My life, as it is now, began the day I left Iran at the age of nine. I’ve spent my adult years protecting that little Iranian girl from being erased, because that day was also the day life as she knew it ended. She never saw her friends, her cousins, or her school again. She had to learn most truths about daily life over again. Little of what had shaped her as a person — who she was or wanted to be — would exist in her new home. In fact, she would only encounter a small roomful of people who looked like her, knew her language or world, either in person or in fiction.
I think of that nine-year-old girl often and wonder where she would be now had her life not been unhinged so suddenly, so deliberately, when she boarded that plane. Still in Iran, now in her thirties, she would speak and think and dream in Farsi, abilities I lost so fast it was almost traumatic once I realised they were gone. She might be a lawyer too. That much is possible. Maybe the urge to rebel and speak out is innate in us, so the oppression would be too hard for her to bear in silence. Maybe that oppression has made her stronger, a real-life freedom fighter, which I can’t claim given that all this freedom I’m now afforded in Aotearoa takes some of the rebellion out of the outspokenness. Maybe she paid that terrible price we were all fearful of: ending up in the notorious Evin prison.
Or perhaps, under the weight of convention, she would be married and have children now. I wonder, does knowing what is expected of you make it easier to feel contented or complete?
I recall that nine-year-old’s strong sense of self, which has never been whole in me again. Leaving my homeland as a child has suspended me between worlds, so it is never possible for me to be fully Iranian — but the experience of having fled Iran is exactly why I will never be ‘fully’ anything else either. The experience of leaving makes the identity of a foreigner forever more acute. It binds us to other children of foreign origin as a tribe, more so than to our own original or adopted cultures. Given I will never know who I would have been had I not left Iran, I must have begun existing the day we flew out of our then homeland, never to return.
That day was greeted as a triumph. It wasn’t an ending; it was a fresh start. Getting out was something everyone around me spoke about for as long as I could remember. Enforcement of what the regime called Islamic law had begun in earnest the year I was born, as did the bloody eight-year war waged against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. My childhood was peopled with a generation of adults in a state of perpetual shock as new oppressions and indignities flooded their lives, as an army of amputees returned from war, as weeping mothers mourned their martyred sons. Once in a while, people would disappear. That meant either exile, prison, or, as we’d discover some time later, death at the hands of the regime. For us, it was exile that released all that pressure and fear that had defined our daily lives. No wonder then that I walked onto that plane determined to shed everything, the good with the bad. What wouldn’t you give to be free from fear?
My memory of that morning in late September 1990 begins with waking up in my uncle M’ammad’s apartment in Tehran. It was before sunrise, cold and half-dark. We were drowsy automatons, going through the motions of getting dressed and putting the last of our things into already-packed bags, while being careful not to wake M’ammad’s daughters, who were around my age and had school later that day.
Tehran traffic was notorious even then, even at dawn, so we were leaving hours before our flight. Driving in my uncle’s car, I remember the grey smoggy sky, the crush of apartment blocks, and roads with so many vehicles jammed on them that the lane markings were meaningless.
I hadn’t grown up in Tehran. I had spent my childhood moving between Mashhad and Urmia, where my dad’s and mum’s families were, and thought of these places as home. Mashhad in the north-east — near the border with Afghanistan — is a big dusty suburban city, nothing like the cosmopolitan Tehran. It’s famous as the second city of Shi’a Islam. Urmia is right across the country in the north-west, almost bordering Turkey. Green and lush, it’s home to an open secularism that comes with diversity, where Sunni, Shi’a, Jewish and Armenian communities happily mingle. But the final scenes of Iran in my mind are of that tense drive in the grey Tehran dawn.
Tehran was the last of three rounds of goodbyes we made. At no point did we tell anyone of our intention to flee, but no one was in doubt about that. It was an extraordinary expense for people like us to go on an overseas tour to begin with, and truly bizarre to go around conscientiously saying a fond farewell to people in person before what was supposedly just a two-week trip. In Mashhad, where I was born and we lived, we took a few days to visit my parents’ best friends and close relatives, including my grandma and two uncles’ families. I remember the extended tight hugs; the kisses on each cheek, then each cheek again; the squeezed hands; the welled-up tears fought back. These goodbyes were profound for their permanence.
