In 1979, as Iran was in the throes of a violent revolution, my mom, my sister, and I came to the U.S. on a day’s notice. We went from couch-surfing with relatives in Tel Aviv to moving in with my grandmother in suburban Los Angeles, until my dad finally fled Iran to join us here. I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life, and I’ve never returned to Iran. But as one of nearly 140,000 Iranian Americans—and 50,000 Iranian Jews—in Southern California, I have stayed tied to my homeland through food (I’m currently working on a cookbook of recipes by Iranian Jewish matriarchs), and music.

Life in Los Angeles can’t not be a mishmash: I have birria with my matzah (and dip it in consomé), and Taiwanese noodles are as much a taste of home to me as my mom’s gondi. Music is no different: Once I graduated from the alt-rock sounds of KROQ, I’d drive around listening to Superestrella, the local Spanish pop station, with a Spanish-English dictionary in the passenger seat so I could look up unfamiliar words at red lights. Persian music was my parents’ music, and I was a rebellious third-culture kid who favored Tori Amos over Mahasti. But you can bet that at every bat mitzvah, every wedding, as soon as certain songs started playing, my hands would shoot up, and I’d run to the dance floor.

Viguen—“Baba Karam”

In the early ’80s, as new immigrants finding our way, what grounded us the most were family gatherings. Whether it was Passover seders, our strange takes on Thanksgiving meals, or just a simple dinner with family, getting together with my aunts and cousins created that rare space where we could speak our native language and be fully understood.

Now, here’s the thing about Iranians, in my experience: It’s perfectly normal, at even a casual gathering, for everyone to get up and start dancing in the middle of the living room. Hear a certain beat and we all break into gher—that near-subconscious groove of the hips essential to Persian dance. At my Auntie Mohtaram’s house, this was also the moment when her husband, Nasser Khan as we called him, would pull out a tombak and join in with his own percussive drumming.

“Baba Karam” is a classic Persian song with a slow-like-molasses beat that has moved people to gher for decades. This version, by the beloved white-coiffed Armenian Iranian singer Viguen, is my favorite.

Bijan Mofid—“Avaz, Agha Moosheh” from Shahr-e Ghesse

We did a lot of road-tripping as a young family in a new country—up to Sacramento and Yosemite, or out to Las Vegas. And the soundtrack was always cassette recordings of musicals by the great Iranian playwright and theater director Bijan Mofid. His most famous, Shahr-e Ghesse (City of Stories), appears to be a children’s story populated by singing animals—but this avant-garde show was actually a dangerous act of resistance, exploring the clash of Iran’s traditional values with rapidly approaching modernity.

I didn’t understand all that as a child, but I definitely picked up on the sad, discomfiting undertones—including the heartbreak of the Mouse character on this song. I connected to it as a small child, and I still tear up listening to his squeaky, high-pitched voice.

Morteza—“Del Beh Tou Bastam”

My bat mitzvah was a great party. I recall a delicious spread of herbed rices and grilled meats, cocktails flowing freely, and a dance floor filled with family who’d come from Chicago, the East Coast, London, and Israel.

There is no line between pop stars and banquet singers in the Iranian community. My bat mitzvah singer was Morteza, one of the foremost Persian pop stars/wedding singers of the late 1980s. This song, with its gher-inducing tombak and violin intro, pulled the whole party—kids, grannies, and everyone in between—into a multi-generational dance party for the ages.

Alabina—“Alabina”

Los Angeles Iranian Jews’ musical tastes aren’t limited to Persian music, but there is a very specific mix of genres and nationalities that make up a typical Iranian Jewish party playlist. Obviously Persian dance songs reign supreme, but you’ll also find the Turkish singer Tarkan’s “Kiss Kiss,” Gipsy Kings’ “Bamboleo,” Omer Adam’s “Tel Aviv,” the Egyptian pop classic “Nour El Ein” by Amr Diab, any Ricky Martin banger, and of course, “Despacito.” Alabina brings this world of influences together in one band.

