As I was turning thirteen, I packed up everything I had to embark on a new life in Tehran with my Iranian mother and stepfather. In 1999, I left behind everyone and everything I knew in Los Angeles, including my American father. The culture shock was massive, to put it mildly. I had only been to Iran a couple times, including a trip as a child in 1991, the year Hollywood released 'Not Without My Daughter,' the film starring Sally Field depicting the real-life story of an American woman who makes a daring escape from Iran with her child amid a custody dispute with her Iranian husband. About the only other thing I had learned about Iran was that a man called “The Shah” once lived there, and that he’d had an arch nemesis named Khomeini.
I’m happy to report that I’m much better informed today (I'm an analyst and commentator on Middle East affairs with a focus on Iran). But back then, being a politically naïve teenager complicated my feelings of displacement and melancholy. One day reading aloud from the textbook about the Iranian revolution in my seventh grade history class, I got to the passage about Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989. I pointed out the mistake to my teacher. After all, how could the man be dead when his image decorated every street and public building in Tehran? My classmates erupted in laughter. It took me a while to distinguish the morality enforcers of the komiteh from other branches of Iranian security; at the sight of ordinary conscripts, I would hurriedly tuck my hair under my headscarf, and put the sleeves of my manteau all the way down so not even my nails would show.
Being an American in Iran initially filled me with paranoia. Somehow I believed that if my nationality was discovered, I could be taken hostage—like the Americans at the U.S. embassy in 1979 (I only have a U.S. passport since they don't grant citizenship to children with foreign fathers). The bars on the windows of the Tehran International School reinforced my sense of dread. My young mind would wander to fantasies of American marines rescuing me from an Iranian prison. At the end of my first year of school in Tehran, I wrote “I Love Mullahs” in my textbooks before handing them back in—my own little insurance policy in case the Islamic Republic ever came for me. Whenever I saw American flags set ablaze or protesters chanting “Death To America” on state television, it confirmed my fear that Iranians hated the United States and everything about it.
