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.