My mother’s greatest fear is that I will betray our family secrets and tour the world imitating her accent to make strangers laugh, like dat Korean girl, dat Cho. I tell her not to worry, because I already do this with practically everyone I meet. Whenever I feel obligated to perform, which is to say whenever I am in a social situation, I find myself channeling my mother. Imelda, known as “Mel” to her friends, is joy personified: laughing black eyes, red lipstick and silly jokes. With mock sternness and a wagging finger she delivers her favorite introduction, “My name is Imelda, but I am not the one who collects shoes!” followed by infectious giggles. Leave her on a park bench with a stranger for ten minutes and you’ll come back to find the two of them laughing like old friends.
But there are other sides to my mother. She has an alternate personality, and a hidden past. She hates it when I tell people that she wasn’t always this babushka wearing, lawn mower riding, food network watching and gardening wonder, that in fact she was once a doctor. We’ll be talking and out of nowhere she will suddenly become very serious and say, “Your friend never progressed past the anal stage.” Therefore I have dubbed her “Super Secret Psychiatrist Mommy.”
In fact, both my parents are psychiatrists. Every time I tell someone this, I get a reaction somewhere between pity and awe, with a little fear mixed in. Maybe this is similar to the reaction the children of serial killers get. ‘Wow, how much did that fuck you up,’ their eyes seem to say as they laugh nervously. ‘It’s really great you’re able to function in public without pissing yourself. Don’t get up - I’m just going to go put away the sharp implements.’
My mother retired from psychiatry when I was a toddler, and never talked shop at home much. She mostly acts the exact opposite you’d expect of a psychiatrist. She is suspicious of everyone outside our family to the point of paranoia. When I tell her I’m having a dinner party for a few close friends I’ve known for years, she tells me to hide my valuables. And she is vicious in her thirst for vengeance. Whenever I came home crying because someone made fun of me on the bus, there was no recitation of the golden rule, no “Kids will be kids,” or “They’re just jealous, just ignore them.” No, my mother was the kind of person who shouted, “Kill them all!” at the television, and often advised me to kick boys in their “safety deposit boxes.”
So when I told her of the kids who tormented me, she responded, “Fight!” She tried her best to coach me towards violence. She balled her hands into fists and shouted, “You must fight dem, dahling!”
But I was not growing up in the mean streets of South Philly. This was snow white suburban Emmaus, Pennsylvania, with a few Chinese kids thrown in for pizzazz. Needless to say I was the only half Filipina half Iranian girl at school. I had no homeys to back my shit up.
Although physical violence was an awkward and decidedly unpopular mode of dealing with playground conflicts in my world, especially for girls, with my mother’s constant encouragement, I decided to give it a try.
My first attempt at violent retribution took place in the first grade. A boy named Wayne Stevens kicked my book bag out of line for the bus, and outraged, I impulsively swung my Holly Hobbie lunch box (which I still have and cherish) into his head. Specifically, I did a 360 degree turn and whaled him in the face with it. I am one of the reasons why lunch boxes for children are no longer made from metal. From that moment on, I forever carried with me the vision of blonde, blue-eyed, peaches and cream Wayne, his lip bloodied and eyes wide with shock and pain, spitting, as if in slow motion, long, gooey strands of blood and saliva, and finally spewing a tooth onto the grass.
The guilt I felt was enormous. I was a ball of nerves. It was the crime of the century at Shoemaker Elementary. Wayne was popular. I was not yet an untouchable but well on my way. I couldn’t bring myself to go to school the next day; I spent the day in bed feeling like a terrible and dangerous little girl. I couldn’t show my murderous face to my classmates, who would surely shun me in the halls and stone me at recess.
My mother, however, felt no guilt, no sense of responsibility, not a jot of concern for the boy (who lost his tooth and needed a stitch in his lip). “Oh-loh-koh,” she crowed when I told her what happened, the same way she did at every movie when the bad guy got his due. I am not sure of the exact meaning, but I think it is similar to her other favorite saying which is, “An eye for an eye!”
