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people’s kids out of their house in the middle of the night.”
    When it served her purposes, Maman embraced America and lovingly recited all the qualities that made it superior to our backward-looking Iranian culture. That Americans were honest, never made promises they didn’t intend to keep, were open to therapy, believed a divorced woman was still a whole person worthy of respect and a place in society—all this earned them vast respect in Maman’s book. It seemed never to occur to her that values do not exist in a cultural vacuum but are knit into a society’s fabric; they earn their place, derived from other related beliefs. Maman thought values were like groceries; you’d cruise through the aisles, toss the ones you fancied into your cart, and leave the unappealing ones on the shelf. When I was a teenager we constantly fought over her pilfering through Iranian and American values at random, assigning a particular behavior or habit she felt like promoting to the culture she could peg it to most convincingly.
    Our earliest battle on this territory was over Madonna. Maman called her jendeh, a prostitute, which I considered an offensive way to describe the singer of “La Isla Bonita.” On what grounds, I argued, was she being condemned? Was it because she flaunted her sexuality, and if so, did that make out-of-wedlock sexuality a bad thing? My defense of Madonna seemed to infuriate Maman; her eyes flashed, and her bearing radiated a grave, ominous disappointment. It was the same disproportionate reaction she’d show when I would forget which elder in a room full of aging relatives I should have served tea to first, or when I’d refuse to interrupt an afternoon with a
friend to take vitamins to an elderly Iranian lady who couldn’t drive. Certain conversations or requests, unbeknownst to me, would become symbolic tests of my allegiance to that Iranian world, and the wrong response would plunge Maman into dark feelings of failure and regret.
    At the prescient age of thirteen, I realized our Madonna arguments signaled far more serious confrontations to come. Maman’s contempt for Madonna seemed like sheer hypocrisy to me. Was this the same woman who thought it regressive and awful that Iranian culture valued women through their marital status, and rated their respectability according to the success or failure of their marriage? The woman who denounced a culture that considered divorced women criminals? She believed it was only modern to consider women fully equal to men, independent beings with a sacred right to everything men were entitled. Somehow, it became clear through her designation of Madonna as whore, that she also thought it fully consistent to believe premarital sex (for women) was wrong, and that women who practiced it were morally compromised. The men she forgave, offering an explanation worthy of an Iranian villager: “They can’t help themselves.” Women, it seemed, were physiologically better equipped for deprivation. Often our fights would end with me collapsing in tears, her bitterly condemning my unquestioning acceptance of “this decadent culture’s corrupt ways,” and my usual finale: “It’s all your fault for raising me here; what did you expect?”
    In Maman’s view, America was responsible for most that had gone wrong in the world. Een gavhah, these cows, was her synonym for Americans. She’d established her criticisms early on, and repeated them so often that to this day they are seared on my brain: “Americans have no social skills. . . . They prefer their pets to people. . . . Shopping and sex, sex and shopping; that’s all Americans think about. . . . They’ve figured out how corrupt they are, and rather than fix themselves, they want to force their sick culture on the rest of the world.” Since she mostly wheeled out these attitudes to justify why I couldn’t be friends with