There’s a transition inherent in teendom, where home truths about our place in the world are realised, and the ideas about ourselves that we carried around as children transform. For me, the transition was marked by realising that race exists. That coincided with all the universal doubts we have about our bodies, social hierarchies, and formulating what hopes and dreams we’re allowed to have.
My family came to New Zealand from a world that seemed almost devoid of any paradigm where race affected daily life. Later, looking back, I remembered that Mashhad, being on Iran’s easternmost border, saw an influx of Afghan refugees when I was a small child. Those who were visible to me were young men working as labourers on roadworks or construction sites. I remembered having an understanding that their country was worse off than ours and they were escaping a war. It didn’t occur to me that labouring work was all that was open to them in Iran, that it was what they had to do to survive here. Since they spoke Farsi, albeit with an accent, and looked more or less like the rest of us, there didn’t seem to me to be an issue.
Moving to the West was the first time I had to contemplate race, that I learned I was, in fact, a ‘person of colour’. That happened when my parents pushed me into a Pākehā-dominant intermediate school in an affluent suburb of Auckland in a bid to secure my education.
Iranians generally don’t see themselves as people of colour in the greater world context the way colonised peoples or those who share direct borders with Western neighbours have been forced to. It’s incredible to think about that now, given we seem to be among the most vehemently despised peoples, bearing the brunt of Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ and sitting firmly in the ‘Axis of Evil’. As a nation, by the late 1980s, we did have a sense of shame about our ‘backward’ religious-based government. We did realise that we had suffered imperialism of some sort under our crony Shah, with his deference to the West. We knew that our only democratically elected leader, Mosaddegh, was able to be deposed by an American-funded coup. But we have never necessarily understood ourselves as sitting below European Westerners in terms of race. To the contrary, I think Iranians — at least the vast majority of urbanites — saw themselves largely on par with Europeans. We were an Old-World culture, part of the ‘civilised world’ who, before the revolution, partook in modern fashion, films, and music. The glitch later was only political.
But race is multi-faceted and doesn’t seem contingent on what any group has in fact contributed to civilisation, art, literature, or urbanism. We didn’t realise that those parts of our history could be erased in the Western World. Our physical appearance, skin colour, and the preconceptions imposed upon us dictated how we were perceived and what opportunities we were provided. It didn’t matter how we saw ourselves. We learned quickly that colour, just like gender and other group identifiers, comes from an external gaze. It’s a gaze laden with expectations and misgivings, because we are not white. That means we are not enough, not ‘normal’ enough. That means we may be despised or feared from birth.
At around eleven years old, this was a tangible realisation for me.
In my interactions with teachers and other adults, I had already noticed that my parents were presumed to be religious and strict, rather than eccentric liberals, which in fact they were. They were also presumed to be uneducated, ignorant, homely, even rural people, rather than urban intellectuals. Who we were was determined by our physical differences. That was not something we had expected or emotionally prepared for. I don’t think Westerners realise that in the rest of the world, we interact with foreigners of different races as if they could be like us in terms of education, financial means, and political beliefs. We expect that an African woman could be an ambassador or a doctor, not only a tribeswoman or maybe a small-business owner selling beads (which I later learned is what even the most humanitarian aid organisations often assume African women aspire to). We don’t assume ‘Asians’ are good at maths. In fact, we understand Asia itself to be the most diverse of continents, which covers the vastly divergent cultures from Japan, China, India, South-east Asia, as well as most of the so-called ‘Middle East’ (which is of course a Western construct that somehow includes North Africa and a diverse group of Asian nations and peoples).
Until just over a year after we settled in New Zealand, I had managed an unscathed existence. I felt different in terms of language and life experience, but I wasn’t made to feel lesser. I felt mostly like a kid from a different school who joined the class late in the year.
Then we moved from West Auckland.
