Author Archives: thirdcultureblog

On Music

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If you thought that you couldn’t be moved to tears (tears of pain, not laughter) by a cartoon, then you’ve never been an Iranian expat watching Persepolis.The movie-length cartoon, based on the graphic novels (or comic books?) of the same name, tells the story of a young Iranian who lives through the Revolution, moves abroad, moves back to Iran, and goes back abroad again.

There are many poignant and unbelievable scenes, but the one that always makes me dissolve in a pool of tears is the scene in which Marjane is walking around, trying to buy some music illegally on the streets. If you’ve never seen it, here it is on YouTube:

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Anyway, many things in the movie seem surreal, but none other than the sight of a teenager on the prowl for some Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, and “Jichael Mackson.” The scene may be comical (it is), but it is also a really painful snapshot of how things really were in Iran.

For my sister and her cool friends (and by extension, moi, because what little sister doesn’t annoyingly follow everything her older one does?), it was always A-Ha (you may remember my post about Iranians’ obsession with blonds). However, my parents wouldn’t DREAM of having their 13 year-old (my sister, not me) go out and get in trouble by prowling for illegal music. So my mother would take it upon herself to head to the seedy parts of town, asking for any new A-Ha tapes. Little did we know that A-Ha released very little new music after their huge hit, “Take On Me.”

So my mom came back one day with what I believe was a U2 tape…Joshua Tree maybe? You know the song “With or Without You”? The part where the chorus goes “with or without you ahhhhhh haaaaaaaa, I can’t liiiiiiiiiiiive”? Well, I (or was it my sister?) pretty much convinced myself (ourselves?) that the “ah ha” in the middle of the song really meant that the band singing was, indeed, A-Ha. And we would sing along without abandon, with our nonexistent English skills, while my parents (who, you know, actually knew the language) would try to correct us by telling us the real words. All the while we’d continue singing phonetically and declare that they were the ones wrong in their word choice and pronunciation.

That is a very long trip down memory lane, and all things I’ve been thinking about as P gets more and more excited about singing and dancing, and music in general. At this point, I’m leaving all the preschool songs to my parents, while I slowly indoctrinate her in all things Beatles.

This has been surprisingly easy, since there are so many animal-themed Beatles songs. She loves “Octopus’s Garden,” but isn’t that crazy about “Piggies.” “Blackbird” is a bit slow for her, but she tolerates it pretty well since I insist on belting it out at the top of my lungs. Her favorite though? Definitely a non-animal themed song: “Michelle.” She requests it every other day, and insists that I sing it to her every night to say goodnight.

She even knows the words and sings along. Sometimes, she sings by herself. One time, we were walking in San Francisco, and she was singing “Michelle” with very little help from me. We passed a cafe, and a woman looked at P singing, and couldn’t contain her excitement. “Yes,” she said, “start them early!”

She even tries to sing the French parts…you know, “sont le mot qui vont tres bien ensemble, tres bien ensemble.” (Forgive the incorrect spelling, but I’m working on high school French here.) Her French sounds like you would expect a 2 1/2 non-native French person sounding: pretty rough. She basically just mouths the words really theatrically, looking at me with wide eyes to see if she’s saying them correctly.

She probably sounds like my sister and me about twenty years ago, as we tried singing along to U2. The obvious big difference being that instead of going to horrid parts of town and risking arrest to get some music, I just turn on my iPod.

Strange how seeing your child do something triggers a whole flood of different memories from your own childhood. And makes you respect what your parents did when you were growing up.

I’ll try introducing P to A-Ha (maybe) and U2 (definitely). And have my mom tell her stories of what it was like trying to find those tapes in the seedy parts of Tehran.

My Olympic Story

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Disclaimer: The following story has nothing to do with parenting. It has to do with a particular day that happened oh so long ago, in the days before parenting (BP?). I’m sharing it to try to get into the Olympic spirit–difficult to do when our TV has zero reception so we can’t see NBC. 

It’s a little bit about the Olympics, but more importantly, it’s about traffic in Rome. 

