by Sara Saedi
But my physical appearance was a different story. I had always been short for my age. Nicknames like “Shrimp” and “Small Fry” haunted me through grade school. In high school, my petite frame and height didn’t seem to matter quite as much. I still envied my statuesque friends (my closest girlfriends were five ten; I was barely five feet), but I’d come to accept my vertical limitations. My wardrobe left something to be desired at the start of ninth grade. My go-to outfit was a white polo shirt, khaki corduroy pants, a denim jacket, and a pair of navy-blue Converse. I dressed like a prepubescent boy. Plus, I still had a mouthful of braces, a nose my face would never grow into, and ears that stuck out if I didn’t cover them up with my frizzy brown hair. I definitely fit the description of the ugly duckling in makeover movies, except that those girls were actually gorgeous actresses disguised by poorly framed glasses.
I wasn’t always the awkward and dorky girl. I am not too modest to admit that in sixth grade, I had serious game. Boys liked me. Boys fought over me. I was like the Gigi Hadid of De Vargas Elementary. This was before I hit puberty. Actually, it was before anyone in my school hit puberty. Except for a few early developers, no one had boobs. Not only was I undeniably adorable, I was also the student body president of our elementary school. Yeah, I was an undocumented immigrant who’d been elected to public office. How do you like me now, ICE?* In three adjectives, I was pretty and smart and popular. In fact, I’ve never had as much confidence as I did when I was eleven. Everything was going my way. My crush actually liked me back, and when I asked him to “go” with me, he said yes. That’s right. I was so self-assured that I wasn’t biding my time, waiting for boys to ask me out. I was taking the bull by the horns. At this point, I was also ignorant of our illegal immigration status and the sad fact that the government could kick my family and me out of the country, effectively ending any relationship I started. Life was simple and uncomplicated.
But it all changed when I graduated from sixth grade and enrolled in a junior high that accommodated several different elementary schools. Puberty hit fast and hard, and I went from a solid ten to a solid six. I couldn’t compete with girls from other grade schools who had perfectly styled perms and brand-new boobs. I couldn’t pull off baggy pants and tight bodysuits. No one seemed to think my plaid blazer and matching headband were cool (I was the Blair Waldorf of my generation). My stock plummeted, and by high school, it plateaued. Oh, and my hot sixth-grade boyfriend left me for a girl who could effortlessly pull off an oversize Dallas Cowboys parka.
Some days, it felt like I was letting my mom down. She was, and still is, a total knockout. Mama Saedi’s delicate features, stylish short hair, youthful skin, and radiant smile were regularly commented upon. My mom fit in the MILF category. My friends and their moms were always pointing out the fact that I had a pretty mom, but they never followed up the comment by saying I resembled her. And still, I was proud of my mom’s good looks. Even though none of her genes had apparently been passed down to me, I felt like it gave me a certain cachet among my girlfriends to have the gorgeous mom. I didn’t even find it disturbing when guys my age would openly say they thought my mom was hot. You’d think an ultra-attractive mother like mine would understand why my appearance was hampered by my Frida Kahlo eyebrows, coupled with my inability to paint stunning self-portraits of said eyebrows.
But my mom didn’t understand. You want to know why?
Because she was afraid of what our relatives would think if word got out that Shohreh let her daughter pluck her brows before she’d turned fifteen. Would the older generation of great-aunts and great-uncles think she was a bad mom? Would they infer that her kids were sluts and harlots? Would her sisters scoff at her for abandoning her Iranian ideals and allowing hair-free Americans to weaken her resolve? Probably. My parents will be the first to admit that a favorite Iranian pastime is to sit in judgment of others. We go to family parties not to bask in each other’s presence but to whisper among ourselves about tacky dresses, botched plastic surgery, and disastrous haircuts and highlights. (Iranian women who dyed their hair blond were just setting themselves up for a lifetime of ridicule.) If anyone could replace the late Joan Rivers on the red carpet, it’d be a Persian woman. Those bitches are brutal.
So you can understand my mom’s conundrum. If she allowed her daughter to flirt with hair removal, then family members would whisper about it. If she made her daughter stick to the natural, overgrown eyebrow look, then family members would whisper about it. Either way, my poor maman was in a lose-lose situation. I’d be remiss not to add that she was also the type of mom who thought I looked beautiful no matter what, and regularly told me so. But I didn’t care if the powerful and wise lioness who had given me life thought I was pretty. I wanted the fourteen-year-old boy who was completely blind to my inner beauty to give me validation. Luckily, after enough time passed from the Unibrow Burn of 1994, and after Samira appealed to our mom on my behalf, she finally gave in. I was awarded tweezers and a small boost to my fragile self-esteem.