Led by an Israeli vocalist of Egyptian and Moroccan Jewish descent, and backed by a band of Spanish-speaking Gypsies from Montpellier, France, Alabina performs in Hebrew, Arabic, French, Spanish, and English, and the band’s live performances bring out the Los Angeles Middle Eastern constituency (Iranians included) in droves.

Omid Walizadeh—“Asemoon”

For years, I lived a double life. My friends from school would not have recognized the brainy, quiet girl they knew running to the dance floor in heels to get down with cousins, aunties, and even her own mother to unabashedly saccharine Persian pop songs.

So my first visit to Discostan blew my mind. At a dark, divey bar called Footsies, tucked away in Los Angeles’s Cypress Park neighborhood, DJs spun a mix of Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian songs. Blond hipsters sidled past the pool table to the tiny dance floor to groove to the very songs that played at our bat mitzvahs decades ago. The decidedly uncool soundtrack of my brown girl family life was suddenly hip!

Omid Walizadeh frequently spins at Discostan events, and I can’t get enough of his modern mixes of nostalgic sounds.

Galeet Dardashti—“My Flower (The Bride)”

A guiding principle of my work is to fight Ashkenormatism—the idea that Eastern European Jewish traditions are the only Jewish traditions. So many people know about the Yiddish language, but there are countless Judeo-Iranian dialects, including Kashi, the Judeo-Kashani language my grandparents spoke. During a series of virtual presentations from the Jewish Language Project, Galeet Dardashti performed this song in Judeo-Isfahani. It’s the wailing plea of a young bride to remain in her father’s home, and feels like an auditory time capsule from my grandmother’s generation.

Backed by an estimable Iranian Jewish musical heritage—her father is a cantor, her grandfather was a renowned singer of Persian classical music—and a PhD in anthropology, Dardashti brings traditional music to a new generation. Her latest album, Monajat, blends recordings of her grandfather singing traditional Yom Kippur prayers with her own vocals.

Adja Pekkan—“Viens Dans Ma Vie”

I was recently at a potluck dinner for “creative, artsy, blacksheepy Iranian babes,” and amid a playlist by one of our hosts, Rose Ghavami, aka DJ Rose Knows, was a French song with very eastern riffs and a definite ’70s sound. I couldn’t tell you a thing about this song, but I instantly recognized it from when I was a kid.

It turns out it’s a 1977 song by Turkish pop star Ajda Pekkan. Surely it was on one of the many bootleg cassettes my dad would ship to my mom in the U.S. while he was still in Iran. A core memory I didn’t know I even had—this French song from Turkey that was popular in Iran over 45 years ago—made its way back to me in a backyard in Lincoln Heights at a dinner for misfit Iranian women like myself.

Hooshmand Aghili—“Vatan”

As part of my culinary research, I attended a ladies’ lunch this spring in the West Los Angeles home of a Jewish woman from the Kurdish city of Sanandaj. All of the guests were in their 70s and up, and sported blown-out hair, manicures, and the chicest outfits. They chatted and gossiped in a mix of Persian and Judeo-Kurdish Aramaic as they took tea and Kurdish Passover sweets, then beer and cocktails, then a spring feast crowned with huge platters of fragrant herbed rice. After lunch, they gathered in the living room and to my delight, started singing.

One woman with a professional-level voice belted out a song I’d never heard, entitled “Vatan,” the Persian word for home. The lyrics loosely translate to, “This city is beautiful, I know. Its colors are bright and its waters clear, I know. It’s like a picture postcard, I know. But it’s not home, it’s not home, it’s not home.” Forced diasporic life in one verse.