Like all good immigrants set on building a better life, my parents asked around about good schools. They were told all about Auckland’s public grammar school system and the array of grammar and private schools bunched together in what was known as the ‘Grammar Zone’, essentially two old central suburbs in Auckland. By then they were working — Dad as a house painter, Mum behind the counter at a local café — and were intensely focused on clawing back some modicum of the life we had had back in Iran, but mostly they were focused on ensuring I had opportunities I couldn’t have had back there. We moved from Kelston to a tiny unit on the cusp of Auckland’s prestigious suburbs comprising The Zone. My mum remembers I burst into tears when I first saw our new home. It was tiny, weathered, and there was black mould all over the bathroom walls. I said I would never bring friends home again. She promised to fix it up and mostly did. We trooped on. I must have shrugged off that initial shock because I left my friends in West Auckland and began intermediate school in the Grammar Zone with an air of optimism. Again, I looked at the school grounds and thought about how familiar it would all be soon. Starting over isn’t such a big deal once you’ve survived the first round.
The culture shock was pretty immediate for me. This was a far bigger school than Chaucer, but I was one of only three or four ‘ethnic’ students in my year. That wasn’t a deterrent in itself and I tried to talk to the other kids as I had done in my last school. That didn’t work so well here. I started to get a very real feeling of being given the once-over by other children and even teachers. Something about me wasn’t quite right.
What drove it home was a girl who ran over to me on the school field as I was walking home one day and asked me if I was a refugee. She was blonde with her hair in a high ponytail. She must have been playing a game on the field, because I remember she was in our school PE uniform and a little flushed.
Based on her tone and the fact that she had a hand on her hip, I instinctively said no.
She replied, ‘Good, because I hate refugees.’
I knew even then that she couldn’t possibly know what she had just declared. She couldn’t possibly mean that she hates people who suffer persecution and war, who have been forced to live outside their country of birth. She must have been repeating hate espoused at home or on TV. Even though I knew it was wrong, I felt ashamed of what I was. I learned not to talk about being a refugee for years to come. Today, I never use the term ‘former refugee’. I know many adopt it to denote a life beyond refugee status, but I fear it is also to alleviate the shame that comes with identifying as a refugee, inadvertently reinforcing the prejudice. I don’t ever want to feed that.
Thankfully, that bit of overt hatred was a one-off.
One of the main problems for me in terms of being accepted in the social hierarchy at my new school was class. Everyone had expensive sneakers and schoolbags. We had a uniform, so those accessories were the key opportunities to show you were cool. It was the early 1990s, and it was all about Air Jordans, Adidas, and Stüssy. To my family, $100 seemed like a million. I couldn’t even imagine asking my parents for sport shoes that cost about double that. Better clothes wasn’t going to be the fix. But, as it turned out, that was just a small part of the problem.
The real stigma seemed to run deeper. From the start, my teacher made a point of refusing to pronounce my name correctly or even attempting my last name. She was a tall, slender woman, maybe a runner, with short platinum-blonde hair and an all-year tan that you could tell she worked at. She was married to a wealthy man who owned some golf courses she often mentioned, probably where the sporty tan was nurtured. Just looking at my name on her roll at the start of the year made her annoyed. She told the whole class she wouldn’t ‘go there’, then giggled. I realised having your name acknowledged and used in the official roll call each morning was a privilege not afforded to people like me.
I noticed there was an immediate presumption that I was ‘nerdy’. The teacher gave me thick books, like The Hobbit, to read ‘at lunchtime’. I silently took the book, but I felt embarrassed. Why did she think I would read a book alone at lunchtime? Of course, I loved books, but I had never been the kind of kid who read during breaks. Like the presumption that Chinese kids will be good at math, I’m sure this wasn’t seen as racist by anyone involved. Maybe they saw it as a compliment even. But it certainly didn’t come from anything I did or said. Until then, I had always been one of the girls surrounded by friends, making up games and sharing secrets. For some reason that wasn’t a role I was seen as capable of occupying here.
