by Sara Saedi
I’m sure that as my dad bawled his eyes out, I begged him to stop crying. I’m sure I apologized for being an ungrateful brat. I’m sure I hugged him and told him that I was proud of him and that he had nothing to be sorry for. But it’s just as likely that I froze. I’ve always loved the fact that I have a dad who openly weeps. I’m glad a guy who wasn’t void of emotion raised me. But in that moment, I wished he were one of those stereotypically cold, distant American dads or those stoic, strict Asian dads my friends always complained about. Those guys never cry, right?
But let’s pause for a moment on my dad’s red and puffy face, and cut to the events leading up to our provisional estrangement. It was three months earlier, the summer of 1997 to be exact, when my mom told me that we were putting our beloved home on the market. Soon our charming black-and-white house on Pinewood Drive would no longer belong to us. It would belong to people who could afford to live there. A family of American citizens or, at the very least, a family with green cards. A house with a swimming pool was not fit for the Saedis. We were a ragtag team of undocumented immigrants, and for us the American dream was more elusive than Banksy’s true identity.
“But what about my collage?” I cried when my mom told me the news.
I had spent several painstaking weeks cutting out my favorite pictures from issues of Us magazine (back when it was still a respectable monthly publication). It had required at least two rolls of double-sided tape for the work of art to take up one massive wall of my bedroom. It was my pride and joy.
My older, college-educated cousin called it postmodern. I had no idea what that meant, but I totally agreed. And there was no way I could take apart every single picture and replicate the masterpiece in another bedroom. Izzy and I had also created a mural on another wall, and had taken great care to paint my blinds with the colors of the rainbow. I was hoping any potential buyers would be deterred by the thought of a fresh paint job and replacement blinds, but that wasn’t the case.
My parents made it seem like they just wanted to downsize. With my sister out of the house, and with me a year away from college, they didn’t need all the space. Why not live in a smaller, generic town house in a less expensive part of south San Jose that was twenty minutes farther from all my friends, my job, and my high school? But I knew what was really happening. Peninsula Luggage was floundering, and they could no longer afford our mortgage and my sister’s college tuition.
My postmodern collage.
Here’s the thing. As an undocumented immigrant, you’re screwed when it comes to filing for student loans to send your kids to college. Though it may have been tempting to commit a felony and covertly check the box that read “American citizen” on the application, my parents knew those financial aid peeps meant serious business. From what we’d been told, they’d conduct extensive background checks into our immigration status. A false claim would have been considered criminal activity and would have been grounds to deny our adjustment-of-status application and deport us. So instead, my parents tried to scrape together every penny to pay for my sister’s college in full. Even though my dad worked as a waiter and bus driver to put himself through school, my parents hated the idea of my sister getting a job to help with her tuition. They wanted her to focus solely on her education. She would defy them and get a job anyway because, like me, she suffered from immigrant child guilt complex.
My parents had been self-employed for my entire life. They’d never had the benefits of a steady salary or paid vacation days. Their income was always unpredictable, and any time off or a lull in their business would impact how much money we had for bills and groceries each month. But luggage sales were only a small portion of Peninsula Luggage’s cash flow. The main source of income was cocaine and illegal firearms. Not really, but I always liked to pretend the business was a front for the Persian mafia. Most of our profits actually came from luggage repairs. My parents had accounts with the various airlines and were hired to repair bags the airlines had damaged. Each day, my dad donned a white lab coat with his name, Ali, embroidered above the front pocket, and drove his giant red van to the San Jose and San Francisco airports to pick up suitcases in need of fixing. When his van wasn’t filled with luggage, my friends and I would ride around in the back and slide up and down its slick floor anytime the car slowed to a stop. His employees loved working for him, and one even asked if my dad would be willing to sponsor him to get a green card. My dad had to break the embarrassing news that he couldn’t, because he didn’t have a green card, either. Despite his cheery disposition, I knew my dad hated what he did for a living.
“It’s a thankless job,” my dad always said of the business. “You’re dealing with unhappy customers all the time.”
