“Are you having a party, and if you are, why am I not invited?” Izzy asked me over the phone.
“I’m not having a party,” I responded.
“Liar. It sounds like you have fifty people over.”
“Oh, it’s just two of my aunts,” I replied. “They stopped by to see my mom.”
“Why is it so loud? Are they fighting or something?”
“No. We’re Persian. It’s just the way we talk.”
Whenever my friends called our house, they could barely make out my voice on the other end of the receiver and always assumed an impromptu gathering of a dozen or so relatives caused the background noise. What they eventually learned was that “quiet Iranian” is an oxymoron. I’ve never met one. We don’t whisper or use inside voices. What’s the point of saying anything if no one can hear you? Our opinions must be expressed at top volume in order for people to listen. You know when all the cohosts on a talk show speak at the same time and you don’t understand what anyone is actually saying? The industry term for this is “cross talk.” Well, that’s what it was like to be around my mom’s side of the family.
I couldn’t tell you what it was like to be around my dad’s side of the family. With the exception of Mamani, the Saedi contingent lived in Iran for the entirety of my teen years, so I only knew them through stories, letters and photographs we’d receive in the mail, and telephone conversations shouted at the top of our lungs to hear each other’s voices through the shoddy long-distance connection. I never expressed it to my parents, but I dreaded the calls to Iran. I could always tell when my mom and dad were on an overseas call from the way they had to yell names into the receiver repeatedly until they heard someone else’s voice on the other end of the line:
“FAFAR. FAFAR. FAFAR.” My dad would bellow his younger sister’s name over and over again.
“Ugh,” I would vent to my sister. “They’re calling Iran. Again.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to my relatives; it was that I didn’t know what to say. When my parents handed me the phone, I would stretch the cord (yes, phones had cords) as far as it would go for privacy. My Farsi wasn’t what it used to be, and I was ashamed of my now-thick American accent. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was no longer like them. I wanted to have meaningful conversations with my grandma and aunts that captured my sassy humor and penchant for sarcasm, but I couldn’t communicate much beyond the usual Farsi phrases:
“Delam yek zareh shodeh.” (Literal translation: “My heart has turned into a tiny speck,” which is just a fancy way to say “I really miss you.”)
“Jotoon khaley kholly.” (Literal translation: “Your place is very empty,” which is just a fancy way to say “I really miss you.”)
“Be omideh deedar.” (Literal translation: “I hope to see you soon.” We said this even though it had been years since we last saw each other, and we knew there were no visits on the horizon.)
On those phone calls, my limited vocabulary probably made me sound just like a teenage Siri. I’m sure my family in Iran wondered why I followed the same predictable script for every conversation. It wasn’t until adulthood that several family members would become regular fixtures in my life, some of them finally moving to the States and others traveling here more frequently. My cousin Mehdi, who still lives in Tehran with his wife and kids, made his first trip to America in 2015. So when we said “Be omideh deedar” on those phone calls, we had to keep the hope alive for decades before we saw each other. While the Muslim ban was tied up in the courts, Mehdi was denied a visa to visit us, and also his parents, who now reside in California.
But while I was forced into isolation from my dad’s family back in the day, I still had more relatives living in the Bay Area than most of my American friends. My mom’s entire side of the family (the Sanjideh contingent) moved to America after the revolution, and the majority of them followed my dayee Mehrdad to the Bay Area. Each family’s escape plan from Iran would have amounted to disastrous consequences if it didn’t go as planned. All of our departures from the country were dangerous, abrupt, and mostly illegal. There was no time to carefully sift through our prized possessions or to label neatly packed boxes. There were no raucous and lively farewell parties or cakes that read “America or Bust.” We had no choice but to give the Middle East an Irish good-bye. But at least the Saedis got to take an airplane out of the country. One of my aunts had to hide in the back of a truck with her husband and two young children until they were driven miles to the Iran-Pakistan border. They made the rest of the trip on foot in the dead of night, hiking through mountains and rough terrain, terrified that they would be caught and thrown in jail. They were just like the von Trapp family, except they didn’t wear clothes made from curtains or sing catchy songs about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. They made it to Pakistan and eventually moved to Portugal, where they lived until they were able to come to America.
In Iran, the Sanjidehs were an upper-middle-class family. They were raised on a grand scale, living in a lavish home with maids and servants catering to their every whim. But they left their wealth behind when they moved to America, settling instead for tiny apartments and whatever jobs they could get. It was a riches-to-rags kind of story, but everyone found different paths to getting permanent residency in America. I had an aunt who went as far as divorcing her husband and briefly marrying an American family friend so that she could get a green card. But that option didn’t sit well with my parents. Eventually, we became the only members of the Sanjideh clan who lived in the country illegally, as we patiently waited for updates on the adjustment-of-status applications we’d filed through my uncle and grandma.
