Persians Find Their Place

How Iranians in the East Bay hold their heritage.

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All Photos by Lori Eanes except upper right photo by Talieh Shahrokhi.

By Maggie Fazeli Fard
East Bay Monthly, May 2009

Thirty years ago, Iranian expatriate Minoo Hamzavi and a handful of friends jerry-rigged a local celebration of the Persian New Year. Hurriedly lighting a few candles on a deserted Berkeley sidewalk, the young women performed a makeshift version of the fire-jumping ritual that dates back to pre-Islamic Persia, hopping over the tiny flames to chase off bad spirits. Recently arrived in the United States, the small band of relatively isolated transplants had no choice but to improvise.

But this year, Hamzavi, now 48, and some of those same friends leaped exuberantly across hearty bonfires on Durant Avenue in Berkeley. In what has become an annual tradition, they—and hundreds of other East Bay Iranians—flooded the street on March 16, the eve of the Wednesday before the spring equinox. From families with young children to 20-somethings in trendy head-to-toe black, the revelers were illuminated by industrial lights and the glow of traditional bonfires lining Durant, where the fire ceremony is sponsored each year by the Berkeley-based Persian Center. Such Chaharshanbe-Suri (“Red Wednesday”) celebrations are a key item on the Iranian calendar, serving as pre-parties to the New Year, or Norouz.

Partygoers of all ages squealed as they took turns jumping over the flames. Sorkhi-ye to az man; Zardi-ye man az to, many recited under their breaths. “Give me your beautiful red color; And take back my sickly pallor.”

Colorful street festivals are nothing new in the East Bay. The region has long been home to a variety of vibrant cultures, all of which have been integrated into the fabric of life in East Bay cities. Just a trip down University Avenue in Berkeley—home of delicious foodstuffs from Mexico to India, Italy to the Philippines—or a visit to Oakland’s Chinatown reflects the heritage of the region. Rather than assimilate and blend into the murky soup of Americanism, immigrants to cities like Albany, Richmond, and Fremont have helped to define what it means to be American, or at least what it means to be from the East Bay, since the turn of the 20th century.

By contrast, the first wave of Iranian immigrants did not arrive in the United States until the mid-1950s, and many of them never intended to stay. They came, for the most part, to study, planning to return to their homeland to build a new, modern nation. Between the 1950s and the late 1970s, many did just that. But after the 1978 Iranian Revolution—which brought hard-line politics under the leadership of Islamic clergymen, mandatory headscarves for women, prohibition of alcohol, and persecution of ethnic, religious, and political minorities—it grew next to impossible to go back.

Next month marks the first anniversary of Iran’s controversial 2009 presidential election, which sent shock waves through Iranian communities worldwide. Here in the Bay Area, which boasts the second-largest Iranian population in the United States, expats fretted about the fate of family members in their unstable homeland, and marked last summer with organized demonstrations to protest the political situation. In the months that followed, panic over the well-being of loved ones dissolved into a climate of chronic anxiety. But the continuing crisis didn’t deter local Iranians from celebrating the Persian New Year this spring, amid a strong, supportive community with deep East Bay roots.

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Hamzavi’s move to America can best be described as a testament to the importance of family in Iranian culture. At 15, Hamzavi, the youngest of five children, moved from Iran’s capital to Berkeley, joining a brother who already lived here. “My parents were more comfortable sending me halfway across the world than outside of Tehran,” where she would have had no

relatives to live with, says Hamzavi.

“I lived right over there,” she says, pointing out the window of the busy Shattuck Avenue cafe to no place in particular. “I was fascinated by being here—I liked it immediately. But nobody who came at that time really wanted to stay.”

With an interest in the arts, Hamzavi enrolled at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland; she planned to specialize in textiles, then return home to her family. But within a year, her plans changed abruptly.

As a monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran had undergone several decades of modernization and Westernization, thanks to its large petroleum reserves and support from the United States and other Western nations. In January of 1978, mere months after Hamzavi left home, the first rumblings of revolution began in Iran. By December 1979, the Shah was living in exile, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was named the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader.