My mother has always showed me what it is to be tough, almost to a fault. She rarely cries, seldom apologizes and never forgives. As her father wasn’t aware of the etymology of her name, I think it is a cosmic coincidence that he chose “Imelda” which is of Germanic origin and means “warrior.” Her first instinct in a bad situation is not to cry or look for help, but to fight. Her voice is her main weapon. Despite her asthma, she has a voice so loud she can out shout any man, woman or beast. Apparently she hid this side of herself completely from my father until he married her, after which he said she became a whole other person.
He likes to bring this point home by telling the story of how his pretty, new bride dealt with a large black bird that got caught in the basement of his father’s house in Tehran. While my father and his brother helplessly shouted and flapped their arms, panicked, my mother calmly picked up an umbrella. As the men looked on in shocked silence, my mother literally speared the bird through the chest. At this point, my Uncle Parvis, horrified, turned to my father and said, “Houshang, you married a barbarian!”
On the extraordinarily rare occasions on which my mother does cry, or at least makes crying noises, my sister and I have to suppress the cruel urge to laugh. It seems really mean, but it’s an involuntary reaction to watching someone so brutal and hardened actually feeling sorry enough to cry. This is a person who wrote nasty letters to a woman fighting cancer. This woman was her sister. Her grudges are legendary. Her memory for slights is epic. She cuts people off like other people trim their nails. And as she’s getting older she’s losing any inclination to hold back, and has taken to heckling strangers. Once a man with a potbelly walked by her and she shouted, “Hey! When are you due?”
But how can you stay mad at a little Filipina shaped like an apple with an ass as flat as a pancake, red lipstick on pursed lips, glittering black eyes that catch every price that rings up on the register, and a kerchief protecting her newly permed hair. I credit my mother for teaching me to expect the worst from people, to mistrust their motives, to watch my money, to nag relentlessly when I feel helpless, and to threaten and cajole the ones I love into compliance. My mother loves me the way a wild gorilla loves her baby. She would kill anyone who tried to harm me, or anyone who would try and come between us.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Half and Half
One thing about being half of one thing and half of another is that I’ve never fit into either camp very nicely. I keep getting little things wrong, or I should say little things to me, but apparently big clues to other people. For instance, my mom is from the Luzon province in the Philippines, so I used to say, “My mom’s Filipino and-” But this is wrong, as was pointed out to me by a cafeteria worker who cornered me in a college dining hall, demanding to know my ethnicity. “No, no,” she said, “Filipin- ah!” She seemed shocked and dismayed by my grammatical gender dysphoria. “Ah is feminine. Oh is masculine.” She was Filipina too, with hair so intensely black and highlight-free that you knew it had to be dyed. “I’m sorry,” I said, nodding down at her. She came up to my chin. “Filipin-ah.”
The next part goes, “and my dad’s Iranian.” This I pronounce correctly. “Eeee-ran, not I-ran,” I have corrected countless people. However, I cannot pronounce any Farsi words in a way that is recognizable to native speakers. This is in part due to the fact that my mother taught them to me, so I am actually trying to speak Farsi with a Filipino accent. My pronunciation of the word for turkey, for example, is met with stares and bewilderment. It is as if someone came up to you and said, without any context for meaning, “too-ahr-kay.”
Apparently I was fluent in Farsi before we came to the United States, as fluent as a one year old can be anyway. My Persian nanny was extremely protective of me. According to my parents she was so possessive that she would only bring me out for quick visits with them. She was an ancient woman, so old that when she was taken to the hospital for a broken wrist sustained in a fall while chasing my sister’s cats, the residents who looked at her EKG said, “When did this patient die?”
