The Persian Primer: How to Understand and Properly Make Fun of Iranian-Americans

by Ali Binazir [ source article here ]


Everywhere I turn these days, Iranians seem to be in the news. Back in the home country, the women are causing tremors through sheer power of thought and implied hotness under the tents they wear. Both the women and men are causing minor tremors in the US, becoming culturally prominent in ways that I can no longer ignore. And it's not just here in Los Angeles - they're everywhere!

Iranian authors are all over the bookstore: Marjane Satrapi with Persepolis; Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran; Roxana Saberi's just released Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran; Firoozeh Dumas's Funny in Farsi. Shirin Ebadi took the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. Nasim Pedrad is our very own Saturday Night Live cast member. The founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, is Iranian. So is Firouz Naderi, the head of NASA's Mars Exploration; Omid Kordestani, Senior VP at Google; hundreds of super-genius university professors; and about 12 million doctors and dentists, one of which has made you say 'aaah' in the past week.

Unfortunately, there has not been a commensurate rise in Iranian-American jokes. There are jokes about Irish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans. (To be fair, there are also no German-American jokes, but what is there to make fun of? Punctuality? Good hair? Superior engineering? But I digress.) Heck, there are even jokes making fun of Southeast Asian drivers.

But who's making fun of Iranians? Nobody. Except for Iranians themselves, like Maz Jobrani and his riotous US Census videos. Most likely, this shortcoming stems from a lack of familiarity with the endearing quirks of Iranian culture that would lend themselves to proper parody.

Listen up people: we've been here almost thirty years now - figure it out already! To get you started and rectify this gross injustice, here's a cheat sheet of said quirks:

1. Iranians are overeducated.
According to the last US census, Iranian-Americans possess on average 4.7 doctorates for every man, woman and child. There are two reasons for this. First, every Iranian mom pushes her kid to become a doctor or lawyer (or both) and failing that, a dentist. Second, when a Muslim fundamentalist revolution hits a country (as in 1979), the educated people tend to skip town looking for greener (or at least less murder-prone) pastures.

2. Iranians are hairy beasts.
If you've ever gone to the beach with an Iranian friend, he's probably redefined the term 'Persian carpet' for you. It's cool - we wear our fur (and the concomitant early balding) proud, because we know it comes from an excess of manhood. Heck, when you're at the Red Cross donating red blood cells and plasma, we're donating testosterone. By the gallon. Especially for those poor Abercrombie & Fitch boys who can't even seem to be able to grow any facial hair, let alone any manly chest foliage.

3. Iranians are kind of loaded.
You can't just hop a boat or scale a fence to get from Tehran to Beverly Hills (7587 miles/12,210km distance). The skills and resources required to evade authorities over there, get on a plane, evade authorities over here, and get a pad beyond your means -- these all predispose towards a craftier, more educated crowd making it here. Immigrants tend to be an industrious bunch in any case, and with their education, smarts, and devastating good looks, Iranians tend to do well for themselves.

4. Iranians dig their bling.
What's the point of having the dough if you can't show it off? No self-respecting Iranian will be caught dead without their Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, Armani and Rolex. Also, the only acceptable means of transportation is a BMW, Mercedes or Lexus - in any color as long as it's black, please.

5. Iranians are late.
If the invite says a party starts at 8pm, the Iranians will start rolling in at 11.30 - maybe. This isn't quite as bad as Brazilians, who may or may not show up in the same fiscal quarter as they promise, but adjust your expectations accordingly.

6. Iranians feed you to burst capacity.
Ever wonder what it feels like to be one of those force-fed geese that becomes foie gras? Well, if you go to a proper Persian party, you will. Hospitality is one of the cardinal virtues of Iranian culture, and we will not rest until all of our guests are supine and helpless on the floor like anesthetized walruses. The food tends to be mighty yummy, so trust me, there are worse fates than this.

7. Iranians are allergic to authority.
At every opportunity, an Iranian will do his level best to find the shortcut, outsmart the boss, bend the rules and otherwise coax, wheedle, charm and haggle his way out of a situation. Chalk it up to our long history of being overrun by Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Russians, Brits and still coming out on top at the end of it all. Bonus: hire an Iranian lawyer - they were born to do what they do.

8. Every day is Formula 1 Grand Prix day for an Iranian driver.
Iranians can be some of the most pointlessly aggressive drivers on the road. This is because many of them were trained on the demolition derby that is the roads of Tehran -- or at least inherited the genes of their parents who survived those roads (yes, these things can be transmitted genetically, just like the propensity for Prada). And what's the point of driving your black 400-hp BMW M3 if you can't treat the 405 like Nurburgring? Exactly.