“The rug was pulled [from] under me,” Hamzavi says.

Approximately 34,000 Iranians moved to the United States before the revolution in 1978, but even as the new regime tightened its control on emigration out of Iran, a mass exodus began. This second wave of Iranian immigrants had a new face; while the majority of Iranians are Muslims, this new group was composed largely of religious and ethnic minorities like the Bahai’is, Jews, Armenians, and Assyrians. Others simply left to join family members who couldn’t, or didn’t want to, return to Iran.

One year after Hamzavi arrived in Berkeley, her mother and one of her sisters left Iran, and slowly other family members followed suit. Today, only one sister remains in Iran. But just as Iran changed in the aftermath of the revolution, so did the United States.

When Hamzavi first arrived here, Iran’s reputation as a U.S ally preceded her and she was welcomed. But the United States quickly rejected the new Islamic Republic and its leader, and vice versa. In 1979, the U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized by militant Iranian students, and 52 embassy employees were held hostage for 444 days. After the hostage crisis, anyone with Iranian roots—even those who, like Hamzavi, had arrived before the revolution and played no part in it—were stigmatized.

“There was terrible prejudice after the revolution,” recalls Hamzavi, who now works as a Pilates practitioner and performance artist. “Prejudice isn’t just hate or violence. It’s a look. It’s refusing service.”

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The second generation of Iranian-Americans, the children of those who left right before the revolution, or fled right after it, have had a different experience. Our stories are more indicative of ignorance among non-Iranians than of prejudice.

In my case, growing up in an Iranian household in New Jersey, my family was as foreign to the community as martians. Few people knew what I was talking about when I referred to myself as “Persian” on heritage days at school. (“Persian” and “Iranian” are often used interchangeably, though some Iranian-Americans use “Iranian” in a political context and “Persian” in a cultural or historical context.) In the second grade, I argued with a classmate who insisted that “EYE-ran” and “EEE-rahn” were two different countries. Even in the diverse Bay Area, locals in their 20s tell similar stories about growing up Iranian in the 1990s.

“During the first Iraq War, kids would say, ‘You’re Iraqi.’ They didn’t know the difference,” says Reza Shabani, 26, his dark, curly hair bobbing slightly as he shakes his head at the memory.

Shabani, a Ph.D. student at U.C. Berkeley, is seated in his parents’ North Berkeley home. Outside, it’s a bleak Sunday as raindrops tap on the large bay windows behind him, but the mood at the Shabani house is decidedly festive. Shabani invites me to stay for what he calls a “family dinner” as the smell of saffron-scented Persian rice wafts out of the kitchen and enough marinated, skewered meat to feed an army is pulled out of the refrigerator. These weekly dinner parties, or mehmoonis, are an elaborate affair, drawing as many as 30 guests, including family, friends, and friends of friends. Shabani laughs at the observation that “family dinner” may not be the most appropriate description of this large-scale gathering; for him, they’ve been a part of his life for as long as he can remember.

Shabani was born in France to Iranian parents, moving to Iran when he was a year old and, six years later, to the United States. At age 11, he found himself in Richmond; at 14, in Berkeley. Surrounded by Iranian family members for most of his childhood, he was teased by kids at school without understanding why.

“There is no ‘th’ sound in Farsi,” explains Shabani. “When I was in third grade and kids asked what grade I was in, I would say ‘tird’ grade. And they’d make hella fun of me. It only dawned on me years later why.”

Shabani says that as a little boy, he wanted to assimilate as much as possible, but because he looked different and spoke with an accent, it was difficult.

“In fourth grade we did a school play, Aladdin,” he says. “Everyone told me I should be Aladdin because I’m from ‘that part of the world.’ And I was like, ‘I should be Aladdin!’ But I wasn’t Aladdin because I was a terrible actor. Instead I sang the song ‘Arabian Nights’ at the beginning and Aladdin was tall, blond, and blue-eyed. It sucked.”