More front of mind to a preteen girl is that the external gaze of the status quo beholds beauty. Of course almost every person suffers self-doubt and body image challenges at that age, and we know this is doubly difficult for young women in every culture. For me, it meant learning that, while in Iran beauty included our dark hair, broad eyebrows and olive complexions, those features were not part of the standard in the West. At least, they weren’t back in 1992 New Zealand. That was news to me at a critical moment in my personal development as a young woman, and a little crushing each day.
A couple of the girls were eventually nice enough to include me in their chats over lunch. When it turned to boys, which it often did, there was a divide. The girls all asked each other which boys they thought were the cutest in our year, starting with the most popular ones. They only ever asked if I liked the Indian boy in another class. They must have assumed either that I couldn’t possibly like the cute white boys, or maybe that my traditional family would arrange a marriage for me with some other ethnically ambiguous person, so why even ask. I learned to know my place and just vehemently denied liking the little Indian boy. I even started disliking him for the weird association I had been forced into. That’s how people of colour in white-dominated contexts sometimes come to avoid each other, to somehow achieve the desired whiteness. From this constant exclusion, I learned that I wasn’t pretty enough for conventionally attractive or socially successful men.
This wasn’t just driven home in personal interactions; it came from a complete lack of representation in any forum where beauty or success was portrayed. In fact, the kids at school were obviously not the proponents of this insidious prejudice. Like me, they were merely its passive consumers. Learning that you won’t ever be one of the ‘pretty girls’ because of the texture and colour of your hair and skin, which you cannot change, comes from constantly repeated images of what beauty is, which consistently exclude you. At that age, when every young person is desperately unsure about every aspect of their ever-changing physical appearance, this meant I learned fast about all the ways my body was innately flawed and unworthy. It goes well beyond the usual distress that comes with wearing a female human body.
Most of the media I consumed back then was by way of teen magazines, music videos, and after-school dramas centring on teenagers who lived on beaches with conveniently absent parents. They dated and experienced heartbreak necessitating melodramatic beach runs or staring into sunsets with polite tears running down their faces — the girls’ faces, that is. The boys didn’t cry, of course. They had cans and chairs to kick at the beach diners they worked at. I was addicted to these shows, but I also remember sometimes quickly switching the TV off with an overwhelming sense of anxiety. In what I saw as the only mature way to go forward, I tried to accept that I was not allowed those sorts of experiences because no one ‘normal’ or ‘pretty’ looked like me. I would sternly tell myself that I needed to get over it and focus on other things.
At that age, looking different to most people around me and in mainstream media drove home the challenge of fitting in. Beyond beauty standards, there was also the total vacuum of role models or even acknowledgement that people like you exist in the world. School curriculums have been slow in engaging with books by female authors or with female protagonists, and when you add race, the void is far more gaping. Even up to high school, I don’t remember studying books by Māori authors, other than a single encounter with Patricia Grace in Year 12. Māori history is still a battlefield, so to speak, in terms of inclusion in standard New Zealand curriculums. The world I encountered was profoundly Pākehā. There was certainly no space for portrayals of other nonwhite cultures, given even indigenous peoples of the land were systematically erased.
Relatable role models, moral and aesthetic, have been missing for children of colour growing up in even the most diverse of Western societies, certainly in Aotearoa, for as long as I can remember. That’s no small thing. It cuts deep. It affects the way we see ourselves and the way the world treats us later in life. We accept and adapt to the mainstream exclusion, but the point is that young Pākehā boys, and girls to a lesser extent, never have to develop that muscle in their formative years. Having a myriad of images and stories that reflect you in your school curriculum and in mainstream media is a privilege. But it shouldn’t be. Without it, those doubts are confirmed: it isn’t just the hormones and growing pains; the world really isn’t made for you to shine in.