9. Iranians party hearty.
You can extrapolate from the foregoing tendencies that Iranians indeed like to have a good time. An Iranian, Sam Nazarian, quite literally owns Los Angeles nightlife and is expanding his empire worldwide. Dancing, singing, cooking, eating, drinking, celebrating the fullness and freedom of life - these are hallmarks of Iranian culture. History shows that all forces attempting to suppress this natural joyousness fail sooner or later. For the sake of our brethren over there, we fervently hope it's sooner rather than later. And for my own sake, you'd better show up to my party sooner rather than later so I have enough time to overfeed you.



[ source article here ]

book by Ghodsi Mirafzali

I have a book from the San Jose Public Library system that I like very much. It is a small book with page-long vignettes about different aspects of Norooz and the Haft Seen. I cannot find this book on Amazon, but apparently it may be available through ketab.com.

The Mystery of the HAFT-SEEN by Ghodsi Mirafzali, translator: Ali Andalibi, P.H.D.

I like this bit about Norooz:

"Norooz's rituals are steeped in the wisdom of antiquity and should be carried out in earnest and treated with profound respect."

Something new I learned from this book is a peculiar chaharshanbeh-souri ritual called Audiomancy.

"Audiomancy: for this fascinating synchronistic ritual, individuals would first make a wish. They would then go stand on a street corner and listen for the answer to their wish in the first conversation that they would overhear between two people."

a thousand words in the telling

"Farsi suits Persians. It is an outgrowth of the Persian sensibility. I have already spoken of the Persian character in regard to love and romance, but I haven't mentioned Farsi's most adorable feature: it is the language of liars. Not of cold-blooded liars - that's not what I mean. Not of liars who use language as a pickpocket uses his fingers. No, I mean those who dream, those who tell stories to themselves that they believe because of the beauty of the telling, those who use words to make roses bloom in the desert, where the sun has baked the soil black and red. [...]
Is is not the language of the downright, of the straight-talking, of the morally fearless. Can you ever get a straight answer from a Persian? No, it's not possible, because on the way to providing a straight answer, the Persian suddenly becomes aware of a hundred more fascinating routes to the answer, and before he knows it, before she knows it, a simple yes or no has become an adventure that requires a thousand words in the telling."



- Zarah Ghahramani, excerpted from "My Life as a Traitor"

Iran = "Aryan"

I think of myself as a Persian rather than an Iranian. This is not hairsplitting. Persia existed before Iran, a name for the country that dates only to 1935, when the Pahlavis chose Iran, meaning "Aryan," to impress Western powers with Persia's supposed "white" racial pedigree. To think of myself as Persian allowes me to embrace the whole of my country's history, going back to the flowering of a distinctly Persian sensibility under the early Persian emperors - Achaemenes, Cyrus, and Darius -- twenty-five hundred years ago. For the first fifteen hundred years of Persia's existence, Zoroastrian was the state religion, and so, by embracing Persia's past, I also embrace the roots of my religion..."

- Zarah Ghahramani, excerpted from "My Life as a Traitor"

tadig

My mother is obsessed with "crispy rice" - tadig - so Ali's mom made it for us for dinner. Yum!

Iranian women love to get nose jobs

Last night, the topic of nose jobs came up during dinner. I did not realize that Iranian women often have their genetically well-endowed noses surgically altered to reflect a more Western ideal of beauty.

"...the Persian nose, it seems, is out of style."

As someone who believes that natural beauty is much more appealing than chemically altered human aesthetics, this trend is another fascinating cultural phenomenon within the Iranian community.

Documentary: Nose, Iranian Style (Mehrdad Oskouei) [link]

When researching to find the documentary, we also came across this 2005 CBS evening news report. Iran: Nose Job Capital Of World (Jaime Holguin) [ link ]

I'm particularly interested in exploring the connection between makeup, rhinoplasty, and head covering for Iranian women.

(By the way.... nose jobs are not Haram??)

the role of a Persian man...

[ tongue-in-cheek ]

... is to rearrange all of the beemers in the driveway when someone needs to leave the house.

Persians are infamous for throwing perpetual house parties. My husband's parents live in a sleepy cul-de-sac in San Jose and on any given night you will see their driveway overflow into the the street, expensive cars haphazardly parked together and blocking one another in.

I am not someone who 'gets' cars. I appreciate the aesthetics of beautiful design, but do not understand why so many people have undying devotion to a particular brand or model. In my husband's family and their community of friends, BMWs seem to be the only way to go and I am trying to understand why this is true. The BMW is more than a status symbol; it seems to be a way of life.

According to my cousin Anita, it used to be the older people had Mercedes Benzs and younger people had BMWs. Now most people own BMWs: they are fast, well-made, and BMW provides excellent customer service. It's a status symbol, but also appeals to the practical side.

After seeing all of the luxury cars owned by not-always-wealthy people, I have to say that I've never seen a people group more dedicated to a particular type of car.