Americanized

by Sara Saedi

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #2

  What do Iranians have against Sally Field?

  Sally Field is widely considered one of the best actresses of our time, but she’s been persona non grata with Iranians after she starred in the overtly racist film Not Without My Daughter. It doesn’t matter that the movie was released more than twenty-five years ago, because Iranians have a flair for holding lifelong grudges. The film painted Iranian Muslims, particularly Iranian men, in a very negative light. It pretty much made them all seem like abusive pricks. It was also released at a time when a Gulf war was brewing and when there were no other representations of Iranians in TV shows and movies. There still aren’t very many representations, aside from the occasional terrorist character or the reality show Shahs of Sunset (also considered a form of terrorism to some).

  In Not Without My Daughter, Sally Field plays an American woman trapped in Iran with a psycho husband who won’t allow her to leave the country with their young daughter. The film was based on the popular and controversial memoir by Betty Mahmoody, and was critically panned for its racist depictions and Islamophobic tendencies. Though many compared it to a bad TV movie, it had lasting implications for Iranians. In the 2016 New York magazine article “The Not Without My Daughter Problem: How a Sally Field Movie Became an Iranian-American Headache,” writer Gazelle Emami talks to Iranian writer and scholar Reza Aslan on how the film affected his dating life:

  “I am not joking when I say to you that at least on three separate occasions, when I met a girl’s parents or immediately after I had met their parents, the girl would tell me how her mother brought up Not Without My Daughter…There was this one case in particular where on the second date the girl said, ‘I can’t really date you anymore. My mom doesn’t want us to see each other.’ I said, ‘Why?’ and she goes, ‘Well, she saw that movie Not Without My Daughter.’ I have numerous Iranian friends who have the exact same story—it ruined dating for every male Iranian of my generation.”

  For some reason (sexism), Alfred Molina, who played the abusive Iranian father, escaped our wrath.

  Eventually, Sally Field earned back her goodwill with my family when she starred in the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters. My parents loved that show. They thought the Walker family was just like us…except for the fact that they were American, owned a swanky food-supply business in the quaint town of Ojai, and lived in a giant house in a very expensive Pasadena neighborhood. But those minor differences aside, my parents stand by the fact that we were basically the Iranian (and undocumented) version of Nora Walker and her dysfunctional brood.

  I bought a book called Go Ask Alice. It’s actually a teenager’s diary. She’s a really normal fifteen-year-old girl until she gets hooked on acid and pot. Toward the end of the book, she’s getting her life together, after all the drugs, running away from home (twice), torment at school, and being in a mental hospital. There were a lot of things I could relate to about her. The whole diary thing connected me right away. Then, at the epilogue, they inform you that the “subject” of the book died three weeks later from a drug overdose. I’m gonna make all my friends read it.

  —Diary entry: August 6, 1996

  “If you’re going to do drugs, then bring them home and do them with me,” my dad announced to me over a traditional breakfast of lavash bread, feta cheese, and sliced cucumbers. I nearly choked on my loghmeh.*1 It took me a minute to realize that he wasn’t testing me. He was being serious.

  “You got it, Baba,” I said, knowing full well I never planned to try drugs with my dad.

  “If anything happens to you, I’ll know what to do,” he continued. “Your friends won’t.”

  This would not be a one-time offer. I would hear it so often during my teen years that I started to wonder if what he was really asking was for me to be his drug supplier. But “Let’s do drugs together!” was his leading parental philosophy on the subject of illegal substances, and it definitely fit into the “Super Cool” part of the pie chart. In an age where “Just Say No” and DARE were the prevailing antidrug campaigns, my foreign parents didn’t have much faith that either would deter young people from getting high. They figured it was inevitable that one day, we kids would be pressured by our more rebellious peers to experiment with uppers and/or downers (there was no scenario where they thought we might be the ones doing the pressuring), and they preferred that we broadened our horizons with them, at home. It wasn’t the drugs my parents were concerned with. They were more afraid of strung-out friends who might let us foam at the mouth and overdose to avoid getting in trouble with the authorities. My dad felt like it was better for us to experiment in a controlled and safe setting, and while his logic made sense to me, I never took him up on his offer.

