What I Carry in My Bag of American Dreams

When we decided to immigrate to the US from Iran, I thought I was ready to face any possible hard times ahead—but there was still so much I had to learn about living.

Think of a bag. A common, plastic bag. Just like us, they are shaped to hold things within them, and sometimes, we cannot see what they contain. A black plastic bag might be filled with garbage, or it might be filled with secrets that no one should know. Some bags carry the most expensive things, and others carry something as simple as food, a week’s groceries. Some bags travel a lot and go far. Some will be reused, or even overused, before being tossed away with no respect.

There have been days in my life when I walk outside and notice a small clear bag floating in the air, giving itself over to the power of the wind, letting the breeze decide its shape and destination. Sometimes the wind gives the poor bag hope by raising it up, just to crush it immediately by smashing the bag back to the ground. That scene brings me back to memories of past days.

I think of days when I was a young girl in Iran, dreaming about traveling the world, walking all the jungles and sailing all the seas, learning about all sorts of cultures and thoughts from different people of the world. I filled my head with plans for these adventures, and then my parents would remind me: As the only daughter of this Muslim house, I won’t be doing any of the things I wrote on my list with excitement. It’s not safe and it’s not right, they told me, and they passed the list to my brothers.

I remember the day when I was standing with lungs full of extreme stress and anxiety, exhaling prayers of help for our fate as I traveled with my husband and eight-month-old daughter to the United States embassy in the Emirates, to have our visa approved. We waited for the interviewer, who stood high above us behind a glass window. When he approved it, we were so excited. But after entering the United States of America, our excitement was cut short. We didn’t have money, and we weren’t able to work with my student visa, and every year our savings shrunk more and more as our home country’s currency value dropped. Our American Dream seemed so distant back then.

When we decided to immigrate to the US, I thought I was ready to face any possible hard times ahead of us. Still in my twenties, I was relying on my youthful energy and unscratched hopes, so I was ready to work hard. What I didn’t know was so much about living. I had a soft, comfortable life up to that day and didn’t have even a small taste of the soul-killing stress to come, when my hands were tied with helplessness and loneliness.

A privileged lifestyle made me see difficulties in life only in things like money, food, and a roof above us. I learned the hard way: Those things are for staying alive only, but our meaning and existence goes deep, in layers, beneath these basic necessities. We build our personalities through our lives like shoppers filling their bags, but some of the things we hold we don’t choose—they’re given to us by our parents, religion, and society. Life in a new country with very few family, friends, and little emotional support brought times when it was necessary to realize and understand our dreams and beliefs and traditions and thoughts, then pick what we should or could carry with us, and what to drop. Which gods did we want to believe in, now that we had the luxury of choosing? Over the past few years, we have been searching, hungry for answers to feed our souls, filling our shopping bags with new brands: religions and gods and different philosophies and cultures from the shelves of life, until our bags can’t hold anymore.

The day my husband and I got our green cards, the nightmarish fear we had for years about the possibility of having to go back to our unbearable life in Iran slid from our shoulders. I realized how I was used to carrying such a weight on me, a heavy burlap sack tossed over my shoulder. Finally, we could think of going back and to visit Iran after six years away, to see our culture and our roots once again, this time with mature eyes. Our student visas, which brought us here, were one way, and came with the threat of not being able to reenter the US if we left to visit our loved ones. Finally, everything had changed.

I realized how I was used to carrying such a weight on me, a heavy burlap sack tossed over my shoulder. 

Maybe the last hugs with our parents at Tehran’s international airport would not be our last—or at least, that’s what we started to daydream about. But these turned out to be false hopes. In early 2017, President Trump signed some pieces of paper, which listed bad countries, including Iran. It meant that if you come from Iran or any other country on the list, you may not enter your home country—and if you do, and you are not a US citizen, then returning to the US is not guaranteed.

Moments like this we had to bear alone: I can’t expect my best American friends to understand these losses. These pains are not even depicted in the movies, and if they are, it’s for a change of pace in entertainment, not because most Americans actually understand or feel them. I hope they are never going to.

There have been so many mornings when we wake up to the news of bad events from our motherland and feel miserable and sad, along with the guilt of running away from hardship to a better life without looking back. All we can do is to get ready for the monotony of our jobs and ignore our emotions. This guilt sucks the life from us. It bullies us, calling us cowards for not staying where we were born and raised, for not fighting to make it better, for not working to protect it. We left, and that leaving made us into orphans, wandering the streets, confused. These experiences have left us with so many wrinkles and indelible marks on our face. Our skin looks like the surface of an old paper bag.

A sparkle of luck lightened us, sparking our optimism, when my parents hurried to take their chances and get their visas in the last remaining days before the new law closed the US gates. We couldn’t wait to share our stories with them and show them our new life in America. All we wanted was to have them tell us everything would be okay one more time, while we were in their arms.

They came with suitcases filled with Iranian flavors and memories, and as soon as they arrived, they spread their disappointment over our newly-found lifestyle. Our jobs were not good enough, they said. No food tastes better than Iranian traditional foods. Our house could have been bigger. Our daughter hadn’t been raised well. And nothing I achieved, including a list of jobs I was getting at big animation studios such as Disney, the Cartoon Network, or Warner Bros, brought a glimmer of pride to their eyes.

I couldn’t blame them for not understanding my choice of career. My father wanted the best for me, and in his thinking, that would be becoming a doctor. He planned a life for me without asking me what I liked, or observing my potential. To him, that is how life is. You do what is right but not what you want. Iranian parents would never trust their kid’s future with art: They don’t want to see investments and hard work go nowhere if their child picks a career with a low salary. They don’t want to worry endlessly for that offspring who went off the tracks. Especially in a culture in which art is considered as godly doing, and artists are people who dare to play god.

In Iran, screening entertainment means wasting your good time, and it can harm the younger generation by introducing foreign cultures. What if they are attracted to those other lifestyles, instead of the perfect domestic one we have already? I was one of those kids, though. My parents were disappointed when I changed my major to art in the last year of high school, and when I wasn’t accepted to university the first year after high school. When, later, I dropped out from two universities, so close to graduating, it didn’t help to fix their broken trust. I understood all of this and accepted it. How could I expect them to believe that their only daughter, who is the only one in the family holding no academic degree, while my other three brothers have their walls decorated with masters and PhDs, makes a career in the biggest animation studios on the opposite side of the planet each and every day? And that, through her work, is the only financially independent one in the family? I still can’t even believe it myself. Every job I get still seems like a dream I couldn’t imagine as a child. What breaks my heart is that they don’t believe me when I tell them.

My father closed his ears and his mind when I described my job and the studio I worked at, and my parents brought bad memories to our home in L.A., memories I left behind purposefully. After three months, they went back to Iran. They judged us without considering how hard we worked to build our new small-sized life, a life designed to be small. They dishonored our fresh beliefs and forced their God upon us again, the God who ruined our childhood. How could I go back to a God who stripped me of my rights and freedoms, and tells me I am not valued because he created me as a woman meant to serve men from the beginning of time?

Every job I get still seems like a dream I couldn’t imagine as a child.

When my parents saw our broken hearts in pixels on the screens that connected us after they returned to Iran, they realized it was too late. The damage was done. They had left scars upon our hearts. And the possibility of another reunion has been less likely every day since.

*

My family of three has been happy in this new home in Los Angeles. Our life is better than what we could have back home. Here we can choose how to appear, how to think and be. Back in Iran, we had to do as we were told. How to believe in God, how to wear our clothes, what to look like; how to talk, where to go, and what can be eaten or not. But immigration was harder than we thought it would be. The experience came with so much loss and stress and struggle. All those hardships made us depressed, angry, and grumpy—not always pleasurable friends to be with. So, we became like those thick plastic bags you get from stores that hide everything inside, one with a happy face on the outside and the phrase “have a nice day!” under the smile. We were relieved no one was ever curious enough to peek inside, but lonely, too.

The thing about plastic bags is that they will live a very long life. They are new and fresh in the box, or maybe they were another plastic bag first, and they most likely will be used for a short time to help to carry things around. Then they are a piece of trash. They can be a little lucky and get recycled to come back to life in a different shape. Otherwise, they wander aimlessly from place to place. They float through life witnessing what happens to them by the forces of nature, or at the hands of others, without having any choice in the matter. They might drown to the bottom of a deep sea and maybe get pulled inside of some fish bodies, making them sick enough that their death could be the plastic’s way out.

On the other hand, I like that our life is short. Time gives us value. A deadline to make. Time brings in so many feelings and colors to our lives. Relief when the bell rings to end a school day; stress that comes with deadlines approaching; impatience to see our loved ones walking toward us slowly, step by step, as they exit the airport. Time takes us through springs of births and winters of death. If there was no timeline for our lives, we would be as careless as a plastic bag, letting our days go by without fighting for a change. Time makes my life better, and closer to my husband and daughter. Time inspires me to try to make myself live every moment. To try to push myself into thinking differently in darkness, and to remember my days are not endless. To notice how every day my daughter grows taller. To hold my husband closer and kinder as our hair loses to gray. These days will come to an end one day, and I want to make sure I will color them in the best I can, in whatever style I wish. I try to not go with the wind, and instead write my story as I am going: getting it down, permanent.

I like to float under the sun’s life-giving, glowing hands like that plastic bag, but I am not content to be that bag. No, I will be the wind, too.