My nanny only spoke Farsi. The upshot of which was that my mother, left to care for me alone for the first time in the United States, found her child incomprehensible. This state of affairs didn’t last long. A few months in the U.S. and my Farsi had all but gone. Now I can only name some foods and utter a random assortment of words:
Help,
Come,
Fat,
Soft,
Beggar,
Good,
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten
Expensive,
Turkey,
Lady,
Housefly,
May your father burn in Hell*
Your father is a dog.*
*These two are much needed if you plan on doing any driving over there.
“Hello” in Farsi is the universal Salaam and “thank you” is Merci. That was about all I could say to my grandfather, or as we called him, Papa, when he visited in the late 80’s. He couldn’t speak English at all, but he was fluent in French for he had lived there for part of his military training. As a former General in the Royal Army, he was able to leave Iran and visit us only once after things had calmed down considerably.
I was about 10 or 11 years old at the time of Papa’s visit. Finally gone were the T-shirts of the Ayatollah that read “F**k Iran.” Kids didn’t call me a camel driver or say my father built bombs in the basement. This was the period of relative calm between the hostage crisis in 1978 and 9-11, when you didn’t have to hide or apologize for your Middle Eastern background and the worst thing to fear about flying was a crying baby in the next row.
Papa and I could not communicate, but we could share a few pleasures denied him in Iran, namely MTV and bananas. He loved MTV because he liked to see the young people dancing, an activity now banned by Islamic law, and he loved to eat bananas because they had become “like gold” in Iran. Gone I guess were the days of tropical fruit flooding the streets; now a chicken cost a month’s salary.
Though I met other Iranian and half-Iranian kids at weddings and parties, only one other Iranian kid went to my school and he wasn’t exactly interested in bonding. That’s why I got so excited when as a freshman at Cornell I found the Persian students association. Finally, I thought, a place to belong, a place to fit in, a place to imitate my father’s accent for people who could truly appreciate it. I signed up and waited to hear from them so that I could take part in Persian hacky-sack games, Persian soccer watching night, Persian house parties. And I waited. And I waited. Then I graduated.
I suppose I could have tried harder to get into the group, but I had already sat through a two and a half hour classical Persian music concert consisting of three instruments and offered to cook for these people. I had emailed the group leaders enough times to make me feel desperate. I figured they hadn’t gotten back to me because I don’t speak Farsi, but it could also have been because I was rockin’ the sloppy nerd look at the time. And the vibe of neediness. The neediness combined with sloppy nerd look might have definitely done me in.
Unlike most Iranian girls who have an air of elegance about them, I was not raised by a bejeweled mother with a French manicure, high heels, and eyebrows plucked within an inch of their lives. The only make-up my Filipina mother wears is brick red lipstick and black eyeliner. But she doesn’t draw the eyeliner under her eyelashes like some kind of a wimp or sane person. No, I have watched in horror as she pulled down the flesh under her eye to expose the little strip of pink flesh right next to her eyeball and then apply a sharpened pointy black pencil to it. Then she will typically tie a babushka over her pin-set curls, slip on a pair of Jackie O sunglasses, rev up her riding mower and hit the lawn at top speed.
My mother is also an amateur plumber, mechanic, landscaper, butcher, and caretaker of Bonsai. Her prized possessions include her chipper shredder, her miter saw, her Japanese saw, her amazing ratcheting pruning shears, and her vast array of butcher knives. She caulks bathtubs, maintains an in-ground pool, does laundry for a small nation, I mean, my father who cannot use the same towel twice, and cooks Iranian khoresh, stews of vegetables and meat which are incredibly tasty and time consuming to make.
There are culinary benefits to a dual heritage, however, especially ones as varied as mine. While Philippine cuisine relies heavily on pork and garlic, Iranian food is porkless, lamb-centered and nearly garlic free. While Filipinos drink spicy salabat, made from fresh ginger steeped in hot water, Persians refresh themselves with dukh, a salty yogurt drink seasoned with mint. While Filipinos prize balut, the nearly fully developed embryo of a duck eaten whole in its unhatched egg, the Persians love a good grilled lamb testicle.
