In Persian, silence is my mode. In Persian I mean the language, but also all that accompanies it. The cultural cues and expectations; the embedded implications of history; the repertoire of vocabulary with layered meaning. In Persian I have roles that I embody that don’t come up for me in other areas of my life when I exist in other languages. In Persian I am a decorous daughter; an ambassador for the family name; an “American” among “Iranians;” an “Iranian” among “Americans.”
I speak Persian and grew up in an exclusively Persian language household. And yet, when I’m with Iranians of the older generation, I’m outside of all language. I can’t recruit the right words or expressions to get to what I want to say. (If I say something, do I speak in English which helps me gets closest to how I feel, but this surely wouldn’t be understood by them.) Or do I attempt to explain in Persian, where I suffer for vocabulary and speak with a hint of a khareji accent, as a foreigner.
I remember pieces here and there about our departure from Iran. The ride back from the Mashhad airport after having dropped Baba off at the gate. The quiet silence of my five-year old mind amid the chaos in the car that day. The questions asked and quickly dismissed.
(It’s mysterious that I can remember anything at all from that age, now a slippery vestige of my mind.) Neither the departure, nor our arrival to the U.S. was grand I remember, or at least, this is how I remember it.
Our family’s emigration journey began in Mashhad with Baba’s departure in 1982. Baba left a year before Maman, Arash and I. My brother Arash was four years older than me. He was eight and I was four when we drove Baba to the airport on a breezy, pleasant afternoon, the car fast, hugging the curved roads. I sat on Maman’s lap, no seat belt strapped against our bodies. Our hair blew wildly in the wind that circulated through the car, dusting each of us with a touch of smog before swirling back to rejoin the city air. I played with the car door handle. I stuck my hand out the open window, riding the waves. Perhaps it was the same wind that carried Baba’ s plane to America after we dropped him off. It accompanied Maman, Arash, and I back to our house in Mashhad. I don’t recall who else was in the car that day. Probably a maternal uncle driving. Maybe my Khaleh Esmat, one of my mother’s older sisters.
“When is Baba coming back?” I asked.
They all laughed. “Maybe never…” they said, as if responding to the wind.
Their reply wasn’t in jest. Baba never came back. As we drove him to the airport that day in the midst of the cultural revolution in Iran, no one knew what would unfold in the subsequent years. The adults in the car had already envisioned the possibility that Baba may never return to Iran. They had contemplated a worst-case scenario.
About a year after that car ride, Maman, Arash, and I packed up the house, gave a key to one of my aunts, and left Mashhad too. We flew to Cologne, Germany to stay with my uncle Ali, where we could access the U.S. embassy to arrange for paperwork to reunite with Baba in Virginia. He had gone ahead to look for work and fix up an apartment to welcome us. He had also applied for temporary residency with the Immigration and Naturalization Services. His status would mean that the rest of us could also become U.S. residents.
I say packed up, but really there was no packing. We could only take a couple of suitcases, under the guise of a short European trip so that the government wouldn’t think we had escaped to America in the midst of the revolution. Maman was a high school chemistry teacher at the time. “Our trip to Europe is a short summer vacation to visit my brother,” she told her coworkers. We were lucky to get out in 1983, only a few years after Khomeini and the Islamic government took control of Iran in 1979.
Maman sold some of her possessions for cash but left most of it behind at the house in Mashhad. She thought she’d be back there soon, to do a proper move. She sold some of her jewelry, giving the rest to her sisters for safekeeping. Iranian women traditionally receive gold jewelry on their wedding day. Even those who are not well-off, like Baba’s parents who were farmers in a nearby village , had stashes of gold that they could gift to Maman.
Traveling with a handbag full of gold would no doubt be suspicious. Cash and clothes packed more easily, discreetly. Years later, after we had settled in the U.S., with each visit by an aunt or my grandparents, they brought a piece of her wedding gold or one of Baba’s world champion wrestling medals. After Baba left his village, he wrestled in three Olympics and several World Championships. Bits and pieces of our family heritage finally coming together, coalescing in Virginia.
Still today, so many years later, Maman insists that I buy gold. As much gold as I can get my hands on, she says. “It’s for financial security.” She regularly buys more gold when on vacations visiting Istanbul or Cairo, where it’s cheaper than the U.S. There’s a well-developed secondary market for gold in those countries. Artisans can also melt down old pieces to make new ones. Where there’s political instability, the cash in your wallet could depreciate at any moment, so people want to hang on to gold. You can feel its weight in your hand. The value easily crosses borders. My birthday present each year is a piece of jewelry from Maman’s personal collection.
For me, remembering to put on jewelry is a chore; and I can’t be bothered to find a safe keeping place. As a teenager, I lost several pieces, having a hard time keeping track of my gold earrings in between gym class and the next bell. Besides, I’m not convinced that my dollars will suddenly go limp one day. I was guilt-ridden each time I lost a piece. I thought of how these items that seemed so deeply personal to her would just slip through my hands in my hectic American life, though she didn’t give me a hard time about it She just gave me more.
I have pieced together scenes of our departure as I picked through pictures, conversations, and partial details I’ve pried out when asking my parents before they meander off topic. They love to talk about Iranian politics, but when it gets personal they can’t seem to focus, as if they were never there in the first place. Selling her gold, dividing valuables among our family members, tidying the rest of the house to make it look like we were going on vacation – these details took years for me to understand. Usually when I ask why we left, I get political generalizations: “Those fundamentalists ruined our country,” or, from Baba, “People looked up to me, I had to find a way to fight. Leaving was my only choice.” Often, it’s accompanied by “We left for you and your brother. You are our entire life, we came here so you could have a better future.”
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N.S. Goli is a writer born in Iran who immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s with family. The author currently resides in Virginia, researching and teaching as a business school professor while writing a memoir about identity and belonging among the Iranian diaspora.
Lightwood 