Sayonara, suckers, I thought as I pulled out every last hair that bridged my eyebrows to each other. The pain stung and my skin turned red, but it was completely worth it. My mom had tried to warn me that once I started plucking, there would be no going back. I had crossed over to the dark side of hair removal. I had entered the endless abyss of threading and waxing and lasers—otherwise known as a lifetime of physical and psychological torture. But I welcomed the agony.
Gideon never came around. My unibrow was plucked on the daily, but it didn’t change anything between us. He was still just that guy I occasionally flirted with in English class. Maybe it never occurred to him to think anything more of me. Or maybe he was secretly charmed by my relentless sass but didn’t have the guts to pursue me if the popular crowd didn’t approve.
“If a boy teases you, it means he likes you.” Everyone always makes this assumption, but in my case it didn’t pan out. The only outcome from the teasing was my seriously damaged sense of self, and if I’m going to be truthful, not even tweezers helped repair it. In the back of my mind, I lived in fear that being Middle Eastern was considered a turnoff to boys my age. No one at my high school knew much about Iran and mostly associated my culture with terrorism and magic carpets. I wasn’t one of the desirable exotic races (Asians did very well at my high school—they also made up 60 percent of the student body), and I wasn’t the all-American cheerleader type, either. Even my prettier older sister never seemed to have boyfriends, when all the other white girls in her clique did. I couldn’t help but wonder if my race automatically put me at a disadvantage. It didn’t matter how often my mom told me I was beautiful, because I knew the truth: I had peaked in sixth grade.
February 8, 1995
I feel so ugly. There must be something really wrong with me. All the guys like all the made-up, permed hair, easy, trendy girls. And I really refuse to change my whole personality to be liked by guys. I know I’m not disgusting. I guess I’m pretty average. I just feel so inexperienced, and I’m sure it shows. Sometimes I just wish I could get in people’s heads and see what they think about me. I’ve never felt like such a loser before.
Today, I wish I could travel back to 1995 and slap some sense into the old me. I would grab me by the shoulders and explain that it was great that I felt different, and that I was far better than average. I would tell me that low self-esteem would be my biggest obstacle in life, and that I had to dig deep and do better than phrases of encouragement like “I know I’m not disgusting.” Mostly, I would tell me that Gideon Wright wouldn’t amount to much in the future anyway. I can’t even find the guy on Facebook, so clearly he has nothing great going on that he wants to brag about to hundreds of acquaintances. And finally, I would end with one parting thought: just because a girl has a perm, it does not mean that she’s easy. It just means that she’s going to have a lifetime of very damaged hair.
* * *
* ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency, created
in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, is in charge of implementing our country’s immigration laws. In other words, they’re the people who will deport you.
My parents want to read one of my journals so bad. They keep asking me to let them read one. They don’t understand that these are so personal. I don’t even write huge stuff in here, just everyday crap, but it’s basically everything I’m thinking in my head. Most of the stuff looks lame and corny when I look back on it, but they’re only for me, no one else….I could see them reading one anyway.
—Diary entry: June 17, 1996
If my parents were a pie chart, they would look a little something like this one.
And yet one might assume strict, conservative, diabolical monsters with foreign accents raised me. Only the foreign-accent part of that statement is true. My mom and dad defied (most of) the stereotypes regularly associated with Persian parents. This chapter would probably have a whole lot more conflict if Ali and Shohreh Saedi were more like Andre Agassi’s militant Tehran-raised dad (and I might be a tennis champion today), but I was raised by open-minded liberals whose philosophies on parenting boiled down to these three words:
“We trust you.”
But for anyone who’s more familiar with the strict-foreign-parent archetype in popular culture, let’s break down the stereotypes associated with Persian moms and dads.
— Stereotype 1 —
Persian parents allow their kids to choose from only four occupations: doctor, lawyer, dentist, and engineer.
Ethnic background aside, most parents would be immensely proud if their children pursued any of the above occupations. They’re stable, lucrative, and highly respectable professions. But my parents didn’t have hard-and-fast rules about our career aspirations. One of the many downsides of emigrating from one country to another is that you’re not always left with the option to follow your dreams. My dad had a degree in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University, but since he was undocumented, it was impossible for him to get hired for jobs that fit his qualifications. My mom’s biggest regret in life was that she never went to college. Even in the pre-revolution Iran of the 1970s, higher education wasn’t exactly a priority for women. She married young, threw herself into motherhood, and had to adjust to a new culture and language when she moved to America. Enrolling in college was a luxury she couldn’t afford. In the early days of living here, she went from working at a local Sizzler to becoming a nanny. Eventually, she joined my dad to help manage their small business.
Peninsula Luggage was a sales and repair shop in San Mateo, a town about thirty miles north of where we lived. It was owned and operated by my uncles, but when they moved on to start a home-appraisal business, my dad bought them out.
