When Hate Attacked My Home
By Pardis Mahdavi
My mother was late for work again. Just another warm spring day in Minnesota, 1985. After bringing us home from school, she asked if we could get out and walk to the front door so that she didn’t have to pull into the garage.
As her blue Volvo crept away, my little brother and I slowly walked up to the front door hand in hand. (I was seven and he was only four.) We were careful not to step on the cracks in the pavement—a game we loved to play, where we pretended that they contained molten lava. In the summers, when moss grew between the cracks, we felt vindicated in our imaginations.
As we hopped closer to the brown wood carved door, I noticed that a large sign had been taped to the door. Red letters sprawled across a white backdrop, and an American flag was drawn at the bottom. My brother couldn’t read, but he squeezed my hand in fear. He knew enough to sense that the sign was not friendly.
We walked up closer and I could see each angry letter, spelling out the message of hate.
“BURN THIS HOUSE, TERRORISTS LIVE HERE”
I read it out loud to my brother, my voice shaking. “What does it mean?” Paymohn asked, his lips trembling.
My fear quickly turned to anger, and I started kicking the door. I went to pull the sign down, but the door swung open before I had the chance, and I fell forward into my grandmother’s arms.
“My stomach sank…The effects of this day would live within us for the rest of our lives.”
Ghamarjoon asked us what had happened. I pulled out of the hug and took her hand to show her the sign. She couldn’t read English, so I read it aloud again, bile coming into my mouth as I spoke the vile words.
She stood silently looking it. It dawned on me that even though she didn’t understand the words, she could feel the wickedness just as my brother had. I translated it for her. Before I could even finish, she was running to the phone on our kitchen wall.
I dropped my backpack, which felt heavier somehow. Paymohn slammed the door shut, willing the words to stay outside and not penetrate in. I heard my grandmother talking to my father, ordering her son-in-law to come home at once.
I grabbed my brother’s arm and ran downstairs to the basement. As we descended, I heard the television. My grandmother watched Iranian satellite TV all day long—an umbilical cord to the home country that she would never cut, even after forty years of living in the United States. The announcer was speaking in rapid, formal Persian that I strained to understand with my “kitchen Farsi.”
As my brother and I drew closer, we saw the face of Ayatollah Khomeini standing over a crowd that was burning American flags in celebration. The camera panned to what was once the US Embassy in Tehran, which Khomeini had re-labeled the “Den of Spies.” Angry people were spray-painting graffiti on the walls.
My stomach sank. I looked over at Paymohn who was silently watching. The effects of this day would live within us for the rest of our lives.
That evening when my father came home from work, the house was unusually silent. From our play area in the basement, Paymohn and I heard whispers upstairs and the sound of padded feet pacing the kitchen. When we came up for dinner, my father sat us down and looked at us deeply, in that way he had of piercing our souls with his eyes.
“We are moving to California. It’s not safe here for us anymore,” my father announced. Paymohn and I both nodded, too afraid to say anything or ask any questions. The next day my father flew to California on a scouting trip.
While he was away, Paymohn and I stayed home from school, watching the television for clues as to what was happening. On the Iranian satellite channels, we saw Iran decrying our home country, the United States, as “the Great Satan.”
“If Iran were pitted against America, what were we to think about the two of us who were Iran and America at once?”
On the English channels, we heard American officials denounce Iran as the “greatest threat to the American way of life and values.” And our confusion grew deeper. If Iran were pitted against America, what were we to think about the two of us who were Iran and America at once?
One month later, we moved to southern California, and I spent the rest of my formative years in the safety of a place where more than one million Iranians live. For college, I stayed in southern California, afraid to venture out into the unknown. Still, growing up with hundreds of thousands of other Iranian-Americans didn’t help my identity crisis. If anything, I grew more and more confused.
My mother remained firm that in our home, we would carry out “Iranian values”—as defined by her. That meant no sleep overs, no boyfriends, no makeup. If I did something she didn’t like, my mother chastised me for becoming too American; but at school, I was too Iranian, always other.
And so, in college, I chose to study diplomacy, in an attempt to bridge the two sides of me that raged a growing war across continents. It wasn’t until I began studying activism, social movements, feminist theory, and identity politics that I began to find my feet.
This essay is an extract adapted from Pardis Mahdavi’s book Hyphen, which was published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series on June 3.
Pardis Mahdavi is the dean of social sciences in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University and a professor in the School of Social Transformation.