The Ungrateful Refugee Page 26

  Six months before nationals, I pinched a spinal nerve. I signed up for the tournament anyway. I stopped practising but swam every day. At night, my mother held my feet in her lap as I strengthened my core. I barely ate. My lips turned blue. When I returned to the studio, the pain was bearable. To protect my back, I made a rule: every second in sports gear, my stomach muscles must be flexed. I’m not going to Harvard in a wheelchair.

  At the weigh-ins for the nationals in San Antonio, I stripped down to my underwear. I hadn’t drunk water for a day. I had shaved my body and barely avoided laxatives. I made it into the lower weight class by .01 pound. If I hadn’t, I would’ve closed my eyes and stripped down to nothing. I would’ve run to the bathroom and expelled what bile remained. I would’ve stood naked before a crowd of men and shaved my head and eyebrows.

  Daniel had signed up, too. For a thirteen-year-old boy, winning the nationals was a much tougher prospect – every rich boy in Oklahoma did martial arts. And he had nothing at stake. He ate normal foods, practised an hour or two a day, had friendships and hobbies. At nationals, he completed his fights and waited around with his friends.

  Daniel and I weren’t close and moments of sibling kindness were rare. But when I stumbled away from my last fight, having just beaten a fast, angry girl by a single point to secure the gold medal, Daniel rushed to my side with an ice cream bar – Dove, the most expensive kind. He had spent his own money and, though it looked like poison, I ate it for his sake. Iranians show love with gifts of food and over the years I’ve received many such offerings – maybe one or two others felt as true as Daniel’s Dove bar.

  I spent the next hour in the bathroom enduring the violent protests of a body that hadn’t digested fat, sugar or dairy for over a year. I managed to make it to the winner’s block and then went back home. Having accomplished my goal, I quit Taekwondo and returned to eating normally. My coach was dumbstruck – had I lost my passion for the sport?

  ‘What passion?’ I said. ‘I’m not an athlete. This was about Harvard.’

  I was beginning to worry my mother – if one day my lips were a little bluer than usual, she’d go bananas. ‘Mom! Who cares about my lips?’ I said. I had begun calling her Mom a year into our American lives. It felt fine.

  One sticky Oklahoma Saturday, she suggested that we treat ourselves to pedicures or pastries or something. I had just unlocked the front door. An armful of books in mismatched sizes threatened to spill to the floor. How can I go for pastries? I thought. How would going for pastries help get me out of here? Would a single pedicure and fancy coffee guarantee me pedicures and fancy coffees weekly, or even monthly, for the rest of my life? Or at least a significant enough portion of my life so that I might say later on: In this era, I went for pedicures and coffees? Because here was something I knew: when a life is obliterated, all its joys taken away, what makes memories stick is repetition. If an experience isn’t part of an established enough pattern to survive the dulling of memories over decades, what’s the use of it? You don’t become refined because you drank a good Merlot that one time or travelled to Europe one summer back in the day. A flaky pastry or an expert massage would be lost on me now – it would be a waste – I haven’t earned it, or kept it, made a slow study of its quality. The key is to have a wide range of these good things . . . regularly.

  So maybe after college, I could be the sort of person who spends a year learning what makes an oyster good and then a year stomping French grapes and then a year getting Thai massages. But if I spend my time now ‘treating myself’ to useless, one-off versions of those things whose quality I can’t even assess, making small, imprecise memories doomed to the abyss, am I not wasting my life? Wasn’t I lucky to have been taken along in my mother’s escape? How could I, after being granted that, ignore my own flight now? It would be ungrateful and un-American and wrong. I might as well just find the nearest alley and go smoke some mid-afternoon crack.