Shervin Hajipour—“Baraye”

Last September, I sat, astonished, as images of Iran’s mass protests erupted all over my Instagram. For the past few years, social media has offered me a window into contemporary Iran—chic cafe culture, bustling Tehran city life, old men selling handicrafts in tiny shops. Now, it showed me courageous women fighting the same oppressive regime that forced my family out of the country so many decades ago. “Baraye,” young singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour’s somber ballad of freedom, quickly became the anthem of the movement, and captured hearts all around the world. I cried the first dozen or so times I heard “Baraye,” and over a year later, it still makes me emotional.

Chloe Pourmorady Ensemble—“Elohai Neshama”

On October 8, 2023, I hosted an intimate event in my living room spotlighting Iranian Jewish culture. This was supposed to be a night of joyful cultural exchange, with delicious home-cooked food and a performance by L.A.-based vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Chloe Pourmorady. But after the brutal attacks on Israel the night before, everyone felt shaken and frightened for what might come next. For a moment we considered canceling. Then Chloe—whose work blends her Iranian Jewish roots with a diverse set of global influences—said, “We will hold each other up and hold space for healing.” Her music did just that.

“Elohai Neshama” is a daily prayer of gratitude for the purity of our individual souls. That night, while it couldn’t fix anything, Chloe’s ethereal rendition was a timely reminder of our shared humanity and a needed moment of unity.

The post Tannaz Sassooni’s Diaspora Jukebox Playlist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the title question posed, on International Women’s Day, to two Arizona State University experts on women’s leadership at a Zócalo/ASU Center on the Future of War event.

“In a nutshell, I would say yes,” said Pardis Mahdavi, the dean of social sciences in Arizona State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and an anthropologist whose scholarship covers gendered labor, migration, sexuality, human rights, transnational feminism, and public health. She said that transnational feminist movements—from #MeToo to #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria—are having “a moment” now after many years of organizing.

“Feminist organizers have been working in the underground, they’ve been planting those seeds, they’re the tillers of the soil, if you will,” said Mahdavi. However, she cautioned, “we have to create an ecosystem where this change can take root.”

What differentiates feminist organizing from other types of movements, asked Mi-Ai Parrish, managing director of ASU Media Enterprise, and the moderator of the event, which was co-sponsored by the ASU Global Human Rights Hub.

“Feminist organizers,” Mahdavi replied. “they do their homework, they know what the lived experience is about, and they also know you need multiple disciplinary perspectives, multiple trainings. You’ve got to bring different people to the table to solve world’s most pressing problems.”

Transnational feminist movements aren’t limited to women-centric issues, like reproductive rights, she said. For example, Black Lives Matter was founded by three Black women in response to police violence against Black men. Or take feminist groups in Iran who have pushed back pushed back against morality police, Mahdavi added.

“What all these movement have in common is they’re all part of justice feminism,” said Mahdavi, defining justice feminism as “a uniting call that brings all these movements together” whether they’re about health justice, social justice or climate justice.

Mahdavi said that she finds hope in the greater intergenerational collaboration she sees in justice feminism. “Women from across generations and across borders and boundaries are coming together to push back against enemies that even some of the most powerful militaries can’t combat,” she said.

Today, Mahdavi said, she’s also heartened to see how different undergrounds are starting to unite to create larger change. As an example, Mahdavi cited the #BringBackOurGirls campaign in Nigeria, which was able to bring worldwide attention to the fates of 276 schoolgirls who had been kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Maram. She also shared a lesser-known example from some of her own work on trafficking relating to women in Madagascar, also known as Malagasy women.

“These feminist networks organized from Kuwait to Switzerland to South Africa to get all the Malagasy women who had been incarcerated in Kuwait with their babies, they got them all home,” said Mahdavi. The story, which she documented in her 2016 book, Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives, did not get prominent media attention, she said. “It wasn’t on Twitter or social media but it was a great example of these transnational feminists coming together, sharing their undergrounds to get women and their children, in this case, home safely.”

Its epilogue was equally important, she continued; these same women, Mahdavi said, were able to change the policies in their home countries to make migration safer for other women.