  At the start of high school, I was a total innocent when it came to substances like pot and acid and ecstasy. I knew that the slew of kids who hung out at Rainbow Park across the street from campus were considered our official brigade of stoners, but I’d never gotten high with them, and had no interest. Getting good grades and being accepted to a respectable four-year college topped my priority list. My focus on school was a side effect of battling stage-four ICGC, also known as immigrant child guilt complex. This is a chronic disorder that affects only children of immigrants, who experience a constant gnawing guilt for the multitude of sacrifices their parents made to bring them to the United States. There is no cure for ICGC, but treatments include making your mom and dad proud. (There is not a day that goes by that I don’t look at my perfectly straight teeth—paid for by my parents—and think about the years of crooked teeth they’ve endured because they couldn’t afford expensive dental work for themselves. This is why I always smile with my teeth showing in photos.) I knew as a teen that my parents had gone to great lengths to give me a better life, and killing my brain cells didn’t seem like the most thoughtful way to return the favor. In short, I was a prude.

  Even though my sister was one of the most popular girls in school, my friends and I didn’t get invited to parties and had long decided we were too cool to attend any of our school events. We rolled our eyes at every high school convention that society tried to shove down our throats. Pep rallies: “LAME!” Football games: “NO ONE CARES!” School dances: “BOH-RING.” I never admitted it to my friends, but I desperately wanted to participate in all of the above. From what I’d been told by John Mellencamp songs (listen to “Jack & Diane”), high school was supposed to be the best years of my life. I worried I was letting it pass me by. But while everyone else in our freshman class had gone to the same middle school and entered Lynbrook with their cliques already well established, my friend group and I were the unknown entities. We didn’t mix well with the other kids and stuck together mostly by default.

  As the school year ambled on, a few of us drifted away from the group to hang out with the stoners at the park. I envied the girls who left us behind. I wanted to be less invisible. I wanted to hang out with the crowd of kids who went to parties on the weekends so they could get drunk and dry-hump in master bedrooms. But I didn’t know how to ingratiate myself with the cool kids. Izzy claimed that drugs and alcohol were for losers and that we could have more fun hanging out in her bedroom and watching reruns of The X-Files, but I knew she was full of it. She wanted to go to parties as much as I did, but her mother was essentially holding her hostage in her house.

  So for most of my freshman year, I remained a self-hating stick-in-the-mud. Even being in the presence of pot shined a light on how pathetically naive and innocent I was.

  November 3, 1994

  Today in music appreciation, Jonah asked me if I’d ever smoked pot, and I said “No, I bet I’m the only person in here who hasn’t.” So, he takes out his bag of pot and asks me if I like the smell, and I said how I really didn’t think it smelled too good. So he passes it around and everyone’s saying how they think it’s the best smell in the world. I felt like such an idiot
.

  The above took place in what was essentially a storage closet where a small crew of us had been relegated to meet for a group assignment. It was four guys who were regular fixtures at Rainbow Park and me. I knew my aversion to the scent of marijuana meant I had blown my only chance at being cool. Why couldn’t I have just pretended that I could roll a blunt with the best of them? More important, why did I care so much what a bunch of stoners thought of me? Well, for starters, it was an objective fact that the Jonah mentioned in my diary entry was one of the hottest guys in school. His smoldering brown eyes (which were always bloodshot) and his perfectly gelled brown hair bore a striking resemblance to those of a young Luke Perry (Archie’s dad in Riverdale). But guys like Jonah who hung out at Rainbow Park didn’t associate with the popular crowd. They were artsy misfits who dressed exclusively in concert tees and ragged flannels, and it was those brooding qualities that intrigued me more than the cookie-cutter athlete and cheerleader types. Even though I harbored a secret crush on Jonah, I knew at the tender age of fourteen that it wasn’t wise to get wrapped up in someone with a drug problem. Little did I know that stoners would soon become my relationship kryptonite.

