Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card

by Sara Saedi

  I’m so incredibly proud of you. I can’t tell you what it felt like to drive you to school in your cap and gown—and to see how many kids obviously love you at that school…I remember it like it was yesterday when I took you to orientation. I was so nervous for you then—going to a school where you didn’t know anyone. But look how many friends you made, how involved you got, and with straight A’s too!

  See. I told you. Surrogate mom for the win.

  * * *

  *1 The term “anchor baby” refers to a child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that has birthright citizenship, especially when providing an advantage to family members seeking to secure citizenship or legal residency.

  *2 Jewel was a formerly homeless folk singer who gained popularity in the nineties. Her “Foolish Games” spoke to me on so many levels. It felt like it had been written about Evan Parker and me.

  I’m really fed up with people right now. I got my eyebrows done, and the lady was telling me if I ate two lemons a day, I wouldn’t get zits. It’s like telling a fat person about this new diet when you’re really skinny. When I look in the mirror, I agonize about my skin. I think about it constantly, only to hear my parents lecture me on how if I ate better food, I’d have no zits. It’s not that easy. They never had bad skin. They wouldn’t know. Screw them. If they ever read my diary, this entry will tell them how their comments are eating me up inside, probably causing more zits.

  —Diary entry: August 29, 1996

  “There’s something we need to talk about.” My mom said the words in a tone most would reserve for a cancer diagnosis.

  “Okay…,” I replied.

  My stomach plummeted as she slowly approached my bed and sat next to me, subtly avoiding eye contact. It was evident from her cagey behavior that, whatever the topic, this conversation would not end well. Which left me with one option: jump out of my second-floor bedroom window. Before I could appropriately measure whether risking death or a spinal injury was a worse fate than an uncomfortable mother-daughter exchange, she dropped this bomb:

  “I’ve been thinking about it, and I want you to go on birth control.”

  What. The. Hell?

  A conversation about prescription contraceptives was not what I’d expected. At least now I had solid proof that my mom wasn’t reading my diary. If she had been perusing my cursive hopes and fears, she would have known I was a seventeen-year-old virgin who was still fumbling around with masturbation. What made her think that I was going to have sex? None of my friends were on the pill. Not even the ones who were sexually active.

  “Um, I’m not having sex,” I admitted.

  “Oh, I know that,” she said, a little too quickly. “But your khaleh Mandana told me that going on the pill might help clear up your skin. Do you want to try it?”

  At what was a very sensitive juncture in my life, my mom could have told me that cutting off my legs would help clear up my acne, and I would have gladly become a double amputee. For years, my formerly clear skin had been under the occupation of the People’s Republic of Pimples, and I’d done everything to reclaim its independence. I’d tried every over-the-counter zit medication known to man, along with harsher prescription creams like Retin-A or pills like erythromycin that were recommended by my dermatologist. I tortured myself by not eating chocolate for months, hoping that a change in diet would rid my face of pimples. I washed my face three times a day. When the Proactiv infomercials hit the airwaves, my mom paid for a rush order, but even the face wash, toner, and lotion combo couldn’t conquer my clogged pores and whiteheads. Izzy and Paige were also victims of bad skin. We tried facials and mud masks at every sleepover, and took great joy in photographing ourselves covered in zit medicine.

  But of the three of us, I suffered from the worst kind of pimples. The kind doctors refer to as hormonal cystic acne. These are the zits you can feel for days before they fully emerge on your skin in all their glory. And when they do, they’re usually as large as a marble. They’re painful and take months to heal. I tried my best to resist the urge to pop my zits, because I’d been warned that would cause scarring, but they never seemed to go away on their own. I felt like I was in a no-win situation, but the battle would have been much harder to wage if I hadn’t had my closest girlfriends in the trenches with me. It helped to have allies in the fight on our sebaceous glands. We could trade war stories about our latest dermatologist visits and new favorite products. Izzy taught us how to hide our zits with foundation and concealer. Eventually, Paige decided to bite the bullet and go on Accutane, a new acne pill on the market that came with harsh side effects. Paige was on a high dose, and during her shift working at a gourmet grocery store, she started bleeding from her eyes and nose. Her co-workers called an ambulance and she was rushed to the hospital. The experience left her shaken and embarrassed, but her skin eventually cleared up. Silver lining! I was jealous of Paige’s courage. I didn’t think I could handle the risk of bleeding out of every orifice in public, even if it meant no longer cursing my reflection.