My parents ran the shop together. It wasn’t what they imagined doing with their lives, but they needed an income to pay the rent and to save enough money to buy a house one day. Even though I helped them out some weekends (for a measly three dollars an hour—under the table, because I was an undocumented immigrant), they never expected their kids to follow in their footsteps. Growing up in the United States meant we, unlike our parents, had the privilege of exploring what, if anything, we were passionate about.
“This is America,” they’d say. “You can do anything you set your mind to.”
My parents, the proud small-business owners.
I’m not positive that the word “anything” included an acting career, but by high school, I was convinced that being in movies was my destiny. You know how some celebrities wax poetic in interviews about how they just knew they’d be famous? Well, that’s how I felt, too. My parents didn’t seem to blink an eye when I informed them of my future plans, though it’s entirely possible they had to excuse themselves from the room so they could giggle hysterically at me in private.
“She thinks she can be an actress? Muahahahahaha.”
They knew I had an unhealthy obsession with movies and television shows, and they were partially to blame. They seemed to have little concept of what was inappropriate to show to an eight-year-old. In second grade, my mom took me to the theater to see R-rated films like Rain Man and Cocktail. I was probably the only child in America who was horrified when Dustin Hoffman forgot to thank Tom Cruise in his Oscar acceptance speech for best actor back in 1989.
I’m also relatively certain other teenagers in my neighborhood did not wake up at 5:00 in the morning, along with publicists and studio heads, just so they could watch the Oscar nominations announced live. When a school camping trip to Yosemite conflicted with the Academy Awards, I briefly considered starting a petition to have the trip postponed, but my mom promised me she’d tape the broadcast. Yes, before the DVR was invented, we actually had to insert a VHS tape into a VCR in order to record anything we wouldn’t be home to watch. Times were really tough (especially since no one actually understood how to program their VCRs). From then on, I was allowed to skip school on the day of the Oscars (which was a Monday back then), because I considered it a national holiday.
Truth be told, I don’t know if I was as fascinated with acting as much as I was with the cult of celebrity. More specifically, the world of Winona Ryder. During my teen years, she was my number one girl crush. You may know her as the mom from Stranger Things, but in the nineties, Winona was the “it” girl. She was as iconic as Jennifer Lawrence is today. She dated guys like Johnny Depp and Matt Damon. She was a modern-day Audrey Hepburn, with the delicate features necessary to pull off a pixie cut. I once spotted her at a U2 concert in Oakland and literally screamed at the top of my lungs: “Winona, I love you. Winona, I want to be you.” She scurried away as quickly as possible.
I was convinced that one day, little old Persian me would get famous and I would get to play her younger, less attractive, somewhat ethnically ambiguous sister in movies. If you’re too young to comprehend the power of Winona, then I suggest you stream the following movies immediately after finishing this book:
1. Heathers
2. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
3. Edward Scissorhands
4. Mermaids
5. Reality Bites
The best part about Winona was that she lived in San Francisco and grew up in the Bay Area just like me. We were homies. When I read an interview with her in Vogue that mentioned she got her start at the A.C.T. Young Conservatory in San Francisco, I decided that I was destined to follow in her footsteps.
And my parents were like: “Cool, we’ll pay for that even though we totally can’t afford it. Follow your pipe dream, honey! Yay, America!”
For most of my childhood, I thought all dads worked six days a week, but I began to notice that most of my friends’ fathers took Saturdays and Sundays off. When I asked to take acting classes in San Francisco, my dad didn’t point out the fact that he already commuted forty minutes to work each day, and that this would mean driving me an hour into the city on his only day off. He seemed excited to spend the quality father-daughter time together in the car, and waited around in the city until I got out of class. I decided to make a note of that sacrifice so that I could reference it in my future poignant Oscar acceptance speech. But before we could shell out the four hundred dollars for classes at A.C.T. Young Conservatory, I had to go through an intense interview process (with one guy who probably let anyone into the program who wasn’t a complete psychopath and could afford to pay the tuition fee). I wasn’t nervous for my interview. Even though I moved through high school like a puppy lost in a coyote den, I had less fear of adults. I liked to think I had an old soul.
So it was no surprise to me that I hit it off with the head of the program. I tried to act normal as he told me stories about Winona. He described her as “luminous” and said that he could tell she was a star from the moment they met. I imagined that in a few years, he’d be sharing the same stories about me. When I left the building and waited on a bustling street corner in Union Square for my dad to pick me up, I felt like I had found my true calling. Being in San Francisco
made me feel like I could conquer the world. No one at my high school knew it, but I wasn’t meant to live in the suburbs. I belonged in a city with a constant stream of traffic noise, busy pedestrians, and musicians busking on the sidewalk. This, I thought to myself. This is why the revolution in Iran happened. So I could move to America and become the most famous Persian actress alive. The night after my interview, we ordered Chinese food and my fortune read as follows:
“The star of riches is shining upon you.”
I carefully taped it into my journal for added inspiration. One day, I would look at it and think, Daaaamn, fortune cookie! You were spot-on!