In 2018, Crazy Rich Asians became the first Hollywood blockbuster with an Asian leading cast. I saw the film on a flight recently, where I had one of those exit-row seats where you face the flight attendants during take-off and landing. We had chatted and one of them had told me I should watch it, and I was up to a random scene where an Asian male character is being objectified as he emerges from the shower, muscular and handsome. The audience was clearly expected to see him as attractive. But Asian men never get to play those roles — in fact, neither Asian men nor women get to play romantic leads in blockbusters — and that thought meant I sat there desperately trying not to be a person publicly crying during the first twenty minutes of a romantic comedy.
A few months later, during the Golden Globes, the indomitable actress Sandra Oh made a dig at Hollywood for casting two white women as leads in films based on actual Asian stories. I made the mistake of reading the comments online. One commenter, a youngish white man identifying as progressive, said it was clearly fine to cast fictional characters as any race, because if we had to portray their race accurately, the next step would be casting actual murderers as characters who commit murder.
I didn’t comment, but I wanted to say: imagine a world where no film or television show you ever watched had a lead character of your ethnicity or gender as its hero, as a romantic lead, as a complex anti-hero even, ever. Maybe there was the odd character that was the butt of ‘white-man’ jokes here and there in the margins of the story, or once in a decade a film specifically about white men being white men in the most stereotypical way, sometimes as a cliched compliment, sometimes a negative trope — maybe about Vikings, or Nazis — but that was it. So you had never seen yourself as the lead, a hero, or an object of love in a way that reflected your life. But that made sense to everyone, because, they said, none of the films being made were based on ‘white-man stories’ anyway. The Kafkaesque trap was that you weren’t allowed to be reflected in mainstream film or television because stories about you weren’t the ones being made into major films or shows. Then suddenly they announce a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, the great classic novel about a white, middle-class, sensitive man coming of age that seems to hit home pretty hard with that demographic. You’re excited. You finally get to identify with a character; your thoughts and perspective are going to be explored centrally in a film. People are finally investing in one of the stories you grew up obsessing over. It feels like they are finally investing in you. Then they cast an Indian woman as Holden Caulfield. But he’s fictional, so his experiences aren’t based on culture or gender, right? It doesn’t matter that you’ve never been represented in a relatable way. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been erased this whole time. It’s fiction. We don’t need to be accurate. Not even this once.
The fact is that it does matter.
Film critic and screenwriter Roger Ebert said cinema is about building empathy. That’s because it allows us to experience different worlds, to see our world through different eyes. If that’s true, exclusion of entire cultures, races and religions from pop culture is deeply problematic. It doesn’t just erase those peoples; it actively promotes certain demographics as the only normal, the only complex, the only human way to be. It means that the little game of imagining I wished I could play with that commenter on Sandra Oh’s clip is barely possible to members of dominant demographics, because they’ve never had to exercise that level of empathy. The ability to relate to other people’s experiences is built through practice. Is that why this ‘progressive’ ally missed the point Sandra was making?
It wasn’t until I studied the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s in high school when some of what I had personally experienced growing up clicked together. The Black is Beautiful campaign, calling for the acceptance and idealisation of natural hair among African Americans, amalgamated the staunch rise of two equality movements. The fight for civil rights for African Americans was predicated on breaking down white supremacy at every level, just as second-wave feminists campaigned against oppressive beauty standards for women. Oppression by enforced beauty standards was part of the idea that ‘The personal is political’. The erasure of men and women of colour from popular culture and beauty standards is part of the fabric of white supremacy. On that spectrum that ends with far worse degradation, even violence, is the step where we learn that the texture of your hair is all wrong.
If you’re a Middle Eastern or South Asian woman, it might mean learning there’s ‘too much’ hair on you — your eyebrows, arms, or upper lip — and it all needs to be removed so you look more ‘beautiful’. I remember at eleven years old having no idea what to do about this emergency. I tried shaving the soft dark hairs on my upper lip and what I saw as sideburns. To my horror, that just made bald patches. My mother was persuaded to get involved with threading, and disaster was averted by a lengthy, and painful, process of removing the hairs all over my face. But I still hated the soft thicket of upper-lip hair, the impending monobrow, the brows themselves, way too dark and thick for the early 1990s arched style. Now, every time I look at the array of eyebrow-defining products, and images of fair-skinned models with eyebrows groomed to be fashionably thicker, I smile.