  For the most part, I’d been a late bloomer. I got my period after most of my friends, and wore a training bra before I had boobs to support. But I was eleven when I got my first zit. It was in sixth grade (back when I was cool), and it made a cozy home for itself on my chin. I had enough natural confidence to know the best way to survive my new facial deformity was to own it like a boss. I named the pimple Peter and lamented to everyone who would listen about Peter’s poor timing, with picture day just around the corner. I didn’t realize that Peter marked the beginning of the end. My skin would never be the same again. By middle school, I lost the will to be charming and self-deprecating about my faulty pores. It was in eighth grade when I got a painful and prominent red zit on my forehead. I tried to wear a backward baseball cap to cover it up, but everyone knew of its existence. I remember sitting on a bus on the way back from a field trip when a boy from my class shouted, “Hey, Sara! Do you worship Gandhi?”

  Get it? Cause the red zit reminded him of a bindi. I wish I’d had more of a backbone then. I wish I’d shouted back that I did worship Gandhi, because he was a powerful historical figure who helped free India from British rule. I could have yelled back that the Hindu culture was beautiful and that samosas were freaking delicious. But instead, I burst into tears.

  “You’re so sensitive,” the boy said to me.

  “You’re so insensitive” was the best comeback I could muster.

  When I got home, I crawled into bed and wept like a baby. My mom tried to console me, but there wasn’t much she could say to make me feel better. No one else in my family had bad skin. Aside from the occasional pimple, my sister had a perfect complexion. And my brother was far too young to deal with zits (spoiler alert: even puberty didn’t disrupt his skin). Breakouts weren’t a staple genetic flaw for Iranians. We were used to imperfections we could fix with plastic surgery or painful hair removal. And that’s why my parents were convinced that it was my proclivity for sweets and aversion to vegetables that caused my acne. When my mom finally learned that hormones were involved, she decided it would be worth putting me on birth control.

  The pill was by far my favorite acne treatment. I felt cool telling my friends that I was taking oral contraceptives. I loved the plastic container the monthly dose of Ortho Tri-Cyclen came in, and that I could keep track of the day of the week by using the turnstile to pop my next fix of estrogen. Even though I wasn’t having sex, I was religious about taking each dose at the same exact time every day, like the instructions suggested. It didn’t matter if my clitoris continued to elude me, I felt like a grown woman. I didn’t even care that the first few pills of the month would make me so queasy that I had to bolt out of class and vomit in the bathroom. I was a badass. The extra estrogen did help clear my skin some, but not to the extent that my mom and I were hoping.

  My traumatic experiences with bad skin happened before terms like “fat shaming” and “slut shaming” were invented, but even today, no one seems to me
ntion that skin shaming also exists. Most people had the sense not to share a dieting trick with an overweight person, but no one seemed to think it was wrong to share their acne remedies with me. I had more than a few unsavory experiences with peers and adults who were quick to point out my problematic skin. For starters, there was the time a buxom blond cheerleader with flawless skin and adorable freckles very loudly declared in science class that students with acne should “just wash their faces.”

  It didn’t matter if I scrubbed my face daily. I knew that the kids with perfect skin were just as blessed as the ones who were naturally thin.

