I am thinking that I am just going to drop out of school and write my memoir. Here's the start.
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I grew up in Texas with an Iranian father and Filipino mother.
Let that marinade and simmer a minute.
After nearly a quarter of a century, I have grown accustom to the how-the-heck-did-that-happen response. I love telling the story of how they beat the odds, and yes, they are still married.
Mama was born in a house somewhere in Cebu, Philippines. For whatever reason, she makes it a point to remind me that healthcare professionals delivered all her four younger siblings in state-of-the-art hospitals. Her family moved to Chicago when she was seven years old, so she is more American than anything.
She rarely talks about Chicago and she lived there until the start of high school. Somewhere around this point in her life she was dating a family friend’s son, and his name was Fidel Castro. I know.... I know. They once lost Fidel at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, and his mother nearly had a heart attack when the airport employees refused to page Fidel Castro over the intercom.
Fast forward a bit and my grandparents packed their five children and belongings into a station wagon and moved to Channelview, Texas, a town stuck somewhere between Houston and Louisiana with plenty of racial slurs for Asian families at the time. Nevertheless, Mama danced on the drill team, played on the volleyball team, and was a social butterfly. The only thing questionable about all of this is her volleyball team ordeal, especially since she is only five feet tall (on a good day).
She secretly wanted to be a designer, which I never knew until recently, but was sent down the path most common to Filipinos, which was towards a career in nursing.
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My father, who will be referred to as Baba from this point on, was born in a small town called Khorramshahr near the border of Iran. He would always tell us stories about growing up as the youngest out of four boys in Tehran (complete opposite of my mother, who was the oldest of five children). By the end of his stories, I usually have tears in my eyes from laughing so hard, and from wishing I had been there to experience Iran the way he did before the Islamic Revolution.
My grandmother already had three rowdy pre-adolescent boys when she started developing an intense pain in her back. Her doctor told her to get pregnant and that would cure it, so she did and that was the end of her ailment. Nine months later, there was a ten-pound bouncing baby boy. That was Baba.
His two older brothers went to the University of Texas in Austin, while the third one studied engineering in Iran. Baba was sent to Texas to avoid being drafted to fight in the First Persian Gulf War. He was 16 at the time.
On the airplane, he heard Stevie Wonder’s “You are the Sunshine of my Life” for the first time. Whenever he hears this song, you can see him transported through time to that very moment.
I am not entirely sure how he ended up at La Porte High School, but it was only 20 minutes away from Channelview. One time, he forgot his worn-out Persian to English dictionary on the bus home from school. When he called about it, the bus company informed him that they could only find a wrinkled copy of some foreign holy book, which was actually his dictionary.
As much as Mom was a socialite, I imagine Baba was just as socially awkward. He has always had an infectious sense of humor, though, and a love for puns.
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A couple of years later, Baba was taking a government class
at a community college, which my mom took at a different time. This class gave its students the option
of writing a paper or volunteering at a campaign office for the local
elections. Fortunately for me, the latter option was most appealing for both of
them and that is how they met. Mom was fashionable and had a cute perm, while Baba was thinner than thin with hand me downs from his much larger brothers. His hair was down to his shoulders and he had not quite discovered deodorant yet.
Three months later they were married.
Apparently immigration discovered Baba was living under his brother’s social security number and threatened to deport him. I think the proposal was something along the lines of, “They are going to send me back to Iran. My brothers have found a woman to marry me, but I would much rather marry you. If you don’t want to, we can keep dating after I get married.”
Mom would not hear of it and accepted his proposal. She laughed throughout the ceremony at the courthouse, to the point where the judge asked her to settle down.
He was 18 and she was 20.
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