The Black is Beautiful campaign was about the rejection of painful chemical straighteners through affirmations that afro hair and dark skin forms part of what beauty is. I know what deep-seated anguish would drive someone to chemically burn their scalp to alter their non-white appearance. I remember as a twelve-year-old feeling like I looked unclean with what I felt was an eternal film of soft dark hairs over my face. I remember feeling like I would do anything to just wash it all away.
Even changing your appearance in all the superficial ways young women do was barely possible to ethnic girls back then. Hair dye only ever worked to make dark hair into various shades of red or orange. A little change meant you could go dark brown with auburn tones. But if you wanted real change, there was a rainbow of peroxide tones from deep rust to light golden brass. All hair dye advertisements and packaging portrayed white women with very different shades of medium to light brown or blonde hair. Only in recent years did they finally make tone control possible for us, no doubt led by the growing financial power of the Asian beauty consumer.
Likewise, make-up was only ever for pink-toned skin. Many of us with darker or yellow undertones will remember when wearing foundation meant looking like we had an alien tone from the neck up, and never remembering to blend properly from the neck down. Of course, the shades were also never dark enough, so most women of colour looked like we were attempting whiteface.
For me, at intermediate school, the messages about beauty also came more directly. The other girls told me from time to time that my hair was gross, because I put oil in it ‘like Atika’. A year ahead of us, Atika was of South Asian origin and must have at some point talked about putting oil in her hair. I never had oil in mine, but there was no point arguing facts.
I had developed curves early, as all the women in my mother’s family do, so I was also told regularly by the other girls that I must eat ‘bad’ or ‘fatty’ food at home because I was fat. In the same breath, those kids would ask if my house smelled like curry. I didn’t know what curry really smelled like at that point, since Iranians don’t make curries and Indian food wasn’t all that widespread in New Zealand. I knew the implication was that the food my family ate was gross and smelled bad. I knew that made me want to cry. I started counting calories and incessantly running after school, desperately trying to lose the ‘fat’ to put an end to the snide comments. I lost sleep feeling anxious about things I had eaten as far back as years before. I wore baggier clothes and avoided boys, so they didn’t have to live with the discomfort of feeling like I was flirting with them. I didn’t want them to think I was so clueless as to believe that was a role I could possibly inhabit.
Imagine there was a moment when race suddenly comes to exist and affect your daily experiences of the world. It is made clear that within that arbitrary construct of ‘race’, you are brown, and that is something you have no control over. That identification carries things with it beyond colour. It carries a myriad of assumptions projected onto you that were never there before. It eventually comes with internalised self-hate, as you react against the projections, try to be less ‘brown’, downplay it, learn mimicry, or become silent. Otherwise it underpins a reactionary pride, as you begin to ‘own’ whatever those presumptions are.
I do think it’s different for those born into societies where race is an innate part of identity. Processing it later, as I did, comes with the benefit of always knowing that this is a construct to begin with, because you remember life without the barriers. It also comes with the sting of being awake, so to speak, when the knife goes in.
That realisation came around the time I, like most preteens, wished that my parents would just be ‘normal’. It was different for me, though, because I started to notice things like how they couldn’t really help me manoeuvre the everyday logistics of life or even social decorum, which they themselves were learning. They were even suddenly at a loss when it came to helping with my homework, which they were big on back in Iran. Other than mathematics or science, they were behind me in every subject.
Towards the end of my first year of intermediate, the school held a dance, a Blue Light Disco. It was an annual disco sponsored by the New Zealand Police, which may give an indication of how cool the event was. I was nervous. I wanted to look good, so I convinced my parents to buy me a white denim skirt. I wore the skirt with a bright purple-and-pink cropped top. Both resulted from an arduous and exhilarating expedition at Kmart. That outfit would have been cool in Iran or in some Euro-pop music video, but sadly everyone at the disco was wearing jeans and baggy T-shirts, because Kiwis are nothing if not understated. I did dance a little, but mostly melted into the corners, chatting to the other kids who weren’t super into standing out that night.