  As the school year came to a close, I remained hopelessly drug-free. And I was becoming sick of my delicate state. I needed more edge. I wanted to know firsthand what all the fuss was about. Maybe there was nothing wrong with a little medicinal marijuana to treat my ICGC. Plus, if our application for a green card got denied, I wanted to revel in the perks of being an American teenager before the INS killed my vibe. It felt like smoking marijuana was my patriotic right. (Note: This rationalization lacked accuracy, because at the time, marijuana was, in fact, illegal in California. Which by definition meant it wasn’t a patriotic right.)

  It was a blistering hot summer afternoon in 1995 when I finally broke the vow I’d made to Nancy Reagan to just say no. A few days earlier, Samira had thrown herself a massive eighteenth birthday–slash–graduation party, and someone had left behind a backpack at our house, containing a bong and a bag of weed. I was swimming in our pool with Samira and our cousin Leyla when they came up with the brilliant idea to smoke me out.

  “Let’s get Sara high!” Samira announced.

  Hallelujah, I thought. It was time to put my straitlaced ways to rest. I briefly considered my dad’s offer: If you’re going to do drugs, then bring them home and do them with me. Well, technically we were at home, and even though my dad was at work, doing drugs with my sister seemed like the next best thing. I knew she’d be able to handle it if anything went wrong. And anyway, everyone always told me that you don’t get stoned your first time, so I expected smoking weed to feel comparable to smoking a cigarette (which I’d done before, thanks to my grandmother’s nurse, who always kept a pack in her purse—I would sneak cigarettes from her and smoke in the bathroom when no one was home). Pot couldn’t be that much different, right?

  I listened carefully as my sister and Leyla gave me step-by-step instructions on how to take a bong hit. I followed their lead, and after two bong rips, I started laughing and couldn’t stop. They giggled back at me, and declared to each other: “Sara’s high!”

  Finally, I had crossed the threshold. I thought of the girl who bristled at the smell of weed in music appreciation class and realized that I didn’t want to be her anymore. I would go into my sophomore year of high school as the new-and-improved Sara. It didn’t matter that my sister had graduated and I wouldn’t be Little Sami. I didn’t need to be. I could do anything!

  And then I started feeling weird. Like, really weird. My forehead had developed its own giant pulse and it would not stop beating. I couldn’t focus on anything. The heat was getting to me, and my mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. My heart was racing, and there was only one thought going through my head: “I am going to die. I am going to die right now, and my parents are going to be so mad at me.” Immigrant child guilt complex was bringing me down.

  I gave my sister a panicked look and asked how long what I was feeling would last. She didn’t have an answer.

  “I don’t like this,” I said, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Get it to stop,” I begged. But my sister and Leyla were too consumed by fits of laughter to help me. Where was my dad when I needed him? Maybe it would be a good idea to call him at work and let him know that I was about to die, and that I would miss him.

  I walked into the house to get some relief from the heat, examine my face in the mirror, and call my dad to tell him I was mere moments from death. I barely recognized my reflection. My eyes were red and bleary. My little brother, Kia, was sitting on the couch, eating graham crackers and watching cartoons, and I desperately tried to act normal around him. What if he grew up to be a junkie, and when I caught him with a bent spoon under his thin dirty mattress, he’d scream that he learned how to do drugs from watching me? I sat on the couch to watch television and temporarily forgot about calling my dad, but the image of Scrooge McDuck swimming in a pile of gold coins did not improve my mental state, so I went back outside to avoid croaking in front of Kia. My eyesight was blurry and I could barely make out Samira and Leyla swimming in our pool. Their voices sounded muffled and distant. Was I going blind and deaf? Or was this what the world sounded like right before you died? I wasn’t sure. Mostly, I didn’t understand how my sister and cousin could function in their current state. If I jumped in the pool, I was certain I would forget how to float and sink to the bottom.