The result of this was that we often had two dinners on the table: a Persian khoresh of vegetables and meat and the national dish of the Philippines, the garlic, vinegar, soy sauce infused dish that is adobo. Both sides love rice. My mother learned to make it Persian style – not too sticky, not too hard, with a golden crust on the bottom of the pot made of potato slices, the crunchy prized tadhik.
My mother generally ate her pork adobo while my father ate his khoresh, one of his favorites being khoresh de bademjan (eggplant) along with masta khiar. Masta khiar is thick yogurt mixed with shredded seedless cucumber, salt and mint.
Me, I ate it all. And what I discovered can only be described as divine.
It’s possible that my gastronomic breakthrough, made purely by chance, is entirely original, because the numbers of Filipino-Iranians must be few. I only know of one, my sister, and she won’t eat pork. So she may never experience for herself the goodness of pork adobo, how the cubes of meat caramelized by frying are stewed until tender and falling apart, how the vinegar cuts the luxurious fat and the soy sauce and garlic meld perfectly with the hint of bay leaf. Put this over Persian rice and you are in a very good way, but add the crucial element, masta khiar, and you have reached heaven. The fresh crunch of cucumber and the tangy yogurt mix into the adobo to create a transcendental taste much bigger than the sum of its parts. Manna, baby, it’s manna. And it’s this kind of moment, more than anything else, which makes me not only happy to be half and half, but a little bit sad for anyone who isn’t.
The next part goes, “and my dad’s Iranian.” This I pronounce correctly. “Eeee-ran, not I-ran,” I have corrected countless people. However, I cannot pronounce any Farsi words in a way that is recognizable to native speakers. This is in part due to the fact that my mother taught them to me, so I am actually trying to speak Farsi with a Filipino accent. My pronunciation of the word for turkey, for example, is met with stares and bewilderment. It is as if someone came up to you and said, without any context for meaning, “too-ahr-kay.”
Apparently I was fluent in Farsi before we came to the United States, as fluent as a one year old can be anyway. My Persian nanny was extremely protective of me. According to my parents she was so possessive that she would only bring me out for quick visits with them. She was an ancient woman, so old that when she was taken to the hospital for a broken wrist sustained in a fall while chasing my sister’s cats, the residents who looked at her EKG said, “When did this patient die?”
My nanny only spoke Farsi. The upshot of which was that my mother, left to care for me alone for the first time in the United States, found her child incomprehensible. This state of affairs didn’t last long. A few months in the U.S. and my Farsi had all but gone. Now I can only name some foods and utter a random assortment of words:
Help,
Come,
Fat,
Soft,
Beggar,
Good,
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten
Expensive,
Turkey,
Lady,
Housefly,
May your father burn in Hell*
Your father is a dog.*
*These two are much needed if you plan on doing any driving over there.
“Hello” in Farsi is the universal Salaam and “thank you” is Merci. That was about all I could say to my grandfather, or as we called him, Papa, when he visited in the late 80’s. He couldn’t speak English at all, but he was fluent in French for he had lived there for part of his military training. As a former General in the Royal Army, he was able to leave Iran and visit us only once after things had calmed down considerably.
I was about 10 or 11 years old at the time of Papa’s visit. Finally gone were the T-shirts of the Ayatollah that read “F**k Iran.” Kids didn’t call me a camel driver or say my father built bombs in the basement. This was the period of relative calm between the hostage crisis in 1978 and 9-11, when you didn’t have to hide or apologize for your Middle Eastern background and the worst thing to fear about flying was a crying baby in the next row.
Papa and I could not communicate, but we could share a few pleasures denied him in Iran, namely MTV and bananas. He loved MTV because he liked to see the young people dancing, an activity now banned by Islamic law, and he loved to eat bananas because they had become “like gold” in Iran. Gone I guess were the days of tropical fruit flooding the streets; now a chicken cost a month’s salary.