In response to a question from Parrish, Mahdavi said that transnational feminist movements have momentum today for a confluence of reasons. “Success begets success,” she said, and feminists are watching movements around the world and borrowing strategies from one another.

While doing field work in Dubai, she recalled being heartened by seeing feminists—women and men—come together and share strategies of how to combat oppression. “That hadn’t been happening because people first of all weren’t as mobile before as they are now,” she said. They also weren’t as networked, she added.

“Look at us,” she said, referring to the event’s broadcast on Youtube, “we’ve got people coming in from all around the world listening to us which is wonderful—but this obviously couldn’t have happened three decades ago. So there’s momentum, which we’ve got to capitalize on. The case has been made. Now we’ve got to make the change.”

Parrish asked what that change would look like, and invited Mahdavi to imagine “a fully scaled transnational feminist movement.”

“It’s a world where justice is really at the heart of everything we do,” Mahdavi said. In other words, having policies both foreign and domestic that consider questions of justice at the forefront.

Transnational women’s movements have combined progress and backlash, Parrish pointed out. “There’s been a pull and a push in a negative way against these movements. Do you think people are starting to see the benefit to all?”

Mahdavi replied: “It depends what part of the world that we’re talking about. I think here in the United States we’re finally starting to see it.” She also suggested that the “triple pandemic”—the viral pandemic of COVID, the social pandemic of racism, and the climate emergency pandemic—is forcing people to rethink the paradigm we’re in.

“We need new models of leadership to get us out of this situation, and we need new ways of knowing,” she said.

Audience questions piled in for the panelists throughout the discussion. One asked which countries are at the forefront of transnational feminist movements today.

“I wish I had a crystal ball,” said Mahdavi, but if she had to guess, she would list India, South Korea, Iran and different parts of the Middle East, Nigeria, Canada, and Mexico.

Several audience members wanted to know what men can do to be better allies to women and these movements.

“Listen,” said Mahdavi. As men begin to practice “being self-reflective and saying here’s my positionality” will make a big difference.

Nearing the end of the conversation, Parrish pointed out that it’s human nature that when you rise up, you step on who’s behind you. How, she asked, can feminist movements be better at lifting up others as they rise?

“That intentionality has to be there,” said Mahdavi. “We have to remember we have to lift as we climb,” she said circling back to a point she’d made earlier in the evening about feminist leadership. “True feminist leaders, male or female or nonbinary leaders, are not going to step on people on their way up. We are going to lift as we climb.”

The post Women’s Movements Can Save the World—by Learning From Each Other appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today the debate on U.S. immigration, Israel and the Middle East, the Iran nuclear deal, and other issues are having significant impacts on the Iranians I know who are living in Los Angeles. L.A.’s Iranian American community is hardly monolithic, and many Iranians identify by religion more than nationality. Obviously, I can’t speak for all of my fellow Jewish Iranian immigrants in Southern California, let alone for the large numbers of immigrant Iranian Muslims, Zoroastrians, Christians, members of the Bahá’í community, and others belonging to the diaspora who’ve settled in metropolitan Los Angeles. But what I see is that our community has felt the impact of the travel ban imposed earlier this year—as well as other current U.S. immigration policies—in a way that is personal, intimate, and painful.

There are several explanations why. First, the size of the Iranian American community here is larger than that of any other country targeted by the travel ban—Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya or Yemen. It’s difficult, in fact, to assess how large the community really is. I’ve read estimates ranging from 350,000 to a half-million Iranian expatriates in America; the U.S. Census bureau has placed the total at about 370,000.

One reason it’s hard to settle on population size is that Iranians do not feel comfortable giving out their private information to a census. It feels completely antithetical to everything they learned in Iran about the dangers of divulging information to government officials. A frequent joke was that if someone knocked on their door, people would go hide, even though they were American citizens who needn’t fear being deported. This speaks to a deep and strong fear of the government—even the U.S. government—knowing about your personal life.

