Complicated in Farsi

I remember first seeing Funny in Farsi at Cody's on Telegraph Street in Berkeley several years ago. I was just coming to realise that this whole ethnic thing didn't have to be such a bad thing. In fact, suddenly, it made me a richer, more interesting person. Non-ethnics and Other-ethnics wanted to know what I ate at home, what it sounded like when I talked to my parents and even how to pronounce my name correctly.

This was a drastic about-face from my early days in the American public school system where anything exotic was shunned, especially if it was green and didn't smell like peanut butter and jelly. Needless to say, I learned that lesson well. I assimilated and so did my parents. We took up Christmas, bought a Ford and spoke English to each other, even when no one else was around. It was only then, 20 years later, that I felt like I had lost something--a part of myself, of my parents, of my past that I would never really have again.

When I saw Funny in Farsi, prominently placed on the front table at Cody's, I felt an overwhelming mixture of kinship and sadness. This was my story and it had been told by someone else. I was both afraid and eager to read it. What would this book reveal to me about my own life? But, as a not so financially solvent student, the hardback seriously exceeded my modest means. (You should know that 5 years later, I'll buy another handbag before I shell out nearly thirty bucks for a hardback...patience is a virtue, kids. Wait for the paperback.)

Five years later, on my 29th birthday, I open a delicious looking Seychelles shoebox in breathless anticipation. Inside, I find an unbearably cute pair of sky high wedges with black canvas straps, accented with a little red bow at the toes and adorable polka dot lining. I squeal. Urged to look under the wedges, I found my own paperback copy of Funny in Farsi. A little less excited (I mean, come on, it's polka dot lined WEDGES!), I thanked my best friends, the Millers.

So I read it. I even saved it for a month--as you do with books you're sure you'll love and want to savour it, or is that just me? Anyway, on to the book. I really wanted to have an emotional resonance with this book, the way I had and still do with Lipstick Jihad. But, I just didn't fall into it and maybe that's because it's laid out as quick little vignettes that are more amusing than poignant. It's not that my experience growing up Iranian in America wasn't funny and endearing and precious for having laughed through it with my family. But much of it--the public part anyway--was tinged with awkwardness and loneliness.

And maybe that's how I feel about belonging to a people who are exiled from a country that no longer or maybe never really existed. You can make it humorous, tell your friends how your dad goes by Fred "like Fred Flinstone" and loves shopping at Ralphs everday, having made friends with the butchers and bakers. Or how about the time my best friend in elementary school wanted to know how to get rid of leg hair without shaving and I told her that I had seen my mother use honey to do it? (This is before leg waxing became mainstream and when it was only done by stocky little Persian women in back storage rooms of Persian-run beauty salons). I am happy to report that honey apparently works as well as proper Persian wax. But, my relationship with my lost heritage and growing up in a country that I've come to love very much is much more complex than that and it goes too deep in my self to only laugh at it.

I guess I'll have to keep looking for the answers. Maybe it's unfair to expect a memoir to give that to me. Maybe I need to go to the mountain. That's right, Mohammed's mountain. The homeland itself. Now, how to convince the hubby that we will make it back with all our civil liberties intact?