  And then there was the Persian eyebrow threader who decided to dole out skin advice while she kept my evil unibrow at bay. Threading hurt like a mother, and my eyes always watered from the unbearable pain. But on the day my eyebrow threader suggested that if I ate two lemons every day I’d get rid of my zits, the tears that filled my eyes weren’t just from the agony of tiny hairs being pulled out by the root. I did try to eat two lemons a day, but it didn’t work. Fine, maybe I only tried it one time, but I’m still convinced it’s an old Persian wives’ tale.

  But the worst was the time a total stranger commented on my skin. I had pulled into the parking lot of our local pharmacy to run an errand, and checked my skin in the rearview mirror like I often did before getting out of the car.

  “Yes!” I thought to myself. “I’m having a good skin day!”

  I picked out everything I needed at the store, and stood in line at the checkout. A girl who used to live down the block from me was manning the register. I’d always felt bad for her, because she was on the heavier side, and I imagined that wasn’t an easy way to go through high school. An elderly woman was in line in front of me. She turned to me, smiled broadly, and then said, “My grandson has a lot of zits. I can see that’s something you have experience with. Do you have any advice for him?”

  First of all, why ask someone with bad skin to give advice to someone else with bad skin? That’s the equivalent of asking someone with a beer gut for tips on how to get a defined six-pack.

  “Tell him to go on birth control,” I should have said, but didn’t. Instead, I recommended he see a dermatologist.

  The girl at the register looked at me with an expression of utter and genuine sympathy that I’d never seen on another human being before, and quietly whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I managed to say, but I felt like someone had reached into my chest, pulled out my heart, and dropped it in a meat grinder. If I was getting comments about my acne on a good skin day, then I was monumentally screwed.

  By college, I finally decided to give Accutane a shot, but it took two rounds to alleviate most of my skin problems. The medication was aggressive, and I was required to stay on oral contraceptives and to get a blood test every month to prove that I wasn’t pregnant before they prescribed me the next round of pills, since one of the side effects of the drug was severe birth defects. I hated the fact that Accutane made my eyes look perpetually red and my lips feel perpetually chapped, but in the end, it was worth it (for me). I still didn’t achieve perfect skin. Some of my acne scars never went away, but I was much better off than I’d been without it. And luckily, no one had told me yet that adult acne was a real thing. Accutane was discontinued in 2009, though generic versions remain on the market. While Roche, the manufacturer, claimed they discontinued the drug due to the patent expiring, some believe it was the bevy of lawsuits linked to the medication. Aside from severe birth defects, it was also linked to depression, suicidal tendencies, and bowel disorders. It’s probably the most hard-core drug I’ve ever done.

  At least my battle with bad skin felt like a disorder I could somewhat control, but there were no over-the-counter creams or prescription pills that could decrease the size of my famously large Persian nose. For years, my parents and relatives tried to convince me that I’d been blessed with a normal-size nose. I would come to realize that this was a flat-out lie. It was true that the bridge of my nose didn’t come with a hump, but it was still long and bulbous. In profile, my nose jutted way past my chin and upstaged the rest of my features. It quickly became my archnemesis (no pun intended).

  My sister hated her nose, too—hers was smaller but more rotund than mine—and my parents agreed that something needed to be done about it. And so, for her seventeenth birthday, they offered to get her a nose job. I was stunned. She’d barely been allowed to pluck her eyebrows, but they didn’t think seventeen was too young for major plastic surgery? But I also knew that Samira (whom I considered gorgeous) was very self-conscious of her nose. If changing it would really make her feel better about herself, then who was I to stand in her way? I would have preferred that the money go toward a desktop computer, but I decided to keep my mouth shut.