The real disaster of the night, I realised later, had come before I even walked into the darkened gym. My dad had driven me to the school. As he’d indicated to turn down the driveway of the school, I had become agitated. I told him that he had come too far, to not drop me at the entrance where everyone could see. I asked him to let me out somewhere down the road, so I could walk in alone. He was confused for a second, then seemed to take on my panic and quickly got away from the school. Just before I scurried away from the car, he wished me fun and said he would see me back here at the end of the dance.
The next day, my mum took me for a drive. She stopped the car at a park, turned to me and asked, ‘Do you feel like your dad has been a good dad?’
It was an odd, pointed question, and I had no idea what she was getting at. I gave her a simple unassuming ‘yes’.
I remember her voice was stern and holding back anger. She said, ‘I think so too.’ Then she looked straight ahead, away from me. She said, ‘I always liked how much time he spends with you, no matter how tired he is.’ She raised her voice a touch: ‘And he always takes an interest in what you’re into. He spent all that time playing the games with your dolls when you were little, taking you and your friends out. You remember? Not all dads do that.’
I was choking back tears by then.
She turned and asked, ‘Was it worth your dad, such a good dad, feeling like his daughter is ashamed of him for the sake of what some kids at school think?’
I can still feel the punch to the gut.
‘You need to remember that we came here together as a family and we can’t lose ourselves,’ she said. ‘No one’s opinion is important out there except the opinion of the people who love you, otherwise you will lose yourself.’ Then, more gently: ‘Do you understand, dear?’
I nodded.
As we drove home, I sat there, remembering how my dad used to be the ‘cool dad’ and how proud I was that he was my dad when he agreed to take my friends and me to do things back in Iran. I realise now that what he felt that night went beyond what a normal parent goes through, because, for him, my reaction was part of the fabric of this new world where he was losing himself. I could see it so clearly in his lack of jokes, in his demeanour when we were out, in the way he struggled to know what people were saying. Now, he wasn’t the cool dad anymore, and that was one more thing on top of all the other things he had lost of his old place in the world.
My mother was right, and I still think hard about whose opinion I value and whose feelings I protect when I have a visceral reaction of shame or the need to fit in. It was a real lesson of the regret you will feel later if you don’t stand by your people. It applies now to my work. Which communities am I pleasing and whose oppression am I amplifying if I base my decisions on what is popular rather than what is true to my roots?
But, man, was that a harsh truth for an eleven-year-old girl to hear after the school dance.
It was infinitely lucky that before things got hard, and I got busy processing myself as an outsider, my parents made inroads into Auckland’s tiny Iranian community. It was a community of families who had been there longer than we had, many of whom had kids my age.
That’s how I met Ghazaleh Golbakhsh. We had invited her aunt and uncle over for dinner one night. She had heard a girl her age would be there, so she came along. She walked into our house carrying a bundle of movie magazines, and held them out straight away with a huge grin. Her aunt introduced us and Ghazaleh’s first words to me were: ‘I’m going to be an actress when I grow up.’
She was darker than I was, tiny, flat-chested, with straight pins for legs and no hips. She showed me her famous Michael Jackson impersonations that night, which were, frankly, totally on point. We hit it off, and spent much of the night lying on my bedroom floor, analysing whether Christian Slater was cuter than Billy Warlock, one of the guys from Baywatch. I was for Billy, but in retrospect Ghaz went with the more iconic of 1990s heartthrobs. I was instantly sold on Ghaz. She inhabited a world where we were allowed to have crushes on cute boys and perv on 25-year-old film and TV stars. A world where we could not only dream about becoming famous actresses, but declare it as truth.