I know the hardest goodbye that round was my dad’s to his mum, Maman Naz (lovely mama), as she was to me. He had been a self-professed and proud mama’s boy his whole life, and they remained close until she passed away in October 2017. Since we never felt safe enough to go back into Iran, he never got to see her as her health declined, even when she was moved to hospice care. He couldn’t go home for the funeral.
As difficult as those Mashhad goodbyes were, they were a picnic compared to the harrowing scene at Urmia airport before we flew to Tehran for our final leg.
My mother is the middle child of seven. They grew up largely on vineyards in Western Azerbaijan, which my grandma’s family had owned for generations. The women of my mother’s family are passionate people, remarkably loving and extraordinarily close to one another. We split our time between Mashhad and Urmia during my childhood in Iran, because my mother could hardly bear to be apart from them. That closeness seems to be deeply rooted in their Kurdish heritage and a deep connection with their homeland — the vineyards of Western Azerbaijan. I always felt like an observer of this, since I never became proficient in their native dialect. But even being a little on the outside, the warmth of their familial culture was always electric.
Even though Iranian vineyards couldn’t make wine after the revolution, my grandmother held on to them as well as growing other kinds of fruits and walnuts. We spent a lot of time there on the land, the whole family chatting and preparing food, eating and laughing hysterically at a series of much-repeated in-jokes. There was generally a party on weekend nights. Members of the enormous extended family took turns hosting, and we all danced the traditional Kurdish line dance with scarves. All this happened at fever pitch on our last short visit before leaving the country.
My mother always said she married a man from across the country so she could get away and find her independence, but I think moving to Mashhad only intensified her sense of belonging to her own people, and they to her. When we left, the tears came hot and fast. Almost the whole family was there: her two sisters, her brother, all their children, her aunts, and their adult children. My grandmother’s two youngest children, my aunt and uncle, had escaped the country soon after the revolution. She hadn’t seen either of them for a decade, and still felt that loss keenly. At the airport, she was visibly distraught, though trying hard to hold it together for my mum as we said goodbye. It was a whirlwind, given the number of people. I felt overwhelmed, as I usually did with the emotional openness on that side of the family. I’d never been too demonstrative, and I remember feeling guilty that I wasn’t crying and clutching at everyone the way they were all doing. I also remember, most vividly, that my little grandma had to be restrained by security, because she kept walking through the barriers beyond where only ticket-holding travellers could go. She kept ignoring everyone and walking faster, calling for my mum to turn around so she could get a final look at her face. They were speaking in their dialect, Azeri, which I understood enough to know that they were reassuring each other, laughing about the next time we would all sit and eat my grandma’s giant Turkish meatballs together. I felt lucky to be permitted in that inner sanctum; it was unconditional love made palpable, so it was harrowing to have it ripped away. We never ate meatballs with my grandma again.
For my part I was acutely aware of the fact we were leaving for good and prepared for it silently in the weeks preceding. I had listened to those whispered conversations about fleeing, about seeking asylum, and about the few people we knew who had made it out. I knew it was a kind of salvation. I wasn’t afraid of it, but I knew people didn’t really come back.
I made a concerted effort to take snapshots in my mind’s eye of every special place and person I was parting with. I still carry these with me. I would sit on my bed and look in each direction for a few seconds, without blinking. I wanted to particularly remember the white-and-pink closet wall unit across the back wall of my room, which we had painted ourselves only a year or so earlier. I was proud of the colour scheme, which I had chosen myself.
On its shelves was an overflow of books, ranging from picture books to young adult books, which I had just begun reading and loved, all in Farsi. The last Farsi books I read were a biography of Helen Keller and a little compendium of the biographies of important historical figures like Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln, illustrated with watercolour portraits. I would lie on the floor in a sea of chaos, switching between different books, which would inevitably be left strewn across the carpet. (I never did learn to put things back once I was done playing with them. It was the bane of my mother’s life.) It wouldn’t be until twenty years later, when it was finally safe for my aunt to send them, that I would get to see and hold a few books from my precious collection again.