Though I met other Iranian and half-Iranian kids at weddings and parties, only one other Iranian kid went to my school and he wasn’t exactly interested in bonding. That’s why I got so excited when as a freshman at Cornell I found the Persian students association. Finally, I thought, a place to belong, a place to fit in, a place to imitate my father’s accent for people who could truly appreciate it. I signed up and waited to hear from them so that I could take part in Persian hacky-sack games, Persian soccer watching night, Persian house parties. And I waited. And I waited. Then I graduated.
I suppose I could have tried harder to get into the group, but I had already sat through a two and a half hour classical Persian music concert consisting of three instruments and offered to cook for these people. I had emailed the group leaders enough times to make me feel desperate. I figured they hadn’t gotten back to me because I don’t speak Farsi, but it could also have been because I was rockin’ the sloppy nerd look at the time. And the vibe of neediness. The neediness combined with sloppy nerd look might have definitely done me in.
Unlike most Iranian girls who have an air of elegance about them, I was not raised by a bejeweled mother with a French manicure, high heels, and eyebrows plucked within an inch of their lives. The only make-up my Filipina mother wears is brick red lipstick and black eyeliner. But she doesn’t draw the eyeliner under her eyelashes like some kind of a wimp or sane person. No, I have watched in horror as she pulled down the flesh under her eye to expose the little strip of pink flesh right next to her eyeball and then apply a sharpened pointy black pencil to it. Then she will typically tie a babushka over her pin-set curls, slip on a pair of Jackie O sunglasses, rev up her riding mower and hit the lawn at top speed.
My mother is also an amateur plumber, mechanic, landscaper, butcher, and caretaker of Bonsai. Her prized possessions include her chipper shredder, her miter saw, her Japanese saw, her amazing ratcheting pruning shears, and her vast array of butcher knives. She caulks bathtubs, maintains an in-ground pool, does laundry for a small nation, I mean, my father who cannot use the same towel twice, and cooks Iranian khoresh, stews of vegetables and meat which are incredibly tasty and time consuming to make.
There are culinary benefits to a dual heritage, however, especially ones as varied as mine. While Philippine cuisine relies heavily on pork and garlic, Iranian food is porkless, lamb-centered and nearly garlic free. While Filipinos drink spicy salabat, made from fresh ginger steeped in hot water, Persians refresh themselves with dukh, a salty yogurt drink seasoned with mint. While Filipinos prize balut, the nearly fully developed embryo of a duck eaten whole in its unhatched egg, the Persians love a good grilled lamb testicle.
The result of this was that we often had two dinners on the table: a Persian khoresh of vegetables and meat and the national dish of the Philippines, the garlic, vinegar, soy sauce infused dish that is adobo. Both sides love rice. My mother learned to make it Persian style – not too sticky, not too hard, with a golden crust on the bottom of the pot made of potato slices, the crunchy prized tadhik.
My mother generally ate her pork adobo while my father ate his khoresh, one of his favorites being khoresh de bademjan (eggplant) along with masta khiar. Masta khiar is thick yogurt mixed with shredded seedless cucumber, salt and mint.
Me, I ate it all. And what I discovered can only be described as divine.
