by Donia Bijan
I was compelled to go home on weekends to keep my parents company and to make up for the two years we had been prematurely separated. Their love was close and available, and unlike my fellow freshmen, I was no longer eager to distance myself from my parents. Having already flown the nest once, I regretted my blind cockiness—carelessly leaving them when they had needed me most. In my freshman year, my parents had moved to the Bay Area to seek better job prospects for my mother and board-exam preparatory courses for my father. Every weekend, they met me at the Greyhound station in Palo Alto. It was comforting to slide into the backseat of their baby blue Pontiac and smell my father’s cologne, to talk about what my mother had made for dinner and whether we would watch Jeopardy! or Columbo. Unlike during my high school years, I didn’t feel a need to embellish my college experience, answering their queries about my courses and my professors candidly, telling them about a twentieth-century art history class, how I was mesmerized by the distortions in the cubist paintings. I boasted that a term paper on the parallels between the blues and classical Persian music had received praise, but then I left out my harsh sentiments about the premed courses and the mental anguish I suffered in chemistry class.
By the next morning, I would find them at odds over their new beginnings, each coping with exile quite differently. While my mother worked to support our family, my father faced another long day at home, where he slipped further and further into resentment. How does a man who had spent a lifetime building and healing pass time in idleness? Vacillating between rage and longing, day after day, he watched his wife go to work, bring home a paycheck, pay the bills, talk to the landlord, answer the phone, mail their letters, go to the bank—everyday tasks he seemed incapable of. He made repeated tries, but the board exams proved to be his nemesis. Thus robbed of his profession, he lost his ardor. He couldn’t help wondering what would have become of them if my mother had steered clear of politics. Could they have gone home, quietly resumed their practice, and salvaged their identity under the glare of Khomeini? Could he see his wife living passively among the injustices of a theocratic regime?
I was in fourth grade when I first became aware of my mother’s restlessness. As she nursed at my father’s side, the hospital became too small for her. Though they shared the desire to transform their country, each had a different approach. My father knew he could make fundamental changes by running a modern hospital, teaching family planning, offering prenatal care, pediatrics, and even marriage counseling. My mother’s vision was more broad and expansive, yearning to change the status of women in her country. My father feared for her against the corrupt, unwavering system she would be facing. She didn’t wish to defy or abandon him, but her willingness to work as a team in the insular world of the hospital diminished every day. Ultimately she had to walk away. Her resolve eclipsed his objections.
My mother took on any establishment that did not give women a voice, and that was essentially every institution. If her drive had not coincided with that of a monarch who wished to modernize Iran rapidly, she most certainly would have been chided and silenced. But instead, she found the support and the blessings of Queen Farah. My mother found that she had a knack for politics and diplomacy, and soon she was on the boards of various organizations, fighting for women’s rights, becoming the director of Tehran’s first nursing school.
In the early seventies, she ran for a seat in parliament, representing Baft, in the province of Kerman. Her mother’s family had cultivated pistachio orchards in Kerman for decades and she felt a personal connection to the area. At the time, only three other women presided in the 270-member legislature. The night of the elections, we listened to the results on the radio at a friend’s house. When the announcer read my mother’s name, everyone but my father raised a glass to toast her victory. He sat solemnly in an armchair, nursing a whiskey soda, and stared out the window. He couldn’t share the magnitude of her accomplishment, seeing only that her victory was the first indication that they were becoming unglued as partners. He felt betrayed by her decision to be affiliated with politics, cynical that her efforts would have staying power—a precursor to what would follow one day in exile.
Immediately after her victory, she had taken a bus to her district some four hundred miles from Tehran, arriving in the early morning hours at a village where she walked the dirt roads with an aide. The townspeople came out of their mud huts to peer at her. Children circled her and she opened her purse, only to find a box of colored pencils she had always carried around for me. She said she had felt foolish dispensing them, but they were all she had and the children were delighted. She was appalled to find a forgotten village with no infrastructure, no schools, no clean water, no electricity, and no clinics. In the months and years that followed, she fought single-handedly to build schools, roads, and clinics for her constituents. My mother became their saint, and they would rush to kiss her hands when she came to monitor the progress.
At home she was defiant in the face of my father’s accusations of abandoning medicine for politics. He resented her travels, her maroon diplomatic passport with the gold seal, her sudden launch into a world of bureaucrats and politicians he suspected of corruption, and their association with her as mere posturing for the Shah. To him, medicine had been their glue and their faith. But my mother had not turned her back on medicine. She saw her position as a means to an end. To open a clinic where doctors and nurses would stay, you had to build a road, provide running water, and build a school for their children. She saw the big picture; she recognized this remarkable era for women not just in Iran, but in India, where she met with Indira Gandhi, and in Israel, with Golda Meir, who was at the time the world’s third female prime minister. My mother knew that, despite my father’s objections, she had to stay the course.
By the time my sisters left for college in America, I had become accustomed to a different routine. I was a latchkey kid, coming home from school to find a note next to a pot on the stove with heating instructions for our dinner. My after-school snack of bread and jam was laid out on the kitchen table with a tin of instant cocoa and a mug. I missed our quiet afternoons together, but her sweet notes with an occasional doodle kept me company. I would keep watch by the window until I heard the sound of her wheels in the driveway, then rush back to my desk and pretend to be doing the homework I had finished earlier. Once in a while, she would be home when the school bus dropped me off at the corner. I was beside myself just seeing her green Peykan, a sedan manufactured in Iran, parked in our driveway. For the rest of the afternoon I would follow her around like a puppy, not letting her out of my sight. I couldn’t stop talking, and to keep her engaged, I would embellish my stories with dramatic twists and turns. She would listen patiently, and at the first break in my monologue, she would pull a box out of her bag. A specialty of her district that she knew I loved was soft cakes with a date filling and a prayer stenciled on top with cinnamon. Maybe I was a fool to forgive her absence in exchange for a box of cookies, but I loved nothing more than to sit at the kitchen table while she made us a pot of tea, nibbling on date cakes and telling her about my day.
As the intensity of my mother’s work increased, our family meals became tense, often ending with an outburst—my father pushing his chair away from the table, the harsh scrape of the legs wearing a groove into the tile floor. What followed were heavy footsteps to the bedroom, a door slamming, then weeks of moody silence where I became the vessel between them. No ship has carried a heavier burden than the child who bears messages between quarreling parents who refer to each other as your father and your mother, canceling any prior connection they may have had.
During these endless periods of cold war, my father would experiment in the kitchen, making his own meals as further rebuke to my mother. He would come home with a chicken, head and feet intact, throw it in a pot that was barely big enough, cover it with water, throw in a handful of dried plums, crank up the heat, and march away. Not long after, the smell of burning metal and chicken fat
would seep under my bedroom door, where I would be keeping to myself, lest I be called upon to deliver a message. I would hear his footsteps rushing to the kitchen, the scalding lid he had picked up with bare hands crashing to the floor like cymbals, and the murmured expletives. I felt sad for him—too stubborn, too proud, too righteous—and would slowly get up, tiptoe to the kitchen, and ask him if I could make him an egg. Once in a while, when the chicken didn’t burn, he would eat it standing up, right out of the pot, always leaving it, charred or not, on the counter for my mother to clean up. I would try to get to it before she saw it, knowing it would make her furious. Once, I even took a taste from a batch that had not burned but had nearly caramelized. It was delicious. The plums had given it just the right lift of sweet and sour, coating the chicken, which melted in my mouth in a gamy mixture of tangy, salty, sweet, and silky confit.
The long periods of silence would finally end with my father’s coming home one day cradling an enormous bouquet of white lilies. The origin of their argument was tucked away in an overfilled grudge box, and the tedious cold shoulder would at last relent to a soft kiss. I knew, however, that another blowout was never far off. Later, I would observe other families’ squabbles and feel relieved that ours was not the only family that nursed grievances, glad that the Persian predisposition to cherish a grudge was not exclusive to our family.
After they came to California, the tension between my parents escalated. As an antidote to her husband’s resignation, my mother hurried to learn about the customs of her adopted country, nudging us along, giddy over the liberties that were now ours, too. Cutting out political cartoons from the San Francisco Chronicle that poked fun at Carter or Reagan, she would exclaim, Imagine! Studying the cartoons was also her way of tuning in to the American sense of humor so she could share a laugh. I’ve got to know what’s funny about that! She chuckled over Peanuts and Dennis the Menace, cutting them out to put on the refrigerator door. At the hospital, she asked to be called Amy, a no-nonsense name, to spare her colleagues and patients the struggle to pronounce her Persian name, Atefeh. I imagine if they had known her name meant “compassion,” they would have insisted on using it.
She chided fellow expatriates who wallowed in their loss, who criticized Americans, who at every turn looked for someone to blame for their misfortune, from Carter to the mailman who didn’t have a letter from home. She refused to share their cynicism, and they did not share her bravado or her fierce self-reliance. There was no refrain in her zeal—she despised the clerics for destroying her country and felt indebted to the country that had offered her family refuge. There was no denying prerevolution corruption or abuse of power by the former regime, but she knew that the mullahs’ brutality in the name of Islam far surpassed that of the Shah’s secret police, that they would suppress women, gag them under their wretched veils, deny them equal rights, and put children, their softest target, in the line of fire in an ideological war.