In the beginning, family was the only thing we had in California. Most of us didn’t speak the language (my mom says I learned English from watching television), and we had trouble adjusting to new customs. One day, I came home from kindergarten confused by the fact that none of my new friends wanted me to smother them with kisses. It’s customary for Iranians to greet each other with a kiss on both cheeks, but American six-year-olds thought no one had taught me about “personal space.” My mom gently told me that Americans preferred to greet each other with a simple “hello” or a friendly wave and handshake. To this day, any public displays of affection make me flinch. I also had more family than I was even aware of. When my kindergarten teachers informed me that my cousin had just joined our class, I blankly stared at the little boy they introduced me to.
“He’s not my cousin,” I said.
I’d never seen him before in my life. It turned out that he was my cousin’s cousin, and my parents hadn’t bothered to tell me he’d enrolled in my kindergarten class.
The eighties weren’t the most ideal time to be a Persian in America. With the hostage crisis still fresh in the country’s minds, we were public enemy number one. The news footage of Iranians protesting in the streets, burning the American flag, and screaming “DEATH TO AMERICA” didn’t really do much to bolster our image. And then came the Iran-Contra scandal, which was the vanilla ice cream on the poop pie. But my parents tried to teach us to ignore any negative perceptions of our homeland. We knew the media didn’t define our culture. What the news didn’t show was that we were a passionate people who loved art and music and poetry. A people who came up with any excuse to throw a party and danced with their hips and shoulders in full swing. And who, above all, put family before anything.
“We’re all we have,” my parents would remind us. “Our family is the most important thing in life. Never forget that.”
I mistakenly thought it was that way for everyone. I assumed my friends also came with a tribe of outspoken aunts, uncles, and cousins they saw on a regular basis. But when my friends would tell me they had cousins they’d never met—cousins who lived within an hour’s drive—I couldn’t help thinking: What is wrong with these cold and detached people? I didn’t understand the concept of a “family reunion.” Our family was always together. There was no reason to reunite. We were regular fixtures at each other’s birthday parties, graduations, and weddings. We were the people who not only lived next door to one aunt but down the block from another. If we could have pooled our resources and bought a compound, we would have happily lived on the same plot of land. We’d been displaced by a war and a revolution, but at least we were displaced together.
I grew up among nineteen first cousins, and they each played a pivotal role in my childhood and teen years. Most of them had several years on me, and I could never shake the feeling that they were privy to family secrets and scandals that I was too young and innocent to know about. To me, they were more than cousins. They were an extended family of siblings, and I was the resident little sister. Some of them corrupted me with nicotine, drugs, and alcohol. Others taught me about sex and the importance of masturbation. One even made my wildest dreams come true by introducing me to the love of my life. (More on that later. Hint: he’s a movie star.)
We were a motley crew of immigrant kids with vastly different personalities (think the cast of The Breakfast Club), but with one common thread keeping us permanently entwined. None of our friends knew what it was like to be raised by Iranian immigrants. None of our friends knew what it was like to be an immigrant. No one else understood the intricacies of our family and what our parents had to overcome just so we could live in America. The struggle was real, and it bonded us forever.
If there’s one person in our family who deserves the credit for the close-knit relationships between us cousins, it’s Dayee Mehrdad, otherwise known as the true patriarch of our massive brood. Mehrdad Sanjideh is a short man with a charming and sophisticated personality. He keeps strange hours and prefers to eat his dinner late at night with a gin martini, so he brings his own Tupperware to parties.
There’s nothing he loves more than being in the center of a dance circle. He dated models and actresses and romanced his stunning American wife after standing behind her in line to use the phone at Heathrow Airport. At the time, my aunt Geneva was trying to find a hotel in London, because the friends she’d planned to visit were suddenly unreachable. My notoriously impatient uncle told her that if she let him use the phone, he’d find her a hotel. He spent the weekend wooing her, and they were married just a few days later. He eventually moved his family from Tehran to Saratoga, California, in the seventies, and we moved in with them when we arrived in America. Shortly thereafter, he started a successful appraisal company with my dayee Shahrdad, and over the years, they employed nearly every member of our large family. Our relatives regularly went to him for advice on their businesses, rocky marriages, or dysfunctional relationships with their children. If our family had a mantra, it would be “What Would Mehrdad Do?”
Well, Mehrdad woke up one day and decided that he wanted his nieces and nephews to grow up as close to each other as he was with his cousins in Iran. And it became his life’s purpose to make that happen. From the time I was seven years old, he planned elaborate gatherings for us at least once a year. We referred to ourselves as the BAD Club, and each letter in the acronym represented our relationship with him. The B stood for “baba,” the A stood for “amoo,” and the D stood for “dayee.” Our cousins club started with day trips to places like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the Egyptian museum in downtown San Jose, or (no joke) the racetrack at Golden Gate Fields. But eventually, one single afternoon together didn’t feel like enough time and the tradition evolved into weekend sleepovers at my uncle’s house. We’d spend the days swimming, barbecuing, and brainstorming sketch ideas we would later put on video for posterity. The videos always started the same way: with each of us entering the room one by one, waving at the camera and introducing ourselves. We were like our own Persian variety show. One sketch included a party sequence where we imitated our parents, but our masterpiece was the Persian Jerry Springer Show. Naturally, my uncle would play the Persian Jerry Springer, and the rest of us took turns playing talk show guests and the rowdy audience members who shouted “Es-springer!” (the Persian-accent pronunciation of Springer) on repeat. The video ended with Persian Jerry Espringer giving his final thought from a toilet seat. Once we grew older and drifted off to different cities, the notion of a “family reunion” no longer seemed ridiculous. So my uncle started a bank account to help fund our gatherings and pay for air travel for those of us who no longer lived near the Bay Area. Most recently, he treated all his nieces and nephews, and their spouses, to a three-day cruise to Mexico.
Aside from my uncle, there were four other people who bonded my cousins and me together. Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Fältskog, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were the members of a little-known Swedish band from the 1970s called ABBA. Here’s the thing. When you’re raised by immigrants, they don’t introduce you to American pop culture. As kids, we usually listened to Iranian musicians. My sister and I would always groan that we much preferred to dance around the house to Madonna or Michael Jackson, but my parents were too busy rocking out to Persian singers like Googoosh or Ebi. There was only one English-singing pop group that played on our family boom box, and that was ABBA. Not everyone fully understands the true power of ABBA, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find an Iranian who doesn’t love their entire catalog of music. To us, they were right up there with the Beatles. They had songs we could dance to at family parties, and ballads that could send you into a black hole of sadness. Their lyrics were about love, heartbreak, guys named Fernando, and places called Waterloo.
Even though ABBA was famous years before I was born, I listened to them religiously as a teen. I didn’t exactly advertise this to any members of the opposite sex. Certainly not Evan Parker, who only listened to respectable classic rock bands. But I turned my American girlfriends onto ABBA, and they became totally obsessed. Izzy and I were the queens of falling in love with guys who didn’t love us back, and nothing else quite captured our heartbreak the way songs like “The Winner Takes It All” or “One of Us” did. If our cousins club was one of our most tried-and-true traditions, then ABBA was a close second. “Dancing Queen” plays at every family wedding, and my female cousins and I push our way onto the dance floor to link arms and sway in a circle together. Sadly, ABBA doesn’t tour anymore—they even turned down a billion-dollar offer for a concert. Both couples divorced in the eighties and the end of their marriages marked the breakup of the band. But their music lives on, thanks in great part to Iranians everywhere.
It’s no coincidence that the biggest die-hard ABBA fans among us were also my greatest role models growing up. Neda and Mitra were best friends who were cut from a very different cloth, and I wanted to cherry-pick their greatest qualities so I could be the perfect combination of the two of them. My cousin Neda is eight years my senior, but she always spoke to me as if I were on her level. She had a way of making me feel like we were the same age, even though I was still in high school and she was a workingwoman in her twenties. She was also one of the kids hiding in the back of a truck headed for Pakistan. After living near each other our whole lives, I was gutted when Neda’s parents moved their family to Colorado, but Neda lasted only a year in another state before she decided to return to the Bay Area. Samira had gone away to college, and we had an extra bedroom in our house, so my parents let her stay with us until she found her own place.
With Neda temporarily living with us, it felt like I had an older sister again. When she learned that I took the public bus home from school, she insisted on picking me up every day. She always arrived promptly in her blue Ford Escort, with a Cappuccino Blast from Baskin-Robbins waiting for me in the front seat. I sucked it down even though the high caffeine content gave me serious anxiety and terrible diarrhea. My group of friends loved Neda. She listened to stories about the boys we loved and the girls we hated, and offered sage and thoughtful advice. Neda was mature beyond her years and had a maternal side even as a child. She was polite and well mannered, and at family dinners was the first girl cousin up from her seat to clear the table and wash the dishes. The rest of our parents looked at us kids and wondered why we couldn’t be more like Neda. Who could blame them? She was a perfect human.
If Neda was considered the “good girl” in the family, then my cousin Mitra was the rebellious black sheep. She and Neda were only a few years apart in age, and even though their personalities were wildly dissimilar, they were inseparable. Mitra was my dayee Mehrdad’s daughter, and half-Iranian. With her fair skin, bright green eyes, and auburn hair, you’d never know she wasn’t just another white girl. All through high school, I referred to her as my “cool cousin.” She always had a string of hot skater boyfriends, an adorable nose piercing, and a shoe rack full of Doc Marten boots. Just like Winona Ryder, she could totally pull off a pixie cut. So what if she had a tendency to run away from home and go missing for days with her boyfriend? The girl marched to the beat of her own drum. She didn’t care what the elders in the family thought of her. I felt cooler just by association. I smoked cigarettes with Mitra. I ditched family parties with her so we could drive to a nearby park and listen to her boyfriend play guitar. She promised me that when I graduated from high school, I could skip college altogether and move in with her. I knew my parents would never go for it, but it was nice to know I had options if my undocumented status meant a bachelor’s degree wasn’t in my future.
But Neda had her rebellious moments, too. She was just better at hiding them. When I was thirteen, they both decided it would be really fun to get me drunk. I suppose corrupting me was everyone’s favorite pastime in my family. My parents were out of town, so Neda and Mitra came over to our house with a bottle of vodka and a two-liter of 7Up. My sister was a veteran drinker by then, but I’d never had more than a few sips of wine and beer. I’d certainly never had hard liquor before. It was Saint Neda who introduced us to her favorite drink: vodka poppers. The recipe was simple: two parts vodka, one part 7Up. You’d stick your hand over the shot and bang it on the counter, and once it started fizzing, you tossed it back. I could barely taste any of the booze on the way down. I was tipsy and happy and seriously shocked when virginal Neda confessed to me that she’d been sexually active for a while (Samira, our cousin Leyla, and Mitra were already in the know). It hurt to know that for the past year, she’d made comments about being inexperienced for no one’s benefit but my own. But I was glad that with high school just around the corner, I was deemed mature enough to know my cousin’s biggest secrets.
In the photo below, taken that night, you can’t see the image of the guy on my T-shirt, but it’s a picture of a young Ethan Hawke. My sister knew I had an enormous crush on him and had my favorite magazine photo of him put on a T-shirt as a birthday present. You may know him as the guy who played the dad in Boyhood, but he used to be a Gen X icon. As far as I was concerned, no other actor could play vulnerable quite like Ethan Hawke, and I fell madly in love with him. I read every interview and saw all his movies. When Reality Bites came out, I was almost angry that other girls were now jumping on the Ethan Hawke bandwagon. My devotion to him started during his Dead Poets Society days. I loved him so much that I named my beloved goldfish after him.
Poor Ethan (the fish) wasn’t very well taken care of. We’d bought him for our Persian New Year altar known as the haft-seen.* Goldfish represented the end of the astral year. Once the holiday passed and the altar was put away, Ethan lived in a small glass mixing bowl that we kept by the sink on our kitchen counter. Izzy was always bewildered by Ethan’s survival. Her mom had bought her two fish, with a gorgeous aquarium to house them in, and they’d both died within months. Despite serious neglect on my part, Ethan had been alive for two years.
“It’s because he represents my enduring love for Ethan Hawke,” I would explain to my friends without a hint of irony (which I can define, because I’ve seen Reality Bites).
As much as I loved every one of my cousins and had significant relationships with each of them, I have Mitra to thank for one of the best days of my life. It was my junior year of high school, and Mitra persuaded my parents to let me play hooky for the day. She refused to tell me where we were going, but after driving for a half hour on 280 North, I suspected we were headed into San Francisco. With no knowledge of our plans for the day, I still decided to wear an outfit worthy of Mitra’s coolness. An old pair of Levi’s that Izzy had given me from the 1970s, a black tank top, black Doc Marten lace-up boots, and the pièce de résistance: a maroon velvet blazer that I’d found on the rack of a thrift store. Trust me, velvet blazers were all the rage.
We had a few hours to kill when we arrived in San Francisco, so Mitra took me out to lunch and we roamed the crowded city streets. We stopped at her boyfriend’s tiny apartment, where I bravely pretended to inhale a little pot, and then we continued on our way. We strolled down Market Street and approached the massive Virgin Records (a place that used to sell cassette tapes, CDs, and books) on the corner. Mitra pretended like there was a CD she wanted to pick up, but when I followed her inside, she pointed me toward a sign and said: “What if I told you this is what we were doing today?”
I nearly fainted. I couldn’t speak. I wanted to burst into tears. The sign had a photo of Ethan Hawke, along with the cover of his debut novel, The Hottest State. He was going to be there in a mere hour to read a chapter from his book and sign copies. I was about to meet the love of my life. I was nearly shaking as we walked up to the register, and Mitra bought us each a copy of Hawke’s book. The cover was a beautiful watercolor of a dripping green heart, with one symbolic drop of red paint. Some critics rolled their eyes at Hawke’s efforts to become a writer, but I just thought it made him even sexier. He was more than just a guy who recited other people’s lines of dialogue. He was thoughtful and intelligent and quite possibly the voice of an entire generation.
“I can’t believe this,” I whispered to Mitra as we waited for the reading to start.
We were among the first to arrive, so we snagged seats in the second row. The chairs began to fill up, and finally, after what felt like several tortured hours, Ethan Hawke walked down the aisle and took a seat in the front at a microphone. I can still remember what he was wearing: a forest-green suit with a black T-shirt underneath. Back when there was no Twitter or Instagram, you had no clue what your favorite celebrities were doing at any given moment, but I remember watching him and thinking, “I know exactly where Ethan Hawke is right now.”
The moment became even more surreal as I scanned the rest of the audience and noticed a beaming Uma Thurman on the sidelines. I’d never been so jealous of any human being before in my life. I knew everything about celebrities (in fact, Izzy’s mom referred to me as the “information superhighway”), but news of the Hawke-Thurman pairing hadn’t reached the magazines yet. Gossip columns had not found their way to the Internet, so we relied solely on monthly magazines for the latest on whom our favorite celebrities were dating.
I tried to stay in the moment and focus on Ethan’s raspy voice as he read a chapter from his book, but I was way too nervous. Once the reading wrapped, we were told to form an orderly line to get our books signed. Mitra stood in front of me. I tried to think of the perfect, most memorable thing to say to Ethan, but my brain had turned to mush. I stood in awe as Mitra casually greeted him and told him how cool it was to hear a writer interpret his own words aloud. I watched as Ethan’s face lit up, and he agreed. There was nothing sixteen-year-old me could say to him that would sound as smart and perceptive. I finally approached the table, and Mitra hung around nearby to observe the moment. All I could think was that my parents were right. In America, anything was possible. In America, dreams really did come true. I opened my mouth and carefully uttered, “I hope I can write like you one day.”
He looked up from the book and said, “Thank you. Thanks so much for coming.”
If you think my memories of the day might be inaccurate more than twenty years later, here’s the moment described in my diary:
October 29, 1996
Finally, he walked in. He looked so beautiful, but skinnier than I thought he was. His hair was short and messy, and he had facial hair. He looked really nervous, and it was so cute because he couldn’t get the microphone to work at first…then he read aloud chapter 19 of his book, which was so cool…Then we got in line to get our books signed…I was so nervous when I went up to him. I told him I thought it was really good, and that I hope I can write like him one day…I want him so bad.
The next day, I checked on my goldfish, Ethan, but to my dismay, he was floating on his side in his small mixing bowl. Ethan was dead. He’d served his purpose. I had met my number one celebrity crush, and now my fish could peacefully swim across the rainbow bridge.
I was sad to see Ethan the fish go, but meeting his namesake had been the perfect send-off. From then on, spending my days at school would feel like a total waste of time. There was a great big world out there, and I wanted to explore it. I knew I was lucky to have older cousins to take me on adventures that included meeting my literary heroes and drinking tasty vodka concoctions. As far as I was concerned, my dayee Mehrdad had already succeeded at his life’s purpose. My cousins and I were thick as thieves, and we would stay that way even when we grew up and started our own families.
* Haft-seen literally translates to “seven s’s.” The altar includes seven items that begin with the letter s, all with their own symbolic meaning. It also includes a bevy of other non-s-related objects. For instance, “fish” is mahi in Farsi.
I just feel like I’m not good at anything. I know I’m probably just being too hard on myself, but I’m a little annoyed at myself, my personality, everything—except for my family. That’s one thing I’m always thankful to have.
—Diary entry: May 13, 1995