On the top shelf above the books sat dozens of tiny glass animals. I had been collecting them for a couple of years with my pocket money. They weren’t expensive, but it would still take me a few weeks to save up for one. Then I would go to the mall and spend hours examining all the animals, from exotic lions and tigers to farm animals like little pink pigs, before very carefully choosing my next purchase. It was a whole production marked with build-up and ceremony.
I’d sit on my bed, looking at all these objects to memorise their places, textures and colours. This slow, deliberate process of letting go was necessary. It meant that, even now, I remember how everything sat around our home, and in my friends’ rooms. I even know what times of day we visited significant people in our lives before we left, because I remember how the light hit people’s faces.
I couldn’t take any of these things with me, because we couldn’t let on that we were leaving forever. That would have set off alarm bells.
We were lucky that exit visas had become more available in that winter after the war with Iraq had ended, though they were still limited. They came in the form of lucrative tours to select countries that allowed Iranians entry (read: other Islamic states or those who were not themselves signatories to the Refugee Convention). We were booked to take some kind of luxury tour of Singapore and Malaysia that, for a holiday, cost a huge amount. I assume this was how the tour operators could secure the exit visas, through some serious kickbacks up the chain. We had spent almost our entire life’s savings and abandoned everything for the tickets out. We looked at it, though, as an investment in our freedom. It was a secure way out, in among a group, organised by people who had a business interest in getting us out. But there was no guarantee until that plane was in the air with us on board.
We had to look the part, so packing for this trip was as bizarre as the journey itself. We knew we would be searched and questioned ad nauseam as we left the country. We couldn’t risk any sign that we were leaving for good. We bought new clothes to wear on the plane to look the part of international travellers. We packed light bags. I was only allowed a couple of toys, and about ten days’ worth of outfits. I chose two of my favourite tiny china figurines, a cat and badger, gifted by my friend Jeiran, and two soft toys, a scruffy yellow teddy-bear and a fluffy elephant.
No one tells you how warped life has to get before you realise you have to leave forever. Leaving Iran was such a long time coming that it already felt historic in the chronology of my nine-year life, even as it was happening. Maybe that’s why I remember it with such filmic detail and in bursts of significant scenes.
My uncle dropped us off at Tehran Airport, which was chaotic and overflowing with people. I was constantly being pressed into a towering adult in front of me — not my mum or dad necessarily — as entire families hustled past nervously. Everyone was either a uniformed official or travellers in their best curated Islamic dress, in black, grey, brown, with maybe white or navy thrown in. No one dared stand out. For women, there had been a decade of tugging forward hijabs, checking and re-checking if their outfits were loose enough, long enough, didn’t look too expensive or ‘foreign’. I’m always shocked and fascinated by how Iranian women have pushed back those first overbearing dress codes to a place where they can now wear jeans in public.
There was immense tension in every encounter with officials in that first post-revolutionary decade. The airport embodied the absolute pinnacle of that tension. Not only were we coming face to face with a wall of regime officials, searching every inch of our belongings and person, but we were seeking the most contentious of privileges — to leave the regime’s realm of control. This was a realm where everything from phone lines to private conversations in places of work were surveilled, where everything from the evening news to the strands of hair on a woman’s head was jealously watched over by the ‘Guardians of the Revolution’. Leaving could be considered high treason. Of course, just about anything could be considered treason, and anyone could disappear into a torture chamber or quietly appear in a shallow grave for just mouthing off to one of these officials. Playing the wrong music at a wedding, reading the wrong book, wearing a tie — any of these things could indicate your allegiances were offside. It was that constant state of terror that marked my childhood. I felt it too with all the adults at that airport. It meant I wanted to leave as badly as my parents, who were escaping a much more tangible personal danger.