  “Try to sleep it off,” Samira advised, once she got out of the pool. In a couple of hours, our mom would be home from work, and we all knew it was critical that I started sobering up by then.

  “Is this going to last forever?” I asked.

  “No,” my sister said, growing frustrated. “Relax. You’re not even high!”

  I know now that she was just trying to defuse the situation. If she could convince me that I was fine, then I would start to believe it. But her insistence that I was imagining my symptoms messed with my head even more. If this wasn’t what being high felt like, then was there something else wrong with me? What if my brain had a different reaction to marijuana than other humans’ brains had? Just great, I thought. I will never be able to take the SATs if I’m left in a permanent state of dumb. I tried to quiet the paranoia and curled up on a wet towel, spread out on the deck of our yard. I lay there, curled up in a ball, and attempted to fall asleep. But I thought if I closed my eyes, I’d probably never open them again. I was barely a teenager. This was so unfair. I didn’t have a green card or a boyfriend yet. I had barely just gotten a work permit. How sad would it be to finally exist if I was just gonna die a few short months later? Thoughts of hot Jonah passed through my head, and I wondered how he managed to pay any attention in class with the world reverberating around him.

  I could hear Leyla’s and Samira’s faraway voices as they tried to figure out what to do with drug-addled me. If my mom got home and found her daughter crying, eyes bloodshot, shouting to the heavens that she’s “going to stay brain-damaged forever,” she’d probably lose her shit and Samira would be grounded for the whole summer. They needed to fix me before that happened.

  So they took me inside in hopes that getting some food in me might alleviate the steady heartbeat I was feeling in between my temples. I sat there quietly as they fed me Teddy Grahams and slices of watermelon. No fruit or box of processed food had ever tasted so good to me. I didn’t feel like I was back to my normal self when my mom finally got home from work, but the fear that I was going to drop dead had gradually subsided. I tried to act sober around her, and she didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. Eventually, the drugs wore off and I decided that I would never, under any circumstances, smoke pot again. It was a horrible drug. I didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to feel so out of control. It was a terrible state of being. I much preferred to be alert and clearheaded.

  But then I met Evan Parker and everything chang
ed.

  I warned you: stoners would become my kryptonite. I first noticed him that same summer when I spotted his school portrait in the yearbook. He was the only person in our four-hundred-plus freshman class I didn’t recognize. How had I spent a whole year at Lynbrook without ever crossing paths with him? None of my friends knew who he was, either. When I showed up to school in the fall, he was in nearly all my classes. It was like the universe was trying to tell me something. I’m not entirely certain what drew me to stoner types like Evan and Jonah and the few others who came after them. I suppose they seemed more sensitive and introspective. They gave off major Jordan Catalano*2 vibes as they swaggered down the hallways of our school. It always felt like they had something better to do, and that unlike the rest of us, they understood that high school was an unnecessary social construct. Guys like them knew we could learn a whole lot more about life if we just paid attention to each other. In Evan’s case, he also appreciated the little things, like ladybugs and lucky pennies and the clouds on a rainy day. He once gave me a poem he’d written titled “The Lonely Grasshopper,” and I felt like he was showing me a window into his soul. He introduced me to musicians like Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin. He could hacky-sack with the best of them, and knew how to skateboard. He was my ideal man.

  I loved that he was deep and vulnerable and creative. These same qualities would cause me a lot of unnecessary heartbreak and grief in most of my adult relationships, but in high school, they set guys like Evan apart from the jocks and drama geeks. Evan also wasn’t shy about extolling the virtues of weed and how it opened his mind to things he couldn’t explore when he was sober. He also occasionally took drugs like acid and shrooms. I was way too afraid to explore either substance. If I had a panic attack from the most mild and natural illegal substance on the market, then it was safe to say I would experience a psychotic break on a hallucinogenic.