At the same time, she was painfully aware that she would never again walk in the courtyard of her youth, lay flowers on her parents’ gravestones, see her beloved Caspian Sea or the snowcapped Mount Damavand. She would no longer revel in the scent and preparations for Noruz, the Persian new year, which coincides with the first day of spring. Gone was the heady perfume of hyacinth, which lingered in the air for weeks before the holiday, as essential as the scent of pine in December. Plates of sprouting wheat would not line her windowsill. On the last Tuesday of the year, her children would not hold hands and leap over tumbleweed bonfires to dispel last year’s maladies and draw from the fire’s healthy glow. My grandparents would not be expecting us in our brand-new frocks and patent leather shoes, holding out our palms for shiny gold coins that we tucked into drawstring velvet pouches while staring longingly at the carefully arranged towers of delicate chickpea cookies and pyramids of baklava drizzled with rose water on my grandmother’s coffee table. The first day of spring—could my mother let it come and go without recognition? Noruz is an intrinsic Iranian treasure. War, revolution, sanctions, jihad, fanaticism, will all take turns ripping a country apart, but Noruz prevails no matter where you’re washed ashore, as do the food, the song, the poetry, and the art that heal any torn nation. People stagger, but they pick up a tattered thread and wind it back onto a spool.
The fervor with which my mother tackled the hard work of building a new home in a new land left her little time for lamenting the loss of her homeland, the carpet her father had had woven for her wedding, or her china and silver. Only occasionally, with a frustrated sigh, would she pull open a cabinet in search of a platter or a serving spoon to discover that it had been left behind in a kitchen drawer in Tehran. She would quickly recover and make a joke: I hope the mullah’s wife is enjoying serving her rice with my spoon.
My father did not find her jokes amusing. It pained him that his beloved hospital, the scrubbed walls and surgical instruments, were contaminated by a flock of religious zealots who would lay waste to the very structures they would so desperately need after the war, when Iraq sent thousands of “martyrs” home without their limbs. He lamented the loss of his hospital as one would regret abandoning a relative in desperate times. He would recall its gardens and the north-facing balconies that lit up the patients’ rooms. I imagine in his dreams he would walk the corridors and make his rounds, only to find the rooms empty. He could not see the upside of their exile, so while my mother chose to marvel at the miracle of America and its unbounded hopefulness, my father paced their small quarters and listened for Ted Koppel to bring him better news.
Braised Chicken with Persian Plums
My father made this dish for himself when he had argued with my mother. Thus the memory of this dish is bittersweet. He would often burn it, the chicken charred and stuck to the bottom of the pan with the plums like a sad pile of coals. When it was caramelized, just before burning, it was delicious.
Serves 4
4 whole free-range chicken legs
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 large yellow onion, peeled and diced
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 whole cloves
Juice and grated zest of 1 lemon
2 cups water or chicken broth
1½ cups pitted dried Persian plums or prunes
Kosher salt and fresh-ground pepper
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. Season the chicken legs well on both sides with salt and pepper. In a cast-iron skillet or a dutch oven over medium heat, brown the chicken, skin side down, in 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Briefly turn the chicken legs to brown on the other side as well. Remove the chicken legs and arrange them in an ovenproof dish. Discard the fat, and in the same skillet, sauté the onion in 2 tablespoons of olive oil until soft and translucent. Add the honey, cinnamon, cloves, lemon peel, lemon juice, and broth. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Add the plums or prunes and check the seasoning, adding more salt or lemon juice according to your taste.
3. Carefully pour the broth with the plums over the chicken legs. Cover and braise in the oven for 1 hour. Remove the chicken pieces and plums, arranging them on a platter and covering them with foil to keep warm. Simmer the remaining broth until the sauce coats the back of a spoon. Spoon over the chicken and serve with soft polenta, couscous, or saffron rice.
Cinnamon Date Bars
My mother used to bring me a box of soft, chewy date cakes from her trips to Kerman when she visited her constituency. I instantly forgave her long absences when she presented me with this specialty of her region. Their closest relative is the Fig Newton—a happy discovery I made during my first year in America. It was only a matter of time before I would attempt to duplicate them in my kitchen.
Experiment with your favorite combinations of dried fruit—such as raisins, figs, and apricots—and nuts to make your own variation.
Makes about 3 dozen
DOUGH
7 ounces (1¾ sticks) unsalted bu
tter, cubed
½ cup sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2½ cups flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten, for brushing the dough
DATE FILLING
2 cups finely chopped dates
½ cup brown sugar
1 cup water
1 teaspoon cinnamon
TOPPING
¼ cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1. To make the dough, cream the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until pale, about 2 minutes. Add the egg, egg yolk, and vanilla, separately, mixing well after each addition.
2. Add the flour and salt to the butter mixture and mix just until the dough comes together.
3. Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and roll into a ball. Wrap in plastic and chill for 1 hour, or overnight if you like.