There was an inexhaustible variety of officials to placate: immigration officers, ordinary guards, Pasdars (the regime’s moral police or, more accurately, militia). We were separated by gender and strip-searched in little curtained cubicles. I kept close to my mother and silently let the woman in the black shroud inspect my shoes and pat under my clothes. Then there was the grilling. They spat questions at us, at everyone, and moved us about the place. They used the demeaning familiar tense, which in Farsi is used to denote hierarchy akin to a master addressing a servant, and is rarely used between strangers except by adults addressing children. That’s how the regime spoke to its public: ‘Biya,’ ‘Boro,’ ‘Baz kon,’ ‘Bedeh be man’ — ‘Come,’ ‘Go,’ ‘Open this,’ ‘Give me that.’ They demanded women hand over jewellery, separated families for interrogation. Women tugged their hijabs forward on their foreheads and tried not to make eye contact. Everyone made appeals to God and the prophet, his daughter Fatimah, in rhythmic chants. At the airport, stakes were high. Everyone involved knew what the right answers were, how to give them, the personas to adopt, but the power of forcing the charade was enough for the officials. The anxiety and contempt we all felt was not enough to stop them.
Once all the searches and questioning was over, we were ready to push on, but not before I caused a near disaster that almost changed everything. My dad had given me a small zipped bag to hold, a man bag if you will. He told me to hold on to it for a minute, to not put it down. Then he turned to deal with the man searching our final bag. By this stage, I had been up since dawn, and was drowsy and overwhelmed. I must have put that little bag down the moment he passed it to me. When he turned back to grab the bag, I didn’t have it. It wasn’t on the ground, not on the counter next to me. It had vanished. Panic set in. He became frantic, asking me where I had put it. My mum got involved, telling him he shouldn’t have given it to a child, interrogating the guards nearby. It turned out that little zipped bag, which I can still somehow see so vividly, held all our passports, documents and whatever amount of cash we were allowed to exchange and take with us. No one standing near me could tell us where the bag had gone. Within a few minutes, they put a call on the airport intercom and threatened to close the exits in the main area. Then, the guard standing next to me reached up to a cubby hole above the security check line and pulled the bag out. He could suddenly see it, he said. We thanked him, but not without shooting accusatory looks at him. We were close to tears and shaking.
We boarded the plane and sat with me between my parents, busily straightening ourselves out, buckling seatbelts, performing a shaky calm. The plane finally took off, but that isn’t the end of it for Iranians. The real collective sigh of relief comes when the pilot declares us in international airspace. Back then at least, many women would defiantly pull off their hijabs; my mother did. Despite the curated boarding process, she didn’t miss her first chance at shedding the possessive control of the regime. I promptly fell asleep and woke up just before landing as dazed as I was that morning, but we hurried through a far simpler airport experience, and finally into the colourful balmy new world. That initial joyous escape has drawn me back to South-east Asia again and again, but it was short lived during that first trip.
Our brief visit to Malaysia and Singapore was tense. It felt like an eternity of holding our breaths and trying to act natural, waiting for the moment to skip out to our real destination. Hilariously, none of the other Iranians on that tour were there to explore South-east Asia either. No one had any interest in sampling the local cuisine or seeing the water puppet shows on our schedule. Most of them were there to buy electronics to import back to Iran, breaking trade sanctions. There was almost no attempt to disguise this once we landed, and the tour organisers didn’t seem too worried.
We knew the right to claim asylum was not available in Malaysia or Singapore, so we couldn’t stay. We were there to play the part of tourists while we secretly invested all we had in flights to anywhere with a stopover in Auckland. A cousin of my dad’s lived in New Zealand with his family, which was why we were trying to go there. Complicating matters, we needed the flight to leave at around the same time as our return flight to Iran so the tour organisers weren’t alerted to our leaving early. I can barely imagine the fear my parents lived under. Iranians weren’t supposed to do anything without regime approval, least of all move freely outside the regime’s realm of power. Everyone could be a spy and a fair few were.
At some point, my dad managed to buy the tickets we needed, headed to Tonga with a stopover in Auckland, where we planned to claim asylum. Claiming asylum is the process by which a refugee applies to have their refugee status recognised, once they enter a country like New Zealand where the Refugee Convention is law. Before that, we are ‘asylum seekers’. Claiming asylum is not only legal in New Zealand; it is a fundamental human right. The right was recognised in the aftermath of the Holocaust, after the ‘civilised’ Western world reckoned with the harrowing reality that it had blocked its borders and actually turned back ships loaded with asylum seekers escaping Nazi persecution. We collectively recognise that refugees have a right to claim asylum, because without that right most other human rights they hold are undermined. In fact, it is specifically illegal to sanction refugees for being without passports or using false travel documents, since the first step to persecution is usually to make travel impossible for the persecuted group. The Third Reich cancelled Jewish citizenship rights well before the death camps came to be, making the killings possible, as it made it possible for the world to turn its back. For refugees lucky enough to escape or even to afford travel, leaving solves only half the problem. Arriving in a country that recognises those rights is an equally formidable obstacle to safety. Even though the St Louis made it out of Nazi Germany with thousands on board, the fact she was not allowed to dock once she made it to the United States is why around a third of the returned refugees on that ship were later murdered in the death camps.