Veesta Falahati, 21, remembers the day her younger brother came home from school and announced he was black. “When my brother was 6, he told people he was Iranian and they convinced him he wasn’t. They told him he was from Africa. My mom sat him down and showed him a map,” says Falahati, who was born and raised in Campbell, a suburb of San Jose, but now lives in Berkeley.

“Even up to high school, people didn’t make the connection,” says Falahati. “Once I told someone I speak Farsi [the Iranian language], and he was like, ‘You’re from Farsinia?’”

The lack of recognition from their peers was coupled with a rejection of their own “Iranian-ness.”

Despite the regular schedule of mehmoonis and being pushed by his parents to attend Farsi classes every Saturday for four years, Shabani says, “I wasn’t proud to be Iranian at all. I didn’t identify with Iranian culture.”

Falahati, too, felt like an outsider.

“By middle school, being Iranian became an insecurity,” she says. “My mom wouldn’t let me tweeze my eyebrows. I wasn’t allowed to go to sleepovers. When I went out, my parents wanted to know where I was going and who I was with. My American friends’ parents didn’t impose the same rules.”

When Falahati was 9 years old, she visited Iran for the first time, an experience she calls “eye-opening.”

“There was the mentality that life would have been far easier if I were raised in Iran because everyone else was like me,” she says. “There was some feeling of resentment against my parents.”

Both Falahati and Shabani came to terms with their Iranian background only recently, as students at U.C. Berkeley, where they met other Iranian-Americans their age at social events sponsored by the on-campus Persian club. Falahati even went on to become a Persian club officer and one of the editors of Perspective, a student-run magazine designed for Cal’s Iranian community.

“It took a long time to embrace being Iranian-American,” Falahati admits.

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Not everyone felt shame in being an outsider.

Keyvan Berenjian, a 25-year-old engineer at Cisco Systems and a Richmond native, is half-black, half-Persian. His mother is an African-American woman from central Florida and his father was born and raised in Iran. “Obviously there were cultural differences,” says Berenjian.

Berenjian admits that, at times, he “considers himself more Iranian than black.” Rather than feel self-conscious about his background, he learned to embrace it early on—especially when it came to impressing the fair sex.

“In college, I dated three Iranian girls at once,” says Berenjian, a U.C. Santa Cruz alum, with a mischievous smile. “I played the black Persian card. It worked so well. I’d say something in Farsi and the girls would go, ‘Oh, how do you know that?’” His deep voice rises several octaves as he imitates the reaction. Berenjian says it was a great situation—until the girls found out about each other. “I call it the ‘dark week.’ I learned my lesson,” he says, laughing.

Berenjian speaks fluent Farsi and has traveled to Iran five times. Still, he is regularly met with puzzled looks because he doesn’t look traditionally Iranian; visiting Iran means being asked again and again if he is a basketball player, proving that stereotypes go both ways.

“Granted, I’m half black, but I’m just as Persian as a full Persian,” Berenjian says. “We’re in America—the melting pot. Iranians do stick really close to their communities. But eventually it’s going to all melt.”

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Nowhere in the East Bay is the Iranian-American “melt” more apparent than at 1808 5th St. in Berkeley, the home of Golestan Kids.

Golestan, named after the Farsi word for “garden,” is a full-immersion Iranian language and culture program, offering full-day pre-school and after-school classes based on Waldorf and Montessori teaching methods. While Farsi language classes have been offered in the East Bay at locations like Nima Farsi School in Albany and the Andeesheh School at Oakland’s Islamic Cultural Center, Golestan is the first school to offer a daily program of not just language instruction but also science, math, nature, art, music, dance, cooking, gardening, and even yoga—all in Farsi.

Launched in 2005 as a playgroup for Iranian-American children and their parents, Golestan is the brainchild of those parents, including founder and executive director Yalda Modabber, whose sons Manu and Kian currently attend the school.

“Manu and Kian only speak Farsi to each other; they even fight in Farsi,” she says. This is a challenge for her husband, an American who doesn’t know Farsi, and Modabber often finds herself playing the part of translator. But it’s a small price to pay, she says. “If it weren’t for Golestan, my boys wouldn’t know Farsi. I’m sure of it.”