  Nose jobs are a common practice among Iranians. My mom got one soon after she married my dad. Most of my female cousins have gotten them, too. So during the summer before her senior year of high school, my parents sent my sister off to Los Angeles—otherwise known as the plastic surgery mecca of the world. There was an Iranian doctor in Beverly Hills who’d come highly recommended, and he’d agreed to give my parents a good deal. Samira would stay with family in Southern California while she recovered from the procedure. A few days later, we went to the San Jose airport to pick up my sister and to see her new nose for the first time. I was nervous. What if the transformation was so extreme that I wouldn’t recognize her? When she walked out of the terminal, her face was bruised and swollen. For the most part, she looked like the same person. Her nose didn’t necessarily seem better to me, just different. But the surgery did wonders for her self-esteem. She hated her nose so much that she didn’t even wait until college to have the procedure done. She was willing to risk the awkwardness of arriving to school her senior year with a brand-new facial feature. In my opinion, that was just further proof that Sami Saedi was a force to be reckoned with.

  After my sister’s procedure, my parents continued to insist that I didn’t need a nose job. My friends also convinced me that my current nose was just fine. They even threatened to stop talking to me if I got plastic surgery.

  “You’ll look like a different person,” Izzy and Paige would say.

  I’ve already mentioned my ravishing mom. Sometimes my aunts and uncles would look at me and gently slap their cheeks, awestruck by the fact that I looked just like her.

  “It’s like looking at a young Shohreh,” they would say.

  I didn’t see it. My poor middle-aged relatives probably had cataracts. My mom and I didn’t resemble each other at all. But then I stumbled upon old photographs of her in Iran, pre–nose job.

  “Holy shitballs…,” I thought. It felt like I was looking in a mirror. She had my nose. She’d always claimed her old nose was much bigger than mine, but I didn’t see any difference between them. How could my mom tell me I was pretty when she’d looked just like me and had gone through plastic surgery to change her face? What harm would it do if I jumped on the plastic surgery bandwagon? I had aunts who’d gotten face-lifts and even a cousin who’d gotten her ears pinned back. If I joined the club, no one in my family would pass judgment. Back in Iran, nose jobs were a sign of wealth and privilege. Some people liked to walk around the city with bandages across the bridge of their noses, just so people would think they’d gotten surgery. So what was stopping me?

  Fear. Fear that even if it made me look prettier, it would also make me look different. Even worse, what if I liked my old face better than my new face? Getting rhinoplasty wasn’t the same as getting a haircut. Your old nose wouldn’t grow back if you hated the new one. I told myself that I didn’t have to follow the plastic surgery trend that had taken my family by storm. (Plus, I don’t think my parents could have afforded two nose jobs for their kids.) Instead, I would embrace my big nose. Just as Beyoncé sings in her song “Formation,” “I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils,” I would like my Persian nose with Barbra Streisand nost
rils. Yeah, I know Streisand isn’t Persian, but it’s the best pop culture example I could come up with.

  My mom at eighteen.

  Me at eighteen.

  In all honesty, I still hate my nose. There are traits I was self-conscious about in my teen years that I’ve come to embrace in adulthood (my height, my big booty, and my curly hair, for example), but my nose never managed to win me over. When a doctor told me that I had a really bad deviated septum, it seemed like a good excuse to go under the knife. But I never did, and I probably never will. There’s enough about me that doesn’t look Iranian. Almost every Persian person I meet is surprised when I whip out my broken Farsi. Even my name gets bastardized all the time (the ar in Sara rhymes with “car,” not “care”). But my nose is undeniably Persian, and changing it would feel like rejecting the most significant part of myself.

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #4

  What is the deal with Iranian weddings?

  There is no single event for Iranians that has more significance than a wedding. The guest list alone can ruin lives, destroy families, and create deep wounds that take years to heal. This is generally why Iranian weddings are so big. It’s not because we have an array of relatives we can’t imagine not having present on our big day. It’s because we are terrified of offending anyone by leaving them off the invite list. I’ve personally witnessed several family rifts because so-and-so didn’t invite so-and-so to their wedding even though they had the nerve to invite a family friend. If you’re Persian and you want to cut someone out of your life forever, there’s a really easy way to do it: don’t invite them to your wedding or your kid’s wedding or your grandkid’s wedding. I guarantee they will never speak to you again, and after you’ve died, they will visit your grave only to pee on it.