The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd
Authors: Hooman Majd
Tags: General, Social Science, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Political Science, International Relations
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been an exciting moment—I would enjoy myself, knowing that I’d have no responsibility for others’ well-being and happiness, and that I’d probably be leaving just as I was getting homesick. But this time, and for the first time for me in Iran, I had no idea what to expect, and no idea how my wife and child would cope.
The panic subsided quickly, though, and all I could think, as I went upstairs to get ready to go to bed, was that we had done it. We were here, safe, and it would all be okay. It was Iran, after all, my country and my people. I was going to let nothing faze me.
3
WE LOVE YOU (US EITHER)
Waking up the first day in Tehran has always been for me an extraordinary feeling. I don’t feel the pollution in the air, and I don’t really hear the incessant traffic noise; I only feel a comfortable sense of home. Waking up with my wife and son the first day of our stay in Iran was different. Apart from the fact that Khash wanted to explore the house where we were staying by crawling everywhere on the hard, slippery marble floors, floors that led to hard marble stairs, and apart from the fact that I had yet to persuade Karri that the water from the tap was quite drinkable, I had a to-do list that I had no idea how to fulfill. Sheep’s milk yogurt? American-style diapers? Nontoxic baby wipes? Organic nuts and raisins? I had to quickly figure out how to replenish our stock, and I wanted to get an early start, before Karri sank into depression about leaving behind a perfectly good life to live in an alien country, all for her husband’s vanity and his incomprehensible yearning for a motherland.
Khosro lives in the house where he was born, an early-twentieth-century traditional Persian house, surrounded by high mud walls that hide it from Safi Alishah, a street in downtown Tehran, just south of the former U.S. embassy, in a neighborhood that was once upper class but is now middle to lower and very religious. Motorcycleszoom up the one-way street and occasionally down, identical cheap 1960s-era Chinese 125cc bikes assembled in Iran and sold under so many different brand names—Tondar, Rayka, Behrun, Shayda, Parvaz, Pishro, Tondro, and many, many others—that I lost track ages ago. They sound like 1960s-era bikes, too, and belch fumes like vintage vehicles begging for service or an engine overhaul. Bought new, these bikes cost less than a thousand dollars, with drum brakes, kick starter, and all; used, they can be had for the price of dinner for two at one of the fancier Tehran restaurants; and very used, for the price of a couple of kebabs. As such, they are ubiquitous, but nowhere does one feel their presence more than downtown Tehran, in the business districts, where they are used in lieu of trucks. They carry impossible loads through impossibly narrow streets and alleys that were never designed for anything but the horses and donkeys that were present even in my young days and omnipresent when my mother grew up not too far from where we were staying. In the poorer residential parts of town, a motorbike might be a family’s sole mode of transportation, and sometimes entire families ride on one, making for a visual spectacle as women balance their children and clutch their chadors simultaneously, and a horrifying sight on the highways.
One can understand why the government makes available a vehicle that almost everyone can afford, yet it’s incomprehensible that a government so proud of its technological abilities and accomplishments persists in allowing vehicles on the road that don’t meet the very safety and pollution standards that officials themselves insist are important in tackling Tehran’s air quality issues and reducing its unenviable accident rate. Anyone wondering whether Iran’s trumpeted scientific progress is bluster or fact has to think the former, as I do, based solely on the motorbikes it manufactures. How hard can it be , I wondered, more annoyed this time than on previous trips, to
The panic subsided quickly, though, and all I could think, as I went upstairs to get ready to go to bed, was that we had done it. We were here, safe, and it would all be okay. It was Iran, after all, my country and my people. I was going to let nothing faze me.
3
WE LOVE YOU (US EITHER)
Waking up the first day in Tehran has always been for me an extraordinary feeling. I don’t feel the pollution in the air, and I don’t really hear the incessant traffic noise; I only feel a comfortable sense of home. Waking up with my wife and son the first day of our stay in Iran was different. Apart from the fact that Khash wanted to explore the house where we were staying by crawling everywhere on the hard, slippery marble floors, floors that led to hard marble stairs, and apart from the fact that I had yet to persuade Karri that the water from the tap was quite drinkable, I had a to-do list that I had no idea how to fulfill. Sheep’s milk yogurt? American-style diapers? Nontoxic baby wipes? Organic nuts and raisins? I had to quickly figure out how to replenish our stock, and I wanted to get an early start, before Karri sank into depression about leaving behind a perfectly good life to live in an alien country, all for her husband’s vanity and his incomprehensible yearning for a motherland.
Khosro lives in the house where he was born, an early-twentieth-century traditional Persian house, surrounded by high mud walls that hide it from Safi Alishah, a street in downtown Tehran, just south of the former U.S. embassy, in a neighborhood that was once upper class but is now middle to lower and very religious. Motorcycleszoom up the one-way street and occasionally down, identical cheap 1960s-era Chinese 125cc bikes assembled in Iran and sold under so many different brand names—Tondar, Rayka, Behrun, Shayda, Parvaz, Pishro, Tondro, and many, many others—that I lost track ages ago. They sound like 1960s-era bikes, too, and belch fumes like vintage vehicles begging for service or an engine overhaul. Bought new, these bikes cost less than a thousand dollars, with drum brakes, kick starter, and all; used, they can be had for the price of dinner for two at one of the fancier Tehran restaurants; and very used, for the price of a couple of kebabs. As such, they are ubiquitous, but nowhere does one feel their presence more than downtown Tehran, in the business districts, where they are used in lieu of trucks. They carry impossible loads through impossibly narrow streets and alleys that were never designed for anything but the horses and donkeys that were present even in my young days and omnipresent when my mother grew up not too far from where we were staying. In the poorer residential parts of town, a motorbike might be a family’s sole mode of transportation, and sometimes entire families ride on one, making for a visual spectacle as women balance their children and clutch their chadors simultaneously, and a horrifying sight on the highways.
One can understand why the government makes available a vehicle that almost everyone can afford, yet it’s incomprehensible that a government so proud of its technological abilities and accomplishments persists in allowing vehicles on the road that don’t meet the very safety and pollution standards that officials themselves insist are important in tackling Tehran’s air quality issues and reducing its unenviable accident rate. Anyone wondering whether Iran’s trumpeted scientific progress is bluster or fact has to think the former, as I do, based solely on the motorbikes it manufactures. How hard can it be , I wondered, more annoyed this time than on previous trips, to
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