The Iranian American community is not monolithic, and its members differ significantly in their attitudes about U.S. policy toward Iran. Some Iranian Americans favor a hard U.S. line. Particularly among Jewish Iranian Americans, there is a lot of distrust of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and so they support the U.S. and its allies imposing very strict sanctions to rein in the regime’s excesses. In my experience, the Iranian Jewish community has tended to be very supportive of the U.S.-backed economic sanctions against Iran to make it comply with the nuclear deal, because this community’s biggest fear is that Iran might turn nuclear weapons against Israel. And Zionism is a huge part of their identity: Israel is their spiritual home, and very significant for them.

Jewish Iranian Americans make a complete distinction between the government and the people of Iran, and I think that’s why members of the Iranian Jewish community feel really disheartened and sad about the travel ban. They’re saying, “If this ban had been imposed in 1979, we wouldn’t have been able to come to the United States.”

Furthermore, the travel ban feels like a collective punishment against those Iranians who have absolutely nothing to do with the Islamic Republican regime. On the one hand, the Iranian government is restricting their freedom to visit their homeland; and on the other hand America is not allowing their relatives to travel or move to the United States. They feel like they’re in limbo on both sides.

Iranian Americans are also frustrated because these new policies suggest that they are associated with terrorism. Iranian Americans have nothing to do with the terrorism that has taken place in the United States or abroad; there have been no examples of Iranian Americans acting as terrorists in the United States. And they feel like, because of this ban, they’re the ones who are being scapegoated.

Furthermore, the terrorist groups that the United States is now fighting in Iraq and Syria, such as ISIS, are Sunni, whereas most Muslim Iranian Americans are Shia. They say, “As Shias, we’re also being persecuted by ISIS. So we’re not the ones doing this type of terrorism.” And, yes, the Iranian government supports the Shia Islamist militant group Hezbollah, but what does that have to do with the everyday Iranian grandmother just trying to come to America and see her grandchild?

Iranian culture is very family-oriented; everything basically is about your family. My students are absolutely devastated and heartbroken by what this is doing to their families. With family members in Iran whose weddings they want to attend, and grandparents who are aging and have been blocked from visiting the United States, they’re distressed and kind of in shock, asking, “What does my 70-year-old grandmother have to do with any of this?” They don’t know when they’re going to see their families again.

For my generation and my students’ generation, Iran is the language that we speak—Farsi—the food that we eat, and the culture that we represent, and are a part of. But in some ways it’s not a real country to us, because we haven’t lived there and some of us haven’t ever even seen it.

If your parents or grandparents are coming to visit from Iran, we’re not talking about a couple of days; we’re probably talking about a couple of months, or as long as their visa will allow them, in order to truly help raise their grandchildren. The way it works in the Iranian community, everyone lives with each other, takes care of each other. You sometimes have three generations living in one home, because we don’t put our grandparents in retirement homes, we move them in with us. You’re getting little kids growing up with their elders, hearing the stories, learning the language, eating the food. It’s the only way, when you’re an expat, of really keeping this community together, of keeping all of these aspects of being Persian alive in the home. Because they can’t visit their family members in Iran or the United States, many Iranians and Iranian Americans are having to fly to neutral countries like Germany to reunite.

Another huge aspect of this travel ban is its effects on the LGBTQ community. They’re severely persecuted in Iran, and a lot of them have escaped to Turkey, through the United Nations, thinking that they would be able to continue on to the United States. They were going to Canada, and now Canada is basically closing its door to Iranians because they are opening it to Syrian refugees. So this is a community that is truly suffering, because unlike other Iranians who have family support, most LGBTQ Iranians don’t have their family support in Iran, they will be killed in Iran. So they are truly feeling the weight of this ban because they are facing a life-or-death situation.

Personally, my large extended family has not been directly affected by the travel ban, because we don’t have any relatives still living in Iran. I was born in 1976, we left Iran in ’78, and I haven’t been back since. I write about Iran as an academic. But it’s so sad: I don’t know what it looks like and I’ve never even seen the Caspian Sea.