It’s possible that my gastronomic breakthrough, made purely by chance, is entirely original, because the numbers of Filipino-Iranians must be few. I only know of one, my sister, and she won’t eat pork. So she may never experience for herself the goodness of pork adobo, how the cubes of meat caramelized by frying are stewed until tender and falling apart, how the vinegar cuts the luxurious fat and the soy sauce and garlic meld perfectly with the hint of bay leaf. Put this over Persian rice and you are in a very good way, but add the crucial element, masta khiar, and you have reached heaven. The fresh crunch of cucumber and the tangy yogurt mix into the adobo to create a transcendental taste much bigger than the sum of its parts. Manna, baby, it’s manna. And it’s this kind of moment, more than anything else, which makes me not only happy to be half and half, but a little bit sad for anyone who isn’t.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Stockpile
From kindergarten until fourth grade my best friend was girl named Kim, my opposite in almost every way: she was tall, skinny, white and from a working class family; I was the short, plump, brown daughter of immigrant psychiatrists. She lived within walking distance of my house, just outside our neighborhood in a one story bordered at the back by woods. Not far behind the tree line was wide, deep pit where her family and many others tossed their garbage, as well as old air conditioners, buckets of dried up paint, and later, after he was tragically run over, their cat. Next door lived her grandmother, a novelty to me as I had never met any of my grandparents. Two had died before I was born and the other two lived oceans away in what is affectionately called the Third World. Sometimes Kim’s mother sent us to her grandmother’s house to buy TV dinners from her. She had a freezer big enough for a body and stockpiled with Swanson. It was the mother load of Salisbury steaks.
Two things have always stayed with me: first that Kim had to buy the food she was getting from an immediate relative; and second that her mother sent her to buy just two dinners to be shared among four people. Even as a child, one TV dinner was never enough for me. Because my father didn’t get home for dinner until 9 or 10 at night, my mother let me eat whatever I wanted when I got home from school. I thought of TV dinners as appetizers of papery mashed potatoes and processed meat frozen in space and time. When did this chicken leg roam the earth, I thought as I bit into the soft mush of its breaded coating, and who knows what the world was like then?
While Kim’s house was neat and relatively uncluttered, we had at all times enough canned, frozen, and dry goods to last us well into the next decade. My mother, who had lived through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, simultaneously practiced frugality and over consumption. This translated into buying a ton of stuff on sale. We had stockpiles of everything: toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, soap, shampoo, conditioner, canned beans, canned soup, canned meat, cake mix, brownie mix, pie filling, spaghetti, macaroni, tomato sauce, tomato paste, instant rice, instant popcorn, salted peanuts, cupcake wrappers, hotdogs, pickles, plastic wrap, tin foil and salad dressing, to name but a portion of her hoard.
To my mother, expiration dates have always seemed more like suggestions than rules to live by. On a recent trip home, she pushed a hefty bottle of dark brown ketchup into my hands as I went out the door. Only when I got home did it occur to me that it had been a long time since I had seen ketchup in a glass bottle. Also, ketchup is supposed to be red. This stuff was a dark rusty brown, like the color of dried blood. I tried looking for an expiration date, but it had long faded away. There was, however, a label advertising a chance to win tickets to the Super bowl – Super bowl 1982. The ketchup was over 13 years old. I told my mother and she said it was still good – to cook with! She is a faithful advocate of the idea that if you just heat something for long enough and at a high enough temperature, you can will it to be edible again.
Not only did we have more food than we could eat in a year, but mounds of books, magazines, newspapers, clippings, junk mail envelopes (because you could write on the back), catalogues and coupon fliers covered nearly every surface. Mattresses and couches older than me moldered in the basement, along with every shoe and scrap of clothing we had ever worn, shoeboxes full of proofs of purchase, everything we had ever received in a box, and every box that went with it.
Perhaps my mother would not have been so prone to collecting food and my father so keen on keeping every shred of paper that came through his hands if they had not had to leave their home in Iran in such a hurry. They, like many other Western educated professionals, fled after the Islamic revolution and left behind almost everything they owned, including their newly built house. For my father, it was as if his home and his family were almost completely severed from him, with the only connection left the unpredictable and scratchy phone lines and letters that had been censored by the mullahs. For my mother, it must have been a throwback to her childhood, when her father was arrested by Japanese soldiers during dinner and the family had to flee their home to live in the mountains without electricity or running water.