  I called it ‘my great project’, but only in the privacy of my mind, because it wasn’t just about college and I didn’t want to hurt my mother any more than I already had. I didn’t want her to know that it was her fate I wanted to escape. Our flight was still so fresh and the thought that I too could lose everything I had worked for, my entire identity as a smart, capable girl, and be looked down on by ordinary people, was like waking to the lid of a coffin sliding shut, like catching a glimpse of a boulder rolling atop it as the light slivers out. I needed a way to protect myself from that fate – my brilliant Maman, all her squandered years of study. My great project was about transforming, becoming someone unrelated to Iran, my family, my dramatic circumstances. It was about proving my worth in every sphere: body, mind, spirit. It was about sitting on a perch from which I could judge Oklahoma the way it had judged my mother.

  Now and then, I would glimpse her in moments of quiet rage. She had failed the Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) twice. Both times, her score was exactly the same, a statistical improbability, even if she hadn’t studied sixteen hours a day the second time. I’d hear her say that the tests were classist and rigged against foreign doctors, that the facilitators were racist and xenophobic and all kinds of other things. She tried to tell them that they had made a clerical error, but no one would believe her because of her accent – oh, how the wit dulls with a few wrong words. Later I would see that my mother’s broken English was far more beautiful than my perfect one. She had a strong voice, writers would say. ‘I got no wave’ is so much more evocative than ‘My phone isn’t getting reception’. ‘Here is all over poops’ is leagues more succinct and indignant than ‘There’s too much shit on this street’. This is my mother’s razor tongue. But back then, I thought she was just making excuses – if only she had studied as hard as I did.

  ‘I have too much work to go for a treat,’ I told my mom.

  By then my mother and I were already what we would become: two people forever separated by the circumstances of our childhoods. Hers, a strict Iranian upbringing in the home of modern but austere Tehrani intellectuals; mine, those unstable refugee years in Dubai and Rome followed by asylum in the United States, where I was a lesser citizen among Americans who had seen nothing of the world.

  If I was unkind toward Oklahoma, my view of Iran was worse. Once the backdrop of every warm childhood memory, I now considered it inferior – shedding its taint was part of repaying my debt to the West. Iran was a shameful, confused part of my past, a jumble of contradictions I could solve only by murdering the wild village girl and becoming the best kind of American: elegant and iron-hard, a woman without need.

  ‘What if you don’t get into Harvard?’ my mother’s friend, an Indian-American psychologist asked once. ‘Can you be happy somewhere else?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. We were sitting in our living room. She wore a sari and perfume and arranged herself in irritatingly restful poses. My feet were bloody from drills. I wore my martial arts bottoms atop my lifeguard swimsuit. My hair smelled like chlorine and my nails were chewed raw.

  Though I could easily see that she was underestimating and judging me, that she wasn’t one of the people who could ever come to understand, it felt important not to waste her time. I respected professional people – my parents were doctors. Or, rather, Maman had been in Iran. I was sure that what she needed was within my reach. I could get it for her, if only I could understand Americans enough, be successful enough in their eyes. This country was a meritocracy; it was fair – I would redeem us.

  But here was this barefoot doctor with her russet toes on the couch, a fellow foreigner but so much more settled, eyeing the black ink smudge on the blade of my hand, plotting to advise me to ‘take it easy’ or ‘make some friends’. Her disapproval didn’t frighten me – it meant I was doing things right. If my life was gruelling, it was a kind of gruelling that hadn’t been imposed by politics or war; it was fair and rational and would bear fruit. It wasn’t senseless as it had been when I lost my family and my baba’s village and our beautiful house and
Baba along with it. In Iran, I had been a devourer of joy, boisterous daughter to a known pleasure-seeker.

  Now I hated small indulgences. To veer from whatever toil you’ve chosen, just to wallow in the act of existing, breathing, eating, being rubbed down and groomed, like a fattening pig . . . it was that disgusting to me.

  Waste was impossible, the height of entitlement and the first sign of impending catastrophe. It made my chest close in on itself. Nothing in the present mattered to me, only the future. All one-off things, therefore, whether pleasurable or sad or even physically torturous, didn’t count. If something was finished or would soon be finished, it was irrelevant; I could look past it. And, so, I was invincible to everything but patterns: unending poverty, intellectual hunger, body fat, drudgery. The worst thing was to be wrongly categorised, as a worthless immigrant or a mediocre student or just a nameless Oklahoman working in a pharmacy or even my own doctor’s office, ordinary and forever left there, to rot.