Legally there’s nothing preventing me from going back to Iran. In Iran you’re allowed to be Jewish, you’re just not allowed to be a Zionist. But for me personally to return, I think there would have to be a completely secular regime based on a democratic system, and then I’d wait a decade before going back. That’s why my focus is on the expat community, because I can’t go back. Most of my Iranian Jewish students also don’t have relatives still in Iran; what we know, we know from family stories. I learn about what’s going on from my Muslim Iranian American students. Iran for me is a country of the mind.

The irony for many of my generation of Iranian American immigrants is this: The current travel ban is punishing us for the actions of a regime that we don’t support, and that some of us have actively opposed. We don’t even see ourselves as immigrants because we’ve been here for almost 40 years. Iranian Americans take a lot of pride in being the kind of Americans who really respect this country and feel grateful. The travel ban harms people who have been true patriots.

It’s not like Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is going to suffer from the travel ban. The everyday citizen is going to suffer—not only Iranians, and Iranian Americans, but also Americans. When you’re looking at the Iranian American community, you’re seeing one of the most educated immigrant communities in the United States: Many doctors, and lawyers, and engineers. So you’re punishing America by not welcoming what most people would recognize as a model for the ideal immigrant community.

The post Punished by the U.S. and Persecuted by Iran appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You know, everything a ready-made, heart attack-inducing Doritos Locos Taco is not.

So it comes as no surprise to find my mother one day standing by my open fridge grasping a small jar between her index finger and thumb.

“This is hell. I will put it on the side of the fridge, you know, in case you need it,” she says.

It’s just a coincidence that the name of this Persian staple spice—cardamom—is the same word for eternal fiery doom in English.

My mother has been sneaking in her favorite ingredients next to the Hershey’s chocolate syrup and the blue macaroni and cheese box in my kitchen ever since I began dating the man of her dreams, now my husband. Having grown up with his own Persian mother’s everything-fresh-from-scratch cooking, he wouldn’t mind eating a meal that’s not from a box. So the more serious we got, the less subtle her hints. She graduated to telling me, “You seriously need to learn how to cook. It’s not funny.”

Because her comments implied that cooking meant keeping a man, I was very adamant about never lifting a pan. Cooking in this cultural context seemed primitive, sexist, and totally un-American. Where did I get this idea? From my mom who, ironically enough, preached to my sister and me the importance of women procuring financial and personal independence and security through education, privileges she didn’t have growing up in Iran.

Still, I understood where she was coming from. In my mother’s Tehran, it literally “took a village” to raise and maintain a family. The older generation provided food for the burgeoning family, and food was a community affair where everyone helped with the preparing, cooking, and eating. One of my distinct memories from childhood in Iran in the late 1980s is the women in my family cleaning and stemming herbs for rice and stews at our house. Sitting around with their fingers plastered with wet dill and their mouths running with the daily gossip, they were a less sexy version of Sex and the City.

My family moved to Los Angeles in 1991 after a pit stop in Austria for a few months to get our papers together. Or, more specifically, we moved to the enclave known as Tehrangeles where Iranians—especially Iranian Jews—settled after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

But in L.A., I saw less and less of the chattering relatives, partly because they probably got sick of my mom giving them chores. But also because no one has the luxury or time to sit around stemming herbs all day when there are errands to run, e-mails to send, and nails to be manicured.

The idea was to adapt to American life enough to get by, but still speak, breathe, act, and eat Persian. Which led to a lot of awkward conversations at the school cafeteria explaining my pungent green stew to my friend with the crustless PB&J. And every Friday night, we always had to have the Thanksgiving-size Shabbat dinner, complete with the angry drunk uncle who asked the same questions every time (“How much money are you making writing? That’s horrible. You should go into real estate.”)