We were living in Rome in 2004, the year the Summer Olympics were held in Athens. At the time, I was finishing up school and working on the side as a translator. A friend of mine, a fellow ex-pat (and avid runner), was working for the Rome Marathon organization. It turned out that people from the Rome Marathon were going to help the International Olympic Committee to welcome the Olympic flame as it touched down in Rome and started winding its way to Athens. 

And they needed an Italian/English translator to facilitate communications between the international crew bringing the flame to Rome and the Roman crew that was on the ground receiving the flame. 

For some reason, my friend had a previous engagement and couldn’t take part as the translator/facilitator–so I was the lucky recipient of the coveted temporary post. 

And that is how I found myself waiting on a street corner at 6 a.m. one morning, wearing semi-formal work clothes (I believe I was wearing a skirt), waiting for a car to pick me up and whisk me off to the airport to wait for the arrival of the Olympic flame. The other three were wearing sporty Rome Marathon shirts and comfortable shoes. I felt a bit out of place.

I got in with three Marathon staff and started speeding towards Rome’s smaller airport, Ciampino (used for European and internal Italian flights). Traffic going out of town wasn’t horrible, but all four of us were groaning at the prospect of taking the flame back to the city center later that morning. Traffic going into town was, as usual, horrid. 

We got to the tarmac and a few minutes later the plane landed. The mayor gave a rousing speech, and the Olympic flame made its way down to a waiting vehicle. Final destination: Stadio Olimpico, where the first runner was going to carry it through the city. 

My job was pretty easy…told some people to place boxes here and there, and was free to observe the rest of the time. 

Then it was time to accompany the flame downtown. My coworkers and I were grumbling about having to face the traffic when we saw the first motorcycle cops. Who were followed by a litany of other motorcycle cops. It was a motorcade for the Olympic flame.

And it turned out we were the first car in the motorcade. 

Stunned silence descended on the four of us. Which quickly led to hysterical giggling. 

Anyone who has lived in (or even visited) Rome, has seen the daily motorcades that accompany visiting dignitaries and Italian government officials. It soon becomes the most irritating thing to watch yet another motorcade of 30 cars zoom by, stopping traffic and generally being a pain in the arse. 

Those annoyances vanish when you are the one in the motorcade. 

We started out of the airport and met with very little traffic. The cops were waving us along, and there we were in our little FIAT, wide eyed and in thrall of the powerful feeling of police accompaniment. 

When we hit the actual city limits, the feeling was even more pronounced. A trip that normally would have taken an hour was coming to an end in about 20 minutes. It was like Moses parting the seas…the cops had their drill down, stopping, waving us through, angering the general public, and rushing  back to the front to repeat. 

The giggling in the car never stopped, and we had a profound sense of sadness once we actually reached our destination. Who knew if any of us would ever actually experience that again? 

Our work done for the day, we parted and went our separate ways. I had to take public transport to get back home (gasp!). It was quite a shock to the system after having traveled in style. 

Moral of the story? Even if a job is going to net you 40 euros, take it. Because you may end up in a motorcade with the Olympic flame, which will definitely be one of those stories I’ll tell my grand kids. 

I’ll Put it on My Eyes

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My family had been living in the U.S. for just over a year when we moved into an incredibly cute duplex in a working class town 20 miles south of San Francisco. The house had a front yard filled with wood chips, a sunny eat-in kitchen, and hardwood floors throughout.

We had moved to Northern California from Irving, Texas, not too long before. In Texas, we first lived at my aunt’s house (for…two months? Three? The details are fuzzy) and then a hopelessly depressing apartment.

So the duplex in San Leandro was definitely a step up. And we had an awesome view: the house across the street. It was one of those beautifully refined Craftsman-style houses–incredibly well-kept and sporting a fantastic yard.

The man who lived there was, in every sense, quite neighborly. He was always out in his yard with a huge sun-hat, perfecting the garden, waving hello as we walked or drove by.

