evan topic was off-limits because I was (a) madly in love with him and (b) deeply scarred by him. Ben tried to gracefully change the subject, but we both knew I’d been exposed. In that moment, I would have done anything for a customs agent to appear and drag me away to the airport. I would have gladly packed my bags and moved back to Iran just so I would never have to see Evan or Ben or Kia ever again.
Izzy and I let Kia have it once we left Ben and got in my car. I screamed at him so loud that he started to cry and mumbled apologies as his chin trembled. But I wouldn’t stop. In that moment, any deep-rooted resentment I had for being trailed my whole life by my younger brother came to the surface. Why did I have to take care of him? Why did both my parents have to work? Why did they even need to have another kid in the first place? I didn’t speak to Kia for days. Everything seemed status quo at school, so I never found out if news of the awkward exchange reached Evan. Eventually, I forgave Kia for his mistake and apologized for yelling at him, and returned to my favorite hobby: lying in bed and listening to depressing songs that perfectly captured my longing and despair. My all-time favorite was “It Ain’t Me Babe” by Bob Dylan. I’d often close my eyes and pretend that Evan was the one singing to me.
I would still have Evan Parker on my mind the night before I left home for college. I’d begged my dad to take Kia and me to a Bob Dylan concert, even though the venue was a long trek from our hometown. It was cold and windy that night, but we bundled up in a blanket on the arena’s lawn as we listened to Dylan’s gravelly voice. It didn’t sound the same as all the CDs I’d been
listening to. Kia was probably the youngest person at the concert, but I wanted my last night with my brother and parents to be memorable. We left the show worn-out and weary, knowing that the next day I would be gone and Kia would go from being the baby of the family to an only child. The University of California, Santa Cruz, was merely a forty-five-minute drive on the curvy roads of Highway 17. Izzy and our other best friend, Paige, had also enrolled at UCSC, so I took some comfort in knowing I wouldn’t be surrounded by strangers. The close drive would make it easy to see my family on the weekends, and I promised Kia he could come visit whenever he wanted. I already knew I’d had a hand in turning him into a sensitive kid, but I never expected him to go into an ugly cry when we said good-bye outside the dorms. Only three years before, I’d broken down when we took Samira to college. I knew Kia and I had a close bond, but I never realized quite what I meant to him until that moment. He wasn’t just losing his sister; he was losing his surrogate mom. He would come to visit a bunch of times, which made him the only ten-year-old who showered and brushed his teeth in our dorm’s coed bathrooms.
It’s possible my parents hadn’t been lying. Maybe I did spend hours in the bathroom after Kia was born, fists clenched, shouting to the heavens that I’d been dealt a crappy hand. But it turned out the notion that being a middle kid was a form of child abuse was greatly exaggerated. In my experience, being the middle child meant straddling the best of both worlds. I got to experience what it was like to have an older sibling take care of me, and I also got to experience what it was like to take care of someone else. Years later, after I’d settled in Los Angeles, Kia enrolled as an undergrad at UCLA, and we picked up where we left off. With me as the worried mother figure who consoled him over bad breakups, and him as the sensitive kid who listened and supported me through my meltdowns. All my plans for him had come to fruition: he’d grown up to be a stand-up guy. My job was finally done. At last, I had proof that I’d raised him well. But that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. I recently stumbled upon a card I wrote to him for his eighth-grade graduation and was reminded that, even at thirteen years old, Kia was on track to becoming a good person. Here’s an excerpt:
