AMERICA

My father wrote a play. Before then, I hadn't known that it was possible to be sad about Americans. I hadn't known that it was all right to be sad about Americans, rather. I certainly hadn't known that it was beautiful, although I was beginning to see that sadness and beauty were closely related.

In the play, there are men and women divorcing and re-marrying, with a regularity that to us was American. My father was not disapproving, but he was saying that there was something sad and lost about it. I was glad to hear it because there were many families like that in our neighborhood and I was not hearing that anywhere else. I was nine years old and I thought I should be hearing that somewhere.

My father was not saying that we were better for being Iranian. I already knew that from the way he had said to hell with Islam and to hell with everything it said a man and wife should be. The best thing about the play was that my father was saying that when you came to a new country, the sadnesses were yours because these were the people around you. We had only been here for a few years, but the sadnesses were old in us. I didn't think there was anything strange about that because people were old in us, and sometimes that felt like the same thing.

My father was not forgetting about Iran either. He was furious about the way the revolution had turned out and he was miserable about the start of a war with Iraq. But he was taking a writing class at Saddleback Valley Community College in Orange County, California, in an American classroom with an American teacher. It made sense to me at least to tell the people in the class about themselves. It was what I would have done if I was old enough to go to a class like that.

We were going to learn their stories either way, so the least they could do was listen to us tell them. We didn't hold out much expectation that they would try to learn ours. It was all right. We understood. They were busy being American and they didn't know that it was just as good to learn other people's stories when they came to your country. But we were going to tell theirs. And they ought to listen attentively when we did.

Everything about the class sounded wonderful to me, and even the name of the school took on poetic connotations for me, having to do with the setting sun, since the class my father attended was in the evening. They must be the best Americans in America, I thought, for being willing to listen to my father tell about the sadness of American divorce. It was a place I couldn't imagine. I even felt sorry for them, wondering how they were going to make it in America. I had already seen that if an American man was really willing to listen to my father, including listening about Iran, that man was poor. This was based on a scientific study with a sample size of one, the young man who came to mow our lawn. I imagined all the people in the class working out in the hot sun all day and coming to the class in the evening, but I was glad they had the class at least.

And I thought that when I grew up and took a writing class at Saddleback Valley Community College, I was going to have to write about the people in the class. I couldn't help it. They seemed so beautiful to me. They were doing something that was not a part of the country they were in in listening to a man from another country tell them who they were. I wanted to do it too because I didn't know who was better than a man like that to tell them those sadnesses. He had the best view. He had a home that was a break from American life, and it still had its own troubles, but it was a break. And during that break he could take his time and let the sadnesses of America travel inside him because he was away from them. It happened to be divorces and remarriages in my father's play. It happened to be a woman saying that maybe they ought to elect Elizabeth Taylor for president because she's been married five times and so she's one of us. But it could be anything. It could certainly be the people in my father's class, whom I didn't know anything about but who sounded sad to me.

I hoped they would trust me that I wasn't trying to be hard on them when I wrote like that. My father wasn't trying to be hard on them when he wrote about the woman who wanted to vote for Elizabeth Taylor for president. He was trying to be soft on them. But the only he could be soft on them was to be hard on the place they were in. I didn't think there was anything strange about that at all. We hadn't planned on being hard on America when we came here. We were just looking around and seeing what we saw. I thought that being hard on a place and being soft on the people in it went hand in hand. The other option was to not think anything about anybody.

It was very funny when I grew older and I heard people say that if I had anything bad to say about America, I ought to go back to where I came from. I thought they were joking. Suppose I went back and wrote you a letter saying the same thing. Would you be more receptive to it then? You think I don't want you to live and be happy and have a good life? That's all I want, and all I've been thinking about.

I knew when I was nine years old that being sad about Americans was going to help me to figure out what to do to make a better place to be in. My father's play began with divorces and then went to war and poverty and the meaning of democracy. But all that wouldn't have mattered if the characters weren't people, and if they were people, he had to figure out how to love them.

And I knew that I was going to have to step back from them and be lonely for a very long time if I wanted to write like that, because being right in the middle and midst of them meant giving up sadness, because there was no place for it there. All right, I thought, if that's the way it is. And it was my path to becoming American, because you have to know a lot about a people in order to be sad about them. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know them where I didn't actually see them - in their own houses, in their rooms, in their own private thoughts. When I felt bold, I would ask them directly. But most of the time, I would see a little bit and imagine. And my imagination always arