Contents Foreword, by the Honorable Dorothy W. Nelson
ix
Preface and Acknowledgements
xiii
Prologue: Life in Nayriz
1
1 The Sad Society
13
2 Save the Tablets
22
3 A Man of Letters
42
4 Into the Larger World
50
5 Postcards of Iran
67
6 The Promised Land
88
7 Foreigner
100
8 Harlem Prep
110
9 Life is Beautiful
123
Epilogue
136
References
142
About the Author
146
Chapter 7
Foreigner From the moment I arrived in the United States, I had the feeling of being foreign. I was inside the country but outside the society. I had arrived with a few pairs of billowy, ‘Ali Baba’ style pants, canvas underwear made by my mother, an unsightly large black coat, pistachios, and hair gel – because I feared not finding any in the new country. I even came to dislike my name. My father had named me Hussein because his name was ‘Baha’, a name that had caused him great difficulties when it came to employment in Iran where prejudice against Bahá’ís ran high. In the US, though, ‘Hussein’ sounded Arab and Muslim and marked me as different, so I often used American names like David Marg (‘marg’ in Persian means death). Later, my marriage certificate listed me as ‘Jimmy Ahdieh’. During my first Thanksgiving, I was invited to the home of an American family whose daughter was a classmate. Following the Persian custom of tarof, I declined the offers of food though I was hungry. Persian politeness demanded that an offer be turned down a few times before being accepted, so as not to appear greedy and disrespectful of the other person. But I was in the US, and my American hosts took my response at face value. They continued the meal without me while I sat and watched TV, feeling so confused and so hungry that I ate the entire bowl of nuts on the table in front of me while the family ate a sumptuous Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Even though I was a university student, my English remained at the level of a low-wage restaurant worker, while I was gradually forgetting Persian, my mother tongue. My son would later say that I was illiterate in two languages. My friends and co-workers were all foreigners: Italian waiters, Greek cooks, Puerto Rican dishwashers and Persian students. I had a Yugoslavian roommate who was happy just to be working as a busboy in the US, which saved him from the 100
foreigner
poverty he had experienced in his home country. He was enamored of American wealth; he often asked me what I thought Rockefeller was doing that day. On the one hand, I wanted to be more like American young men. I saw them with young women always having fun, but my few English phrases were insufficient to communicate with young women in any way that I didn’t come across like an awkward outsider. On the other hand, I did not share the same values as many of the young American men. The Bahá’í moral laws forbade sexual relations outside of marriage, and the use of alcohol. I felt the pull of this new youth culture while sincerely believing in the Bahá’í Faith. In Iran, my social world had been mostly family. These casual and relaxed relationships between men and women in the US were entirely foreign to me. Whenever I met an attractive woman my age, like the young lady who sat across the table from me in the Hackensack public library where I was contemplating life, or the girl with one glass eye which shone in the dark and who lived across the street from me and was very sweet, my words and manners and lack of means marked me as a poor foreign student. I knew that though I was outwardly fairly attractive, in private I was still wearing the canvas underwear my mother had sent me from home and which surprised my landlady when she saw it in the laundry room near my well-worn shoes whose soles were punctured by holes. In the US, my social world was school, kitchens and the four book-lined walls of my rented room. Being a foreigner also meant living in fear of deportation. The nights before I had to present myself at the immigration office, with my school records to be able to extend my visa, were sleepless ones. The presence of a police cruiser always made me anxious. I had to buy a car when I moved to New Jersey because my school was three miles away, so I bought a Chrysler for US$100. I rear-ended a car in the Holland Tunnel, and the driver offered me US$80 before I could offer him any money; neither of us wanted to involve the police. I was already in trouble for not having paid a parking ticket, so I figured the other guy must have been worse off than me. My 101
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license was eventually suspended for sixty days and a detective came to arrest me. I shared a cell that night with an Italian who told me he was in for rape. Fortunately, friends came to bail me out. Eventually I found myself in traffic court in front of a judge, whom I called ‘Your Highness’. He answered that ‘Your Honor’ would do. I pleaded with him not to suspend my license because I needed it to get to school. A lack of a license, I said, would ‘paralyze’ me. He clarified that he was not ‘paralyzing’ me, he was penalizing me. The next day the town paper had a small headline: ‘Hussein Ahdieh from Israel had a choice to come to court to pay his ticket earlier or take an exam, so he picked the lesser of two evils: he came to court but lost his license.’ My friends were aware of my precarious status. One evening while driving through Paterson, New Jersey, a police cruiser started to tail my friend and me. There was unrest due to demonstrations in town. My friend, being aware of my suspended license, slid under me and took the wheel. By the time the officer came to the window, my friend realized too late that his own license was expired and he was taken into custody. He looked frightened as he sat in the back of the cruiser next to a police dog. When I asked him if I could do anything for him, he answered that I could buy him cigarettes and get lost. I spent the night collecting money from friends to post his bail. When I arrived at the precinct the next morning, he was furious at me. Fortunately our friendship survived, and he later came to my wedding. In another incident, the immigration service actually called on me. I had gotten into a minor argument with a cashier at Macy’s, who then called security. In the back office, the security officer called me a ‘commie’ and referred to us as ‘you foreigners’. He called Immigration – my worst fear – but in the days before computers, there was much less effective follow-up, and the whole incident went nowhere. My anxiety was such that I even considered marrying an Italian woman for US$500 so that I could get a green card. I was concerned, though, that she might not divorce me, so I didn’t go through with it. 102
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