Bahrampour’s book, which covers her travels from Iran to America and back again over roughly two decades, is essentially about the struggle to straddle two cultures. She spent most of her early years in Iran, at international schools attended by the children of foreign diplomats, who hang in cliques and sip imported Hi-C. She could move in this world; her American mother worked at CBS Records in Tehran and knew how to make Halloween costumes. But Bahrampour was never an expatriate. Her relatives spoke a language that sounded like poetry and hired jinn catchers to banish evil spirits from their homes. Once, when Bahrampour wrote to an American children’s TV show, “Big Blue Marble,” in hopes of being assigned an exotic pen pal, she was paired with a girl in Kentucky. “It hits me,” she writes. “They think I am the exotic one. Someone like me, writing from Iran, would never be matched up with a pen pal from a mysterious, fascinating land when the center of the Big Blue Marble is America.”
Bahrampour’s family eventually returned to the West Coast after gunshots and mob riots near their home convince them that the revolution is real. But in America, Iranians weren’t popular, and work was hard to find. Bahrampour’s father, who ran his own architectural firm in Tehran, was forced to take a job as a carpenter in Oregon. The author felt her father’s new fragility, and her own. The girls in her new middle school had boyfriends and feathered hair. The radio played the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann,” with lyrics changed to “bomb Iran.” Bahrampour was embarrassed by relatives who tried to haggle for discounts at the 7-Eleven. But she did not change her name, like her friend Shahrzad, who decided to go by Sherri and tell people she’s Italian. Still, her own sense of identity remained murky. As she grew up, went to Berkeley, worked as a journalist in Europe and enjoyed the freedoms of the West, part of her remained deeply nostalgic for the security and community of Iran.
When nostalgia eventually drew her back in 1994, she returned to a country both familiar and fearful. Old women told her stories about her father as a boy, and fragrant bazaars twinkled with gold. She learned about henna artists who once painted love poems up a bride’s thighs, to be read by the groom on the wedding night. But she was also interrogated by police for speaking to strange men, and heard about mullahs who might dole out lashings if a woman wore the wrong-color head scarf. The rigidity of the new regime and the randomness of what may or may not be considered Islamic by the komiteh (morals police) was unsettling. But Bahrampour found new allies: the hundreds of other women walking the streets in raincoats and scarves, who tip each other off if the police are near. When she returned to her job in Brussels, Bahrampour missed this unique solidarity, and even donned a head scarf at night in her apartment. The nostalgia is, of course, linked to her bicultural status. At the end of the day, she didn’t have to stay in Iran. Just as she can wear a chador, knowing she would never be forced to do it every day for the rest of her life, Bahrampour can see Iran’s many layers, and see them again, with the insight of a native and the freedom of a foreigner. Her story is both entertaining and deeply emotional.