We hadn’t been there very long when he knocked on the door one day, presenting my dad with a huge basket of vegetable-garden bounty. I remember there were zucchini, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

My father, already an emotional man, was over the moon. He started praising the vegetables, our neighbor, America in general, and ended with “Thank you so much. I’ll put them on my eyes.”

Our neighbor wasn’t really sure what to make of this, and said something to the effect of, well, I guess you can do that, but it’s probably better if you eat them.

You see, my dad was literally translating a common saying in Farsi. The phrase, which is said when one person gives another something of value, literally means “I’ll put the [insert gift here] on my eyes.” But the real meaning is that the gift is so precious that I’ll put them on my most precious possession, my eyes (well, something to that effect anyway). It’s just a very flowery way of saying thank you.

That little sentence has fueled my love for all things involving literal translations. They are a fantastic, albeit nerdy, source of amusement.

Fast-forward 20 years, as I try valiantly (and often fail) to sing P lullabies that are actually lullabies, and not Tori Amos or Simon & Garfunkel songs. This is how bad I am–until recently, I would finish “Hush Little Baby” in this way:

If that looking glass don’t shine
Mama’s gonna buy you a concubine.

Every night I would think, what if she asks me what a concubine is tonight? So when I remembered, I would use “porcupine” instead. I pretty much learned how to correctly end that song while watching Skylar singing it to her newborn baby on Breaking Bad. (Ohhhhhhhhh Daddy loves you and so do I!)

So when an Italian friend and his American wife, back from a trip to the Ye Olde Country, gave us a book of traditional Italian nursery rhymes and lullabies, I was super excited. If I can’t teach P all the right American songs, at least A can teach her Italian ones.

And then I saw the songs and rhymes.

And they are ripe for a literal translation.

Here’s the first (please excuse my shoddy translations and lack of rhyming. It’s been a while):

Under the Baracca Bridge,

Little Gigin is pooping.

His poop is really, really hard,

So a doctor came to measure it.

He measured thirty-three,

Now it’s your time to count!

It needs to be said: wha? A nursery rhyme about pooping? Really hard, worrisome poop that needs doctor intervention? This may be the best nursery rhyme ever!

Well, that’s what I thought until I read this next one:

Bam-bada-dam-badam-badam

Three little owls on the dresser

Were making love to the doctor’s daughter

The doctor got really really mad

Bam-bada-dam-badam-badam.

OK. WHAT? This is a nursery rhyme? About three owls having sex with the doc’s daughter? Who, rightfully so, gets mad? I mean, wouldn’t you if three owls were having sex with your daughter? All I can say is, leave it to the Italians to come up with a nursery rhyme that involves sex.

A laughed hysterically when he saw these rhymes in the book. I guess it’s one thing to hear them said over and over again, and it’s completely different to see them written on paper.

Well, K and M, friends who brought back the book from Italy: I love it. I’ll put it on my eyes.

As American as Peanut Butter

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Photo by BrianC

I have no idea who came up with the phrase “as American as apple pie,” but I can assure you that no one outside of the U.S. considers apple pie to be as American as Americans think it is.

Peanut butter…well, that’s a completely different story. I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the world that uses as much peanut butter as the U.S., if they use it at all. Or if they even know what it is.

On our trip back to the Olde Country, my brother-in-law’s girlfriend was trying to figure out what the heck peanut butter is. Mind you, she’s an intelligent woman, with her own law firm and all. The woman can even cook, but the whole concept of peanut butter was beyond her. The conversation went something like this:

BIL’s GF: “So, what exactly is peanut butter?”

Me: “It’s just ground up peanuts.”

GF: “Just peanuts?”

Me: “Well, if you’re making it yourself, you may want to add a tablespoon of peanut oil to make it smoother…but yeah, it should just be peanuts.”

GF: “So there’s absolutely no butter in it? Well I guess it can’t be that bad for you then.”

Apparently, the term “butter” throws people off. Outside of the U.S., it’s not seen so much as a texture, but as an ingredient. It made me wonder what foreigners think when they see apple butter or pumpkin butter in the market.
Until recently, I was not such a big fan of the PB myself (that whole cleanse thing I did about a year ago changed that–it was big on nut butters). I still have this theory that no one born outside of the U.S. can really really love peanut butter. A. isn’t a big fan. He’ll pretty much eat it if there is nothing else around and he is famished.

It’s probably like Aussies and Vegemite. Or living in Rome. You just have to be born into it or else it’s never going to feel natural.

So it shouldn’t have come as a total shock (though it kinda did) when I discovered that P was crazy about the stuff. But not in a I-will-have-a-PB&J-sandwich-everyday type of way. More like peanut-butter-reminds-me-of-home type of way.

When we were in Italy, we visited some friends who had just moved away from the Bay Area to live in Venice. They missed some American yumminess, including (but not limited to) dried mangoes from Trader Joe’s, Mexican food, and of course, peanut butter. They were super excited because they had just made a batch of PB using a very powerful food processor. They brought the jar out of the fridge, and P’s eyes just lit up.

Vigorous nodding was happening when I asked if she wanted to taste some. I took a spoon and started scooping some out. One spoon led to four, at which point I gave my friends the jar back. Poor things, I didn’t want P to devour their tiny jar of prized PB in five minutes.

Moments like these always come as a surprise to me. Logically, I know that P was born here and is growing up here. Emotionally, it’s still strange to be bringing up an American girl.

She probably won’t be a completely all-American girl, but much closer than an all-Iranian or all-Italian girl. She will most likely like chocolate more than lavashak (the original fruit roll-up…but without sugar and SUPER tart…what all the Iranian kids want as a treat) and know the names of all the Sesame Street characters (I still don’t know Bert from Ernie).

She’ll like Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak books, and wonder why I gush about Tintin all the time.

Will P really be as American as peanut butter? We may have to start her on Vegemite soon, just to stir the pot (or jar) a bit.

Thanksgiving in April

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The other day I was walking to work when a bus drove by, the side of it practically screaming the new spring Gap ad with the following slogan: “Be Bright.”

The ad made me think of the Christmas cards we sent out a couple of years ago (which said “Be Merry, Be Bright”), which then made me think of the holidays, and then my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. Then it made me think of one of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving: reading all those blogs in which bloggers state why they are thankful.

I made a mental note of writing a thankful post for Thanksgiving, and then reminded myself that I would never remember. So I figured I would just do it now. If you can have Christmas in July, why not Thanksgiving in April?

Here goes.

Every weekend, I am thankful that I have a husband who is much, much cleaner than I am. He won’t rest until the bathrooms are cleaned, the house is vacuumed, and the wood floors are Swiffered. It makes me feel slightly guilty for not being so neat, but at least someone will keep me honest–and keep the house from being a complete hovel.

Even though P gets more colds than _______ [insert name of person you know who gets the most colds], I’m eternally grateful that the only health issue I have to deal with are sniffling noses and coughing. Knock on wood, tocca ferro, etc.

I’m so thankful that my parents live nearby, so all those sniffling noses don’t force us to decide whether to skip work or send a sick child to preschool.

I’m excited that close friends are having (or have just had) kids, so P will have playmates outside of her circle of friends in preschool and beyond.

I eternally grateful that someone (ahem, my mother-in-law) finally taught me how to fold fitted sheets, so our linen closet doesn’t look like a bulging mess.

I thank my lucky stars for fantastic friends near and far, especially when they do incredibly generous things like treating us to a hotel stay in Seattle.

I’m grateful that what I thought was a catastrophe a few years ago (being laid off during the height of the economic downturn) actually turned out to be a blessing, leading to a second career as a writer. Things like this will give me perspective when I’m in a funk or generally down on myself.

I’m beyond thankful that the second career in writing gives me the ability to work from home twice a week, saving me from a commute and giving me more time to spend with P.

I’m ecstatic that despite the responsibilities of a family, a job, and a new obsession with the Game of Thrones books, I have some time to jot down a few thoughts once in a while and have people like you read them.

Don’t wait until Thanksgiving. Tell me what you’re thankful for this spring.