Landing in Auckland Airport without visas to enter New Zealand meant we had to escape from the transit lounge to access our rights. The anxiety of our time in that white transit room was a whole fresh hell. Stakes were far higher now — we were actually in danger of being returned, which would mark us as dissidents attempting to flee. I knew we could lose everything, that my parents could be imprisoned. I knew that in Iran people were tortured and killed in prison. Everyone talked about the number of dozens of lashes people were given for infractions like drinking alcohol. Everyone talked about executions as a pretty common end to an arrest or disappearance. We knew at least two people who had met with that end already. So I sat silently as my parents tried to figure out the exits. At least at the gauntlet of Tehran Airport, we knew the rules. We knew what to say, how to dress, what to hide. Now in an unfamiliar place, we were suddenly helpless. That was the first time I realised that, from now on, my parents would not have the answers to most of our everyday problems. They had no experience of the systems or social protocol, and only basic English they picked up in university courses years ago. It was useless to tell officials we were refugees in the transit area because we had no right to claim asylum outside of New Zealand (which technically the transit area was) and no right to enter. That would, in fact, ensure we were watched and sent away.
So we sat and waited for an eternity. Finally, we got up the courage to walk out toward the escalator, but we were intercepted. It makes me laugh to think of it now. The person stopping us was trying to be helpful. He asked if we were lost, because we were leaving the transit lounge. We assumed he was there to make sure people didn’t escape, so we thanked him and went back to our seats. After another lifetime of staring at the clock and straightening our clothes nervously, we made another dash for it. This time we weren’t stopped. I still think about that moment when I stepped on the escalator separating international space from New Zealand soil. The set-up is completely different now, but I like to think it’s the same cosmic stairway.
Once we reached the ground floor, we scrambled for the first official-looking person and told him we were refugees and asked to be processed. We were taken aside to a desk where two people in uniform interviewed us. Their manner was warm and casual, without alarm or hostility. My parents were audibly relieved and grateful. Their first question to me, half mimed and translated back by my overwhelmed parents, was, ‘Are you hungry?’ I still can’t think of that moment without fighting back hot tears. I said I was fine. Then they asked us if we were carrying any fruit or plant products. We said no, but my shoe had come off and there was a leaf in it, which was taken away for scientific study or cremation. Then we were given the opportunity to exercise our right to speak with a lawyer. Our relations here had given us the name and phone number for Coral Shaw, later Judge Shaw, who spoke to Immigration and agreed to help us.
We made one more phone call, to my dad’s cousin. He came to fetch us from the airport. That’s right: we were released into the wild, having been given access to food, legal rights and community support within the first hour of being in this new place. It felt like landing on a warm beach and taking a deep breath after almost drowning. We were exhausted and elated. The adults talked and talked in the car ride home. My parents exchanged stories with my dad’s cousin about all the luck we had had making it here. He told them a little about Auckland, about the roads, or shops or whatever we happened to pass. I sat quietly behind the driver’s seat, taking in the scenery. Auckland was cool and humid after some rain. I thought the houses looked like the thatched houses from cartoons, with the pitched roofs we didn’t have in Iran. I had been drawing houses like that my whole life even though Iranian houses had flat roofs. I remember the colours and the light were so different than in Asia. The blues seemed lighter, more aqua; the greens were almost in soft focus. Mostly, I remember that there was just so much green — open lawns in front of every house, more parks and reserves than I’d ever seen in my life. It felt profound to me that the place that had become synonymous with freedom would be filled with nature. I knew immediately that I was going to like it here. That I was going to be okay.