Like her own children, most of the students at Golestan are of mixed heritage, says Modabber. “Except for one, who has no Iranian in him at all. Both his parents are American, but they really just loved the program.”

“Being Iranian means something different to everyone,” says Modabber, who left Iran with her family in 1979, when she was 9 years old. “There is the poetry, the music, the language. But there is also a warmth and generosity of our culture. There is a fear that when our kids enter American schools, they will lose that. We want to teach them to love their Iranian heritage.”

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In 2000, more than 300,000 Iranians lived in this country, according to the U.S. census; the number was closer to 700,000, reports MIT’s Iranian Studies Group. Most of the Iranian foreign-born live in California, but other communities, like Long Island, N.Y., Washington, D.C., and Houston, Texas, continue to grow. Not only is “Persian” becoming a recognizable cultural denomination in these regions, but it has developed into a unique pop-culture stereotype.

In the 1995 movie Clueless, an Iranian student at a fictitious high school in Beverly Hills swears at a teacher in Farsi; in another scene, the film’s main character describes a clique known as the Persian Mafia: “You can’t hang out with them unless you have a BMW,” she says matter-of-factly. A 2007 episode of South Park parodies the film 300 (an imaginative retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartans defeated the Persian army), depicting Iranian-Americans with slicked-back hair, gold-chain necklaces, designer sunglasses, and silk shirts half-unbuttoned to reveal curly chest hair. Most recently, MTV announced a casting call for a spin-off of its popular reality series Jersey Shore, featuring “outrageous, outspoken, and proud Persian-Americans” in Beverly Hills instead of the Italian-Americans that made the New Jersey version a hit.

Berenjian tells me that these stereotypes, though unflattering, are a sign that the perception of Iranian-Americans in this country is shifting: It’s better, after all, to be viewed as a popular-culture cartoon than as an insidious foreigner. “For a long time, people didn’t know what we were,” Berenjian says. “Then, after 9/11, they thought we were Arab.” I half-expect a Seinfeld-ian addendum: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Iranians became targets of the prejudice aimed at Arabs in the name of U.S. patriotism. Berenjian’s optimism notwithstanding, the looks-like-a-terrorist stigma has been hard to shake. Hamzavi experienced the prejudice first-hand, bringing back memories of the difficult weeks and months that followed the 1978 revolution. “After 9/11, the sensitivity was so heightened,” she says. “At a store in Emeryville, one person said to me, ‘Go home.’ I said, ‘To Berkeley?’”

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As Falahati came to terms with her heritage, she also realized that life in Iran wasn’t as fulfilling as it appeared the first time she visited. “Now that I’m older, I realize why my parents came, I know the struggles my parents went through, I see the same struggles my cousins are going through now.”

This month, Falahati will graduate from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in molecular and cell biology. She is looking for research opportunities and plans to apply to medical schools. Her cousins in Iran, on the other hand, dream of life in America as portrayed on MTV.

“In Iran, they all have satellite [television], so they see the music videos of people living fabulous lives and think it’s all like that,” she says. “The widespread misconception of America is that making money is easy.”

Today, many Iranians seek their own version of the American dream. Visas to visit the United States—let alone permanently move here—are hard to come by. But since 1983, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) has been helping Jewish and other religious and ethnic minorities in Iran come to the United States as refugees.

Falahati’s family is Zoroastrian, an Iranian religion that predates Islam. While Iranians still honor their Zoroastrian heritage through holidays and ceremonies (like jumping over bonfires on “Red Wednesday”), Zoroastrians are one of the religious minority groups that qualifies for refuge in the United States. Several of Falahati’s family members have taken advantage of the opportunity.

“But for many of them, it’s very disappointing,” says Falahati. “They have a fantasy of America and they fail to understand the reality. It’s a shock. Many of them are leaving a great lifestyle, financial security, their family, and they come here and have nothing.”