Starting a family of my own, I’m trying to reconcile this need to connect through food with the American notion of independence and can-do-it-all attitude. While I do need some guidance and appreciate when my mom brings over the occasional leftover split pea stew or herb quiche, I don’t want to come home to a tower of Tupperware in my refrigerator. The constant parade of handouts from my mom make me feel as if I’m failing as a nurturing wife and mother, roles I had totally been reluctant to take on yet will be damned if I don’t succeed at them.

So I decided it was time to add cooking to my repertoire. I mean, how hard would it be to buy some ingredients, mix them together, and throw them in a pot to cook if it meant so much to my family? Between Google and the TV, I was confident I could figure it out. I announced to my mother that I was cooking a traditional Persian meal for my husband. “That’s great, azizam,” she said, in a sort of God-I-hope-you-have-a-fire-extinguisher-handy sort of tone. “Let me know how it goes.”

I searched “dinner recipes,” then “easy dinner recipes” and finally “really super duper easy dinner recipes” and was overwhelmed by the number of ingredients, steps, and verbs. How do you zest a lemon? Dredge individual mint leaves with sugar? What the hell does dredge mean, anyway? Just doing the measurements alone seemed to require a Ph.D. in calculus. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother use a measuring cup or an oven mitt.

I was not going to solicit help from my mother, so it was fortunate I remembered that someone had once given us a beautiful Persian cookbook called Food of Life. I swiped the dust off its cover and was delighted to find that it was a literary nerd’s dream come true. Besides recipes, there were pieces of Persian poetry, art, and stories.

“If wheat springs from my dust when I am dead / And from the grain that grows there you bake bread, / What drunkenness will rise and overthrow / With frenzied love the baker and his dough—” is Rumi’s erotic take on baked goods.

Excited at seeing my favorite recipe in English, I braved the long list of at least two dozen ingredients and committed myself to making rice meatballs.

It took me two days to prepare and make these meatballs. I shopped at Trader Joe’s for ingredients I recognized (eggs, rice, tomato paste). I headed to “Persian Square”—an area of Westwood Boulevard where the Iranian version of every business has a storefront—for those I did not.

At Sun Market, the couple running the place was happy to see “a young person” take interest in her native food. They helped me find everything I needed and threw in some unsolicited advice while they were at it (“You really should learn how to read Persian”).

So finding advieh—a mixture of cardamom, cinnamon, rose petals, nutmeg, and cumin—green plums, and summer savory was not really an obstacle. Putting them to use was.

When I was done chopping, slicing, rinsing, boiling, and whatnot, the kitchen was a CSI murder scene. There were grains of rice and petals of herbs on every exposed surface, including the stove, tiles, floor, and sink. Dante’s “Inferno” would have made a more suitable excerpt than Rumi’s poetic fancies.

My husband was grateful for the effort. He ate carefully, as if to detect poison before it was too late. Having taken one look at my disheveled exterior, he couldn’t fathom why I’d go through all the trouble. But it wasn’t really about him.

I wish this experience had made me fall in love with cooking. But at least I no longer found it synonymous with the Dark Ages. I had now tried on my mother’s shoes and saw what an ungrateful brat I’d been. I understand there’s an art driven by love for family and the incessant desire to feed and nurture them. I’m happily going to take them up on their offers to bestow leftovers and swallow my pride until I get the hang of basic kitchen measurements.

That’s the paradox my mother embraced all these years slaving over elaborate meals while preaching the importance of prioritizing education, career, and independence: You can strive to have it all. Doesn’t mean you will, or that you’ll be good at it, but you can and should try because you have the freedom to do so. And that’s the luxury of being an American: not settling for one identity, especially if you’re a woman.

She was beyond amused when I recounted to her the tale of the rice meatballs. One day, to encourage me, she came over with a new bottle. “This is zaferoon. In America it’s called ‘saffron.’ It’s originally from Iran, where the best zaferoon in the world comes from. Ask anyone. Even Americans.” She pauses to make sure I’m watching her. “I’ll put it right here, you see? Next to the string cheese.”

The post Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Persian Food appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.