  So, then, how could I take it easy with so much at stake?

  The doctor leaned her head into her hand and stared at me. She spoke carefully. ‘Don’t you think it’s a little intense?’ she said. ‘Focusing all your energy on just one thing?’ I was done explaining. She was a waster of good fortune, a woman with brains and opportunities but small dreams.

  But she pressed on. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

  ‘I don’t have time for that,’ I said. ‘And I don’t plan to stay here.’

  ‘But you want to have a boyfriend someday?’

  ‘At Harvard. I’ll have one that goes there.’

  She laughed, because I had allowed a teasing quality to enter my voice. She said, ‘OK, fair enough. Tell me what you want to do then.’

  ‘I’m going to be an international corporate lawyer,’ I said. ‘On average international lawyers earn 20 per cent more for every language they speak. Did you know that? I’m studying French and maybe Farsi will count, though it’s not that important a language.’ She scoffed. Realising I had been too much again, I added, ‘Because of the regime.’

  She must have known, on some level, that I was performing for her. ‘But what about fun?’ The doctor shifted on the couch and eyed my sports gear. ‘Such pressure.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ll have fun when I’ve set up my life,’ I said.

  ‘Forget about Harvard for now,’ she said. I could see in her expression that we were now just tolerating each other. She thought I was arrogant. I thought she was ungrateful, that she had failed to earn her place in America. ‘Let’s talk about home.’

  Isn’t that what we had been doing? Talking about Harvard was talking about home, my hope of one day having one that was suited to a strange, intense girl like me. Just because I didn’t yet have it, this woman thought that I had no claim to the good feelings it gave me. Well, I’d show her the wonders I’d one day claim. No, actually I wouldn’t show her, because I would be gone from Oklahoma and I wouldn’t come back, or think of it, or any of the people in it. But, for now, she wanted to hear about Iran, so I told her about the Khomeini mural in my schoolyard in Iran.

  ‘Who can survive like this?’ she muttered near the end of our session, leaning back on our couch, her terracotta feet pulled beneath her haunches as she fondled her hairline with an idle finger.

  For years I toiled. My school only offered three Advanced Placement classes and though the counsellor assured me that no one from Oklahoma was ever accepted to those universities, she agreed to help. I enrolled in a fourth AP class via satellite television, a fifth at a neighbouring high school (to which I drove between classes), a sixth course alone after school with the French teacher and a seventh, BC Calculus, at a table with different textbooks and three other overachieving misfits, in the corner of an easier course, AB Calculus – our teacher was a wizard of classroom management.

  Sometimes I felt like a fraud, trying for something that wasn’t meant for me. The movies were clear: Harvard was for pretty white boys with money. Even my counsellor didn’t believe. But of the many things Taekwondo taught me, the most vital was this: the body adjusts, just as the mind adjusts. ‘Habits take three weeks to form,’ said my instructor. ‘The suffering ends there.’ Every habit becomes easy with time. Every identity and practice and profession, no matter how gruelling, is open to a person willing to survive for three weeks – it takes three weeks of hard work to begin transforming into anything you are pretending to be. And if you look and behave like it, it doesn’t occur to anyone to call you a fraud.

  I volunteered at the food bank, bagging crunchy peanut butter for the poor. I organised a city-wide tutoring programme that brought high schoolers from wealthy areas to middle-school kids in poor neighbourhoods. I worked several jobs. I hardly slept. On quiet Saturdays, I watched Rudy, a movie about a boy with zero chance of playing football for Notre Dame, who nevertheless does. People called me a robot, but they thought my ambition worthy of a nod in the halls. As we grew older, Oklahomans became accustomed to us; we made friends. Daniel, the darkest-skinned of us, was ironically the most American and beloved. He played football, befriended cheerleaders, drove around town with white boys in Jeeps. ‘Just chill,’ he’d say to my OCD, when I surveyed the ground behind me for a beat too long, or checked the locks one too many times. We mellowed in our Iranian-ness and the end of the Gulf War renewed the feelings of gratitude and American exceptionalism already in the air. We no longer frightened them.

