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Adam-the-long-haired-guitarist or why I couldn’t go to the movies twice in one week, or why I couldn’t wear short skirts, I wondered whether they were sincere, or tactical.
    Her restrictions were futile, and only turned me into a highly skilled liar with a suspiciously heavy backpack. Every morning she would drop me off at a friend’s house, ostensibly so we could walk to school together. Once inside
I traded the Maman-approved outfit for something tighter, smeared some cherry gloss on my lips, and headed off to class. Knowing I could secretly evade her restrictions helped me endure the sermons, but sometimes the injustice of her moralizing would provoke me, and I would fling jingoistic clichés designed to infuriate her: “Love it or leave it. . . . These colors don’t run. . . . No one’s keeping you here.” At hearing these words come out of my mouth she’d hurl a piece of fruit at me, dissolve into angry tears, and suddenly the fact that I was torturing my poor, exiled single mother filled me with terrible grief, and I would apologize profusely, begging forgiveness in the formal, filial Farsi I knew she craved to hear. In the style of a traditional Iranian mother, she would pretend, for five days, that I did not exist; thaw on the sixth; and by the seventh have forgotten the episode entirely, privately convinced that my rude friends, who didn’t even say salaam to her when they came over, were responsible for ruining my manners.
    When we encountered other second-generation Iranians at Persian parties, I was struck by how much less conflicted they seemed over their dueling cultural identities. I decided my own neurotic messiness in this area was the fault of my divorced parents. The only thing they agreed on was the safety record of the Volvo, and how they should both drive one until I finished junior high. But when it came to anything that mattered, for instance how I should be raised, they didn’t even bother to carve out an agreement, so vast was the gulf that separated their beliefs. My father was an atheist (Marx said God was dead) who called the Prophet Mohammad a pedophile for marrying a nine-year-old girl. He thought the defining characteristics of Iranian culture—fatalism, political paranoia, social obligations, an enthusiasm for guilt—were responsible for the failures of modern Iran. He wouldn’t even condescend to use the term “Iranian culture,” preferring to refer, to this day, to “that stinking culture”; he refused to return to Iran, even for his mother’s funeral, and wouldn’t help me with my Persian homework, a language, he pronounced direly “you will never use.” When I announced my decision to move to Iran, his greatest fear, I think, was that something sufficiently awful would happen to me that it would require his going back. That he had married Maman, a hyper-ideologue, a reactionary as high-strung as they come, was baffling; little wonder they divorced when I was an infant. Daddy was the benevolent father personified; he couldn’t have cared less about curfews, dating, a fifth ear piercing, or whether my hair was purple or not.

    There were few times during my adolescence that he intervened, but Maman’s attempt to make mosque attendees out of her and me was one of them. Iranians, by and large, are subtle about their piety, and identify more closely with Persian tradition than with Islam. Faith is a personal matter, commanding of respect, but it does not infuse our culture in the totalizing way I have witnessed in certain Arab countries, among many Sunni Muslims. Westernized, educated Iranians are fully secular—they eat pork, don’t pray, ignore Ramadan—and so it had never occurred to the exile community to start up a mosque. Hiking groups, discos, political soirees, definitely, but a mosque would have been in bad taste; the revolution had made Islam the domain of the fundamentalists.