I started to see my social life as a separate world from school. There was a bunch of us Iranian kids who were around eleven or twelve years old, boys and girls, as well as a bunch of older teens who were cooler and came with more drama, which we eleven- and twelve-year-olds could gossip about and aspire to. We spoke on the phone for hours, annoying our parents. In a time when the household only had one phoneline, and dial-up internet was becoming a thing, the phone became a family battleground. We relished these contests with our parents, imagining ourselves as proper stroppy teenagers.
Soon my parents had saved enough to buy a small business, a little liquor shop in Onehunga, which was then a rough neighbourhood in Auckland. They were mildly embarrassed about the type of business they ran, but it was the only thing they could afford. They knew by then that business was the only way they could succeed here, having been thoroughly assured that their qualifications were meaningless. My parents worked in the shop till 10 pm each night, so I was alone at home a lot, and the phone became my world. I would come home from school, heat up whatever elaborate meal Mum had cooked before work and left for my dinner, and basically laugh and chatter with my Iranian friends all night. We would also see each other regularly, at beach trips, or, if we could convince our parents to drop us off, the mall (the dream scenario).
The Iranians in Auckland were a disparate bunch with little in common in terms of personalities, but with a shared commitment to keeping their customs alive. No one was traditional or conservative. They were all people who had fled after the revolution, so wanted to gather together to erase that nightmare. We threw parties like we had in Iran, always with a head-spinning variety of food in volumes to feed twice our number. There was ghormeh sabzi (a slow-cooked lamb dish so rich with herbs it looks dark green, including fenugreek, a particularly pungent herb, which makes it risky served to Westerners), tah chin (a beautiful chicken dish a lot like biryani, where the chicken is cooked golden and a little crisp with saffron, then cooked with the rice as it steams), and, my favourite, khoreshte bademjan (lamb cooked with eggplant and served with rice). Iranian food is high maintenance. Each part is normally lightly fried with cumin and turmeric, so the taste is sealed, then slow-cooked together for hours. We also take rice very seriously, both the type (always aromatic long grain) and the cooking method. It can make or break an entire meal. If the rice is sticking, you’ve failed as a host, and maybe as a human being. We have a saying that translates to, ‘You would start a fight with this rice,’ meaning it’s not up to standard and, if served, could be taken as an insult.
Dinner was served comically late, but the delicious aroma was always in the air as you came in, mixed with the sounds of high-tempo Iranian dance music on the stereo and boisterous compliments as people greeted each other. The women were always dressed to the nines. The colours and sparkle they toned down for everyday life in New Zealand shone bright in homeland company. People would drink, sing and dance various modern and traditional dances (partly in jest and partly from nostalgia, someone would suddenly start their own folk dance from whatever province they were from and everyone would clap along). These dinners always went into the early hours of the next morning.
As the adults caroused, we kids would peel off into our different age groups and carry on largely unsupervised. For our part, my group held seances, played spin-the-bottle, and flipped through magazines. Sometimes Ghaz would try to teach us the dance moves to pop songs. I remember we dressed up for these gatherings too. The boys were into basketball, so it was Air Jordans if they could get them, basketball singlets over T-shirts, and baggy shorts. The girls would get our mums to sew new outfits, copying the ones in magazines, which we couldn’t quite afford to buy. It was all tight, striped, ribbed turtlenecks and long skirts circa the early 1990s. Eventually, I managed to save my pocket money and beg for help from my parents to buy a pair of Converse One Star sneakers to finish the look. They were brown and I loved them. But none of this was for the eyes of my peers at school anymore. We lived in a parallel universe.
I realised later that Ghaz was at an even more monocultural, more isolating suburban school. She was teased because of her dark skin and called ‘Speedy Gonzalez’. She was a true drama club geek for all the reasons kids do drama: to escape their reality with others looking to do the same. She and I started writing little comedy skits together and filming them using my parent’s camcorder. Somewhere in my mother’s garage sits a pile of unwatchable tapes (for both technical and substantive reason) of us performing our in-jokes, barely making it through a take without doubling over in hysterics. We became obsessed with old films, and would bus into the city to sit in the public library reading about James Dean and Marlon Brando for hours. We would also buy old postcards and find posters of them in bargain bins to cover our walls. No one else our age really knew who they were, but that was fine with us.