This sudden and irreversible forced immigration seemed to push my parents to hoard. The idea that a thing has no value if it has no use means nothing to them, because there is always the possibility that it might one day have a use. You never know what you will wish you had kept, or what piece of paper turns out to be vital information. And oh, the horror, if it turns out that the very thing you needed, the thing that would solve everything, was something you had casually tossed away.
It used to bother me when I visited, to see them surrounded on all sides by clutter they could neither see nor give up. But there is no arguing someone out of a possibility. This is especially true if they have lived through war and exodus. In the face of an unpredictable and possibly violent future, how can I tell my parents not hold onto everything they’ve got?
Two things have always stayed with me: first that Kim had to buy the food she was getting from an immediate relative; and second that her mother sent her to buy just two dinners to be shared among four people. Even as a child, one TV dinner was never enough for me. Because my father didn’t get home for dinner until 9 or 10 at night, my mother let me eat whatever I wanted when I got home from school. I thought of TV dinners as appetizers of papery mashed potatoes and processed meat frozen in space and time. When did this chicken leg roam the earth, I thought as I bit into the soft mush of its breaded coating, and who knows what the world was like then?
While Kim’s house was neat and relatively uncluttered, we had at all times enough canned, frozen, and dry goods to last us well into the next decade. My mother, who had lived through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, simultaneously practiced frugality and over consumption. This translated into buying a ton of stuff on sale. We had stockpiles of everything: toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, soap, shampoo, conditioner, canned beans, canned soup, canned meat, cake mix, brownie mix, pie filling, spaghetti, macaroni, tomato sauce, tomato paste, instant rice, instant popcorn, salted peanuts, cupcake wrappers, hotdogs, pickles, plastic wrap, tin foil and salad dressing, to name but a portion of her hoard.
To my mother, expiration dates have always seemed more like suggestions than rules to live by. On a recent trip home, she pushed a hefty bottle of dark brown ketchup into my hands as I went out the door. Only when I got home did it occur to me that it had been a long time since I had seen ketchup in a glass bottle. Also, ketchup is supposed to be red. This stuff was a dark rusty brown, like the color of dried blood. I tried looking for an expiration date, but it had long faded away. There was, however, a label advertising a chance to win tickets to the Super bowl – Super bowl 1982. The ketchup was over 13 years old. I told my mother and she said it was still good – to cook with! She is a faithful advocate of the idea that if you just heat something for long enough and at a high enough temperature, you can will it to be edible again.
Not only did we have more food than we could eat in a year, but mounds of books, magazines, newspapers, clippings, junk mail envelopes (because you could write on the back), catalogues and coupon fliers covered nearly every surface. Mattresses and couches older than me moldered in the basement, along with every shoe and scrap of clothing we had ever worn, shoeboxes full of proofs of purchase, everything we had ever received in a box, and every box that went with it.
Perhaps my mother would not have been so prone to collecting food and my father so keen on keeping every shred of paper that came through his hands if they had not had to leave their home in Iran in such a hurry. They, like many other Western educated professionals, fled after the Islamic revolution and left behind almost everything they owned, including their newly built house. For my father, it was as if his home and his family were almost completely severed from him, with the only connection left the unpredictable and scratchy phone lines and letters that had been censored by the mullahs. For my mother, it must have been a throwback to her childhood, when her father was arrested by Japanese soldiers during dinner and the family had to flee their home to live in the mountains without electricity or running water.
This sudden and irreversible forced immigration seemed to push my parents to hoard. The idea that a thing has no value if it has no use means nothing to them, because there is always the possibility that it might one day have a use. You never know what you will wish you had kept, or what piece of paper turns out to be vital information. And oh, the horror, if it turns out that the very thing you needed, the thing that would solve everything, was something you had casually tossed away.
It used to bother me when I visited, to see them surrounded on all sides by clutter they could neither see nor give up. But there is no arguing someone out of a possibility. This is especially true if they have lived through war and exodus. In the face of an unpredictable and possibly violent future, how can I tell my parents not hold onto everything they’ve got?
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