Falahati says she no longer resents her parents for denying her a childhood in Iran. “I definitely would have been restricted,” she says. “There would have been fewer opportunities to become successful.”

This realization came to a head with the disputed election in Iran last summer. As polls opened on June 12, 2009, voters turned out in droves for what many considered a referendum on the hard-line policies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the nation’s president. When Ahmadinejad was declared the victor, the streets of Tehran rapidly filled with protesters, riot police, and burning vehicles. For weeks afterward, cries of Allahu Akbar (“God is Great”) echoed from Tehran rooftops every night, protests across the country continued, and reports of police brutality against the demonstrators increased. When the government cracked down on foreign media, Iranians posted homemade videos to YouTube to show the world what was happening. And the world responded.

On June 14, 2009, Iranian-Americans gathered in cities across the country to show support for friends and family in Iran. “I was surprised by how many Iranians showed up and supported their countrymen,” says Falahati, who participated in the near-weekly demonstrations held in the Bay Area. “We can be bipolar. On a personal level, we’re always willing to help out, but we have a problem gathering and working together. But last summer there was a deep sense of unity.”

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Sparsely decorated with barely a dozen tables, well-worn rugs covering the linoleum floors, and the word “hamburgers” emblazoned on a large window in green block letters, Oakland’s Woodminster Cafe is unassuming, but clearly popular. Even at 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, customers flow in and out, buying sandwiches or getting change. The owner, Siavash Payrovi, 59—better known as “Sia” among the regulars—teases everyone who comes in. “You have to pay for reentry,” he tells the elderly man who returns for his eyeglasses, which he left behind minutes earlier. The corners of Payrovi’s thick, dark mustache turn up as he smiles. Still, despite the continuous foot traffic and stream of phone calls placing takeout orders, Payrovi indicates this is the calm before the storm.

While his hamburgers are “magnificent” and his scones are “the best”—they always sell out by 8 a.m., he says—Friday is Payrovi’s busiest evening. Friday nights are “Persian Nights” at the Woodminster, and every week for the past five years, Payrovi has served a traditional Persian dinner, prepared with the help of his wife, Effat, to a devoted, mostly American clientele.

Payrovi comes to life when talking about Persian food. He is especially proud of his kebabs—“100 percent lamb!” he exclaims, with a flourish of his hand. He looks forward to eating the kebabs, too, but with customers calling in their advance orders, the skewers often sell out before he even begins preparing them. “People ask why don’t I make more,” he says. “Because if I make more I don’t have control to keep it homemade.”

Payrovi waxes poetic about his hamburgers, his lamb kebabs, his wife’s Persian stews. He is less interested, however, in answering questions about his homeland. He tells me he worked as a pilot before the revolution and was lucky to keep his job after it. (“People like me,” he offers as an explanation for how he weathered a political firestorm.) He says he left Iran in 2000 “for political reasons.”

When I ask why he decided to introduce Persian food, Payrovi becomes very serious. His gaze steadies and his mustache twitches slightly. “I am very, very picky about food. Trust me,” he says with a wave of his hand, as if his word is final. “Persian food is the best. And, honestly, my wife is one of the best Persian cooks.”

Payrovi serves Persian food simply because he loves it; he says nothing about attempting to share his culture with his community. He doesn’t seem interested in preserving that culture simply for the sake of preservation.

“Have you ever been to Iran?” Payrovi asks me.

“No,” I say. “Never. But I want to—”

“Don’t go,” he interrupts.

“Don’t go?”

“Don’t go.” He waves his hand; his word is final.

He came to America for a new life—a better life—and believes he has found it here, in a modest cafe in Oakland.

Hamzavi says that as much as we Iranian-Americans may like to view our experience as unique, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t really that special.

“All these years, I have kept the tradition. I celebrate our New Year. I didn’t change my name,” says Hamzavi. “But this is the history of all immigrants, not only Iranians,” she continues. “The struggle, the survival, it’s nothing new. This is an immigrant country. Iranians within the last three-and-a-half decades—now we, too, are experiencing it.”

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