Ghaz eventually made it into filmmaking. She learned about the lack of roles for girls like us the hard way. After yet another unsuccessful audition, we’d cackle and drink wine, penniless and heartbroken. It was the ‘huddle together and laugh’ technique for dealing with pain we’d perfected as twelve-year-old Iranian girls, I suppose. She worked in any job that got her on a film set, on films that took her to Cannes, and on theatre stages which seemed more forgiving of differences. In the end, she had a ball, and eventually went on to study screenwriting at the University of Southern California’s prestigious School of Film. At the time of writing, in 2019, she teaches film, is making her first feature, and is the founder of Waking Dream Collective, a women’s film collective in Auckland, focused on bringing unique marginalised stories and voices to the screen.
Glowing a review as that is of her inexhaustible knack for survival, I can’t say she came through with that same air of eternal victory and glint in her eye that she had as a ten-year-old. In the end, having to fight so much harder to be seen every time you walk into a room does wear off the shine.
As we were downing prosecco one summer night recently and laughing about our early monobrows and terrible comedy skits, we dug up her childhood diaries. I brought out mine the next time. It had a worn-out padlock — like anyone was dying to read about how much I hated maths and how I hoped a boy in my class named Ross was looking at me that day.
We discovered something unexpectedly horrifying, if tragically comical. It was about the time, at twelve years old, when we began flirting with some boys on the phone, who we came to know and talk to pretty regularly through our friend Sadra, an Iranian boy our age. We never did meet these boys in person because of the rather huge glitch in our genius idea to describe ourselves as, essentially, white dream girls. There were four of us Iranian girls involved. We told them our names were Anglo names like Erica and Sommer. Ghaz, who always had to stand out, invented hers. It was ‘Vanise’. Our diaries detailed our made-up physical features, so we wouldn’t slip up on the phone. It seems I had light-brown hair and green eyes. We all had light-coloured eyes and either blonde or light-brown hair.
I remember the totally liberating delight of ‘meeting’ a boy and being some girl who could be one of the girls in magazines. In fact, I remember literally looking at magazines and smugly feeling like, for that half hour a day I was on the phone talking to Brendon (the boy who ended up liking me most), I could be any of the normal girls in those pages that boys might actually like. We didn’t tell the boys we were pretty or skinny. We just changed our race, as if that was enough to imply all the other desirable things. Alarmingly, I didn’t see anything strange about this at the time.
After the hearty laughter at our childhood mishaps, Ghaz and I had to stop and admit it was pretty chilling. That not one of us even hesitated to make up these identities, that it was such an unsaid shared fantasy between us, was overwhelmingly sad. Once we had agreed it would be fun not to tell the boys our real names on that first phone call, none of us considered, even for a second, that we would just be different Iranian girls or that we would at least still have black hair and dark eyes. It was somehow so obvious that, given half a chance, we would of course be white. As we re-read the diary entries over drinks so many years later, another revelation dawned on us. We realised for the first time that the boys we were speaking to were not themselves white. They had names like Brendon or Cameron, but their last names were Sharma and Singh. I can’t remember now if they too were pretending to be white, but we certainly had thought they were because we assumed they were attractive and to us that meant white. Just as we assumed they would like us more if we weren’t Iranian.
Thankfully there are far more alternatives now. My early ’90s experience happened at a time when far less diversity existed in pop culture. Even the blight of being exotic hadn’t penetrated the popular consciousness. Now, people invest in and make Hollywood films about normal things like love and laughter with whole Asian casts — I can think of at least two such films off the top of my head. That certainly wasn’t so for my generation.
I do believe that the space and community we made for ourselves as Iranian–New Zealanders saved me, and in the end emboldened me to own that outsider status in other less-accepting spaces like my school.