But you’d never know this from the smile on his face when he got home around 9:00 p.m. and took off his white lab coat. The man was relentlessly upbeat and positive. “Don’t worry, be happy” remains his mantra. Which was probably why I didn’t realize the business was in a financial slump. Unbeknownst to me, after taking out an equity loan on our house to help pay my sister’s tuition, my parents couldn’t keep up with mortgage payments. If we didn’t sell our house, the bank would put it in foreclosure.
I was eleven when we moved into our home on Pinewood Drive, and we would move out on my seventeenth birthday. In hindsight, I was a psycho bitch throughout the ordeal. We’d be moving into the sixth house we’d lived in since we arrived in America, while my high school friends continued to occupy their childhood homes. They each had walls in their houses that documented their height and growth spurts, beginning with the year they could stand on two feet. They had neighborhood cookouts, and could paint and decorate the walls of their bedrooms with every assurance that they’d never have to pack their bags and leave. We never had that sense of security. We bounced around from house to house, usually opting for the more affordable and less desirable parts of town. Anytime we had money trouble, my parents would say we were rich in love. And we were. But love doesn’t pay the mortgage. And it also doesn’t buy a colorful collection of Doc Martens.
Six years was the longest we’d lived in any house, and I had become hopelessly attached to our San Jose neighborhood. I loved that we lived within rollerblading distance of a local Japanese market that sold candy with edible wrappers. We still lived off the beaten path, but Pinewood Drive was much closer to my friends and school than the San Jose locales my parents were now considering. As pissed off as I was at my baba and maman for putting our house on the market, I also sympathized with their predicament. I didn’t want them to lose any more sleep over our financial problems.
But once we officially sold our house and moving day came around, I was inconsolable. On the inside of my closet door, I wrote an epic poem to the new owners telling them the house would always belong to me:
PINEWOOD
Money means nothing to me.
Objects make me smile for a second.
But this home I can’t let go of.
These walls, I’ve cried for.
I’ve had screaming fights in this bedroom.
I’ve danced crazy all alone.
I’ve stayed up all night with loved ones.
I’ve talked on the phone with boys I’ve loved.
This has been my shelter from the storm.
This is where I wrote my poetry.
This is where I’ve wanted to die.
These are my memories you’ve taken from me.
So you can paint over my pictures,
erase these bitter words.
But one thing won’t change,
the life that’s been spent.
This home is a part of me,
And I’m a part of this house.
You can sleep here if you like.
You can buy it with your money.
But my music lingers.
These walls
will miss my family’s voice.
So this place you call home,
Will always belong to me.
One day I’ll buy it back.
I like to imagine the new family was so touched by my poignant words that they decided not to paint over them. Perhaps they could tell that whoever wrote it would be a writer someday and that eventually the poem would be worth more than the house. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they leave me the place in their will.
October 6, 1997
My birthday is on Friday. The death day. The day we leave. My last few days of being sixteen, and living in this house. Why is this life so twisted and broken? Even though I shouldn’t, part of me blames my parents. I know they are worse off than I am. But I know they want to get out of here. I hate every happy naïve stupid person. And I hate feeling sorry for myself. And I hate being in this room. These walls are mocking me, laughing at my tears…
After we sold our house, we were officially homeless. We hadn’t found another place to live and had to regress back to our old fobby selves and shack up with relatives. My parents opted to move in with my aunt and uncle in their modest three-bedroom house in Cupertino. Even though their place was walking distance to my high school, I decided that I didn’t want to be in such tight quarters. Instead, I would move in with Dayee Mehrdad. Both his kids were out of the house. Of course he and my aunt would love the idea of a teenager suddenly living with them. They had enough room. They weren’t just rich in love; they were rich in money. Plus, my aunt Geneva totally dug me. She never learned to speak Farsi, and I would hang out with her at all our family parties and talk Oscar predictions. There was a good chance that after I’d lived with them for a few days, they would beg my parents to allow them to adopt me…and then I’d get a green card in no time.
I lasted two days at my uncle’s house. My parents were a mere five miles away, but it felt like they were on the other side of the world. I worried that I had created an unbridgeable divide by rejecting them and choosing my uncle, with his elegant home in the promised land of Saratoga. I cried myself to sleep from loneliness. It wasn’t my aunt and uncle’s fault. Their generosity over the years could fill up this entire book, but their lives functioned differently from those of my parents. They didn’t have kids in the house and were used to doing their own thing. They slept in separate bedrooms because my uncle’s snoring was so loud it was inhumane. They also didn’t eat dinner together, because my uncle’s dining preferences still included eating at midnight with his gin martini and then going straight to bed.
The day I arrived at my uncle’s house, he gave me a hundred dollars to buy my own groceries. He explained that they didn’t really cook and usually fended for themselves for dinner. I tried to turn down the money (taarof!), but he wouldn’t let me. I didn’t tell him that I didn’t know how to cook and that I’d never bought my own groceries. Instead, I hoped they wouldn’t judge me when I dined on Noodle Roni like the peasant that I was.
Maybe it was the thought of home-cooked Persian meals that lured me to my aunt’s house in Cupertino. Or the fact that eight-year-old Kia and I were inseparable, and it felt wrong to abandon him. Or that in two days, I hadn’t figured out how to get the hot water to work in my uncle’s bathroom and that no form of deodorant would mask the stench of my body odor. No, I’m pretty sure what completely did me in was my dad, sitting on that windowsill, apologizing for selling our house and for the mess that we were now in. And then, through his tears, he apologized for failing me.
But he’d never failed me.
When my mom and dad had left behind their entire country to give me a better life, they didn’t write angsty poetry on the walls before they made their departure. They just left…knowing they might never return. Not to my grandfathers’ graves or my mother’s childhood home or the site of their first official date. If they could be that resilient, then I could move to a different part of San Jose without making such a giant fuss about it.
“I don’t want to stay with Dayee anymore. I want to live at Khaleh’s house with you guys,” I told my dad, now through my own tears.
My declaration to end our forty-eight-hour estrangement didn’t slow down my dad’s crying, but I could tell his emotions had taken on a different form. After months, he’d finally been absolved of his guilt. I only wish I’d told him sooner that he had nothing to feel guilty about. I packed up my suitcase and explained to my uncle that I felt bad about leaving my parents. I tried to give him the grocery money back, but in typical Persian-uncle form, he refused it.
That night, I went to sleep in a cozy bed at my aunt’s house, while my parents slept on the floor of the same bedroom. One more sacrifice in a string of many. As I looked down at my mom and dad, it dawned on me that a house doesn’t make a home without the people who live inside it. As cheesy as it sounded at the time, my mom and dad were right: crammed in that tiny bedroom together, we were still rich in love.
A month later, we moved into the Camden Village town houses right off the Camden exit on Highway 85 South. I didn’t complain about the long drive to school, or the fact that we had to get bunk beds for my room so that my sister would have a place to sleep when she came home from college. I would even go on to make another collage. If I had to name the piece, I’d call it:
Resilience.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #6
Why the hell is it the year 1396 in Iran?
Upon the publication of this book in 2018, it’s 1396 in Iran. Crazy, right? There is a method to this madness. While the United States is on the Gregorian calendar, Iran uses the Solar Hijri calendar. According to the Solar Hijri, the starting day of the year aligns with the vernal equinox, which is why Eid (Persian New Year) is always at the start of spring. The holiday is usually a great excuse for Iranians to throw parties, shower their children with crisp dolla dolla bills, and eat one of our favorite traditional dishes: sabzi polo and mahi (rice with fresh herbs and fish).
The country officially switched to the Solar Hijri calendar in 1925, under the Pahlavi dynasty. They also coordinated the beginning of the calendar with the pilgrimage of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. And thus, the year suddenly went from 1925 to 1303. To make matters even more confusing, the origin of the calendar was changed again in 1976. The shah decided to change the starting point from Muhammad’s spiritual journey to the beginning of Cyrus the Great’s reign. And thus the year suddenly went from 1355 to 2535.
After the Islamic Revolution, the origin date reverted back to Muhammad’s pilgrimage. Iranians are basically time travelers. One may think all of these calendar changes would have no impact on me since I live in America, but I discovered later in life that I have a completely different birth date from the one I’d been told by my parents. All of my legal documents said that I was born on September 22, 1980, but it turns out that date is entirely false. I was actually born in October, but in Iran that would have meant waiting an entire year to start school and my parents didn’t want me to be one of the oldest kids in the class. They fudged the dates on my birth certificate so that I wouldn’t be held back for a year. Then we moved to America and the birth-date fraud became completely irrelevant. As a child, I celebrated my birthday on September 22, but my parents eventually revealed to me that I was born on October 10. This fact absolutely delighted me when I was a kid. I had two birthdays! What could be better than that?
But then, as a teenager, I got really into zodiac signs and concluded that it was so much cooler to be a Libra than a boring Virgo. I decided I would begin to celebrate my birthday on October 10 instead. The date of my birth got even more confusing when my dad accidentally filled out an immigration document incorrectly and suddenly I was born on September 21. And then my mom dropped another bomb. She told me I was either born on the tenth or the eleventh of October.
“WHAAAAT?” was my general response.
My mom, frustrated
, finally responded that I was born on “the twentieth of Mehr in 1359,” according to the Iranian calendar. I think we can all agree that I look extremely good for being 659 years old. Luckily, the Internet was finally around, so I could convert the twentieth of Mehr in 1359 to the exact date on the US calendar. The website revealed I was actually born on…drumroll, please…October 12, 1980. So I didn’t know my actual birthdate until I was around twenty years old.
To complicate matters even further, when I finally received my green card, they accidentally printed my birthday as September 21, 1982 (the year we arrived in the United States—not the year I was actually born). I guess I didn’t mind suddenly being two years younger…though I once got turned away from a bar when I was of legal drinking age because the bouncer saw the date of birth on my green card and told me I wasn’t old enough to come in.
Did you get all of that?
Currently, as far as the government and my driver’s license are concerned, I was born on September 21, 1980…even though I was still resting comfortably inside my mom’s womb that day.
I wanted to go so bad. I wanted to wear my dress and look pretty, and I wanted him to think I was beautiful. I told my mom I wanted him to feel as bad as I feel, but she said no guy in this world will come close to feeling what I feel right now, because they don’t feel things like that. Evan can’t feel.
—Diary entry: April 22, 1997
Every morning when my dad dropped me off at school, he left me with the same piece of advice. As I stepped out of the car and mentally prepared myself for another potentially traumatic day of high school, he would say, “Be nice to the boys!”
I can still hear his upbeat foreign accent advising me to be my best self around the opposite sex. I don’t know whether he was just trying to be facetious or if he actually worried that I walked around campus acting like a raving lunatic. The Saedi/Sanjideh women can be fiery and irrational and difficult to please. Even though I was a ball of insecurity, I came from a long line of women with high expectations and high standards for other people. I usually laughed off my dad’s advice, but I wanted to tell him that he had it all wrong. It was the boys who needed to be nice to me. I was not the problem when it came to my lifelong relationship dry spell. Guys weren’t into me. I was the girl in my clique whom dudes sought out when they had a crush on another girl and needed advice on how to win her over. I usually found myself in the friend zone right away. I was the girl who had never even French-kissed a boy. There were girls in my senior class who’d been having sex for most of high school, and I hadn’t even felt a guy’s tongue inside my mouth. My lack of experience was a source of shame and the root of all my insecurities. Sixteen was far too old to have never been kissed. Somewhere along the way, my libido had fallen behind the curve. But I kept telling myself that my dating life was about to take a turn for the better. All this time, I’d never been kissed, because I was meant to be kissed at…