“WHERE is your home?” the consular officer asked me.
I was 13 years old. My parents and I had left Iran eight years earlier,
at the onset of the 1979 revolution. Since then, they had bought a house
and a business — a small roadside motel in California. I had gone to
school and learned to speak English. Then, on a summer trip to visit my
mother’s Iranian relatives in Germany, I made the mistake of calling
America my home.
The trouble started when my mother handed me the visa forms. My father
had stayed behind to run the motel, and even though my mother had
learned enough English to get by, at moments like this, when it was just
the two of us, I was still the translator and all-purpose intermediary
between “us” and “them.” I took the clipboard and began filling in the
papers. My parents and I were in the United States legally, but since
we’d traveled outside the country, my mother’s business visa would need
to be renewed. It was standard procedure — we wouldn’t have encountered
any difficulties if, under the line asking where our home was, I hadn’t
written “America.”
“Are you sure about that?” the officer asked me, her pen pointed at my
adolescent cursive. When I nodded, she retreated to a back room. A few
minutes later, she returned to inform us that our applications had been
denied. We would not be able to return to America, because we had
expressed an intention to stay in the country permanently.
Looking back, the certainty of my response astonishes me. The Iranian
revolution and the vagaries of immigration law had dispersed my
relatives all over the world. By the time I faced that consular officer,
I had cousins in Wisconsin, Stockholm, Istanbul and all points in
between. During our time in Germany, my mother stayed up long into the
night, reminiscing with my aunts and uncles about Iran and speculating
about the country’s future — and the possibility of returning there
someday.
But by that time, I had spent several years distancing myself from the
country then known as “Eyeran.” I had seen enough footage of the hostage
crisis. I had been called a “smelly A-rab” at school, watched my mother
get stared down in grocery shops on account of her accent and witnessed
the sharp looks my veiled grandmother drew in the streets. I had
quickly learned not to be Iranian in ways that showed. I plucked my
eyebrows, bleached my hair with Sun-In and hitched up my skirts. My
accent was pure Valley girl, heavy on the “likes.” By summer’s end, I
was desperate to get back to California. A visa was the only thing
standing between me and the only country I cared to claim.
The first thing I noticed at the American Consulate, where we went to
fill out the necessary forms, was the line of people snaking around the
building. Most were dark-skinned, and more than a few of the women were
veiled. “Refugees,” my uncle explained. “They come every day in hopes of
getting visas.” His voice trailed off, making it perfectly clear how
they fared.
Because my father had German citizenship, I had a German passport, too,
and that meant my mother and I were permitted to skip the line and enter
by a different door. That door, and its false promise of entry, would
soon become very familiar to me. And with each trip we made to the
consulate and each denied petition, the distance between us and the
refugees grew smaller, and the possibility of returning to America more
distant.
OVER the next several months, the mattress on my cousin’s bedroom floor
became my bed. I learned to speak Persian fluently again because it was
the only language my family and I shared. Back in America, my father ran
the motel, saved money for a lawyer, and devoted himself to filing
appeals for us. He persuaded the local high school to let me take my
classes through correspondence work. My German wasn’t good enough to
enroll in a local school without intensive remediation anyway, and what
was the point if we’d soon be leaving? Eventually, my mother rented us a
basement apartment, but strictly on a month-to-month lease. “We’ll be
back in a few weeks, you’ll see,” she explained.
When I wrote to my American friends, I never explained why I hadn’t
returned at the end of the summer. I made it seem like a choice, like we
were having such a wonderful time that we’d decided to extend our
vacation. They mailed me letters and mix tapes, and I hoped they
wouldn’t forget me. But despite my mother’s reassurances, the truth was
that I started to think I might never return to America.
As it happens, I did return, nearly two years later. After several
unsuccessful attempts at filing appeals for us on his own, my father was
finally able to hire an attorney. Six months after that, my mother and I
were free to come back, though with the explicit promise that we’d be
staying only temporarily and only for business reasons.
Of course, so much had changed by the time I returned. The first — and
in some ways most enduring — shock came at the airport in San Francisco,
when I couldn’t recognize my father in the crowd. Two years of running
the motel on his own and wrangling with immigration bureaucracy had left
their mark. He’d gained a lot of weight, and wrinkles fanned out at the
corners of his eyes. He was also much sadder than I remembered, but
then I’d left as a child and returned much more grown up, and I could
see him differently now.
America, though not wholly strange, was no longer familiar to me.
Before, I’d willed myself into looking and sounding as if I belonged.
Though I could still pass as American, I now had the sensation of
perpetually looking at everything from the outside. Home schooling,
paired with exile, had made me more shy and introspective, if also more
independent. I was a real immigrant now.
Each year many thousands of children are brought to America by their
parents. They come before they have any concept of citizenship, much
less of belonging. Like me, they will draw their notions of “home” not
only from what is familiar and desirable but also from what is permitted
and denied them.
Today, I am a permanent resident. I can go and come easily, but at
borders I am still reduced to the girl who once made the mistake of
calling America her home. I check and recheck my passport for my green
card. It’s always there, right where I put it, along with the
uncertainty, the fear and, yes, the anger I’ll never quite outrun.
“Home.” At 13, I had that notion knocked out of me in ways that were
useful, or mostly so. But the word still makes me uneasy, and even now,
whenever I am given a choice, I leave the answer blank.
No comments:
Post a Comment