  We assimilated. We followed the rules. No family of four logged fewer hours of sleep – a typical midnight found Maman reading health policy textbooks, me doing Calculus, Daniel writing poems, Rahim taking out an engine or marinating bulgogi. I began to imagine that one day I would grow into a person whose past didn’t define her every step. That one day I would have time to care for my body, to mend my bloody feet, to let the callouses on my fingers heal. Maybe one day someone would love me.

  At eighteen, I got into Princeton but not Harvard. I found that I didn’t care. Princeton was the same and featured in as many glossy films. I had no loyalty to Harvard; and in fact, my loyalty was transferred instantly and for ever by the simple fact that a great institution had said: We want you. We had our choice of American students and you, Dina Nayeri, are one worth having. How I craved to be claimed. If I couldn’t have a country, I would have something equally indestructible. Princeton would be my home. Academia would be my home. I asked a surgeon to cut me a European nose – I begged Baba for the money. I dyed my hair chestnut in the bathtub. Sometimes as a reward, I ate secret spoonfuls of cream.

  Recently a London friend told me about her aunt, who took a newly arrived Syrian boy into her home. She spoke of his allegiance to sell-by dates, to instructions on boxes. How strange that he should be so militant about written rules, when most would eat a ham a day past its date if their nose told them it’s good. In the early days, you don’t trust your own five senses, your intuition. You grasp at any instruction and you hold on tight. After you learn, you are more versatile, able to make choices – but not yet.

  It takes years even to want your agency back.

  In my early twenties, I had news from Isfahan that Baba’s wife had given birth to a daughter. ‘You have a half-sister!’ Baba said on the phone.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said, desperate to hang up.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, hurt, ‘you do.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, fuming. ‘But I’m the product of a mother with a PhD who busted her ass for decades. This girl’s mother sits around the manghal getting high, so let’s not throw around the word “sister”, please.’

  ‘What a thing to say to your baba.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘You have to get your baby ready for life, OK? You have to promise to get her English classes from an early age. Baba, are you listening?’

  ‘OK, Dina joon.’ He sounded tired. Iranian music I had long forgotten came on in the background. Now I wanted him to be quiet so I could hear. He told me a few more things about my half-sister, ab
out my cousins, aunts and uncles – who had married, who was sick, who was well again.

  At a pause, I said again, ‘If you don’t get her English classes before she’s ten, her life will be hard. English is everything – not just the stuff people say, but what they don’t say. The world turns on English subtext.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s not so easy here. People will ask questions and good tutors are rare. And I think she’ll be a simpler person than you.’

  ‘I’m the simplest person there is,’ I said. ‘That’s how I can be sure.’

  He never enrolled her in English. Why would he? He trusted his own instincts, his own five senses, his language. He was home.

  II.

  Spring 2017. Minoo phones me as I’m preparing a class on James Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues’, and drafting an email to a parent who’s wondering why, given hefty tuitions, I’m not teaching her child more Hemingway or Twain. Her primary concern, ‘How will she get by at cocktail parties?’ Minoo, a newly arrived refugee, is living in a council flat the size of a shipping crate, with her sick husband and pre-adolescent son and daughter. She tells me that she thinks her son is good enough for an Arsenal boys’ team. Can I do something for him? I’m confused. Then I remember that new refugees believe all settled Westerners have access to each other, that I belong to a secret network including the head coach of Arsenal. Minoo is my age, from Isfahan. A woman at her church asked that I befriend her and for a year I’ve consistently failed at that. I try to listen, to advise her. She stares, wide-eyed and numb. I suggest ways to kick-start her new life, to smooth the way for herself and family. It’s hard making suggestions. Do the concessions I’m asking of her amount to self-harm?

  ‘Can you do something for him?’ she asks. ‘Speak to someone?’

  ‘Is he good?’ I ask. ‘Is he already part of a team?’

  ‘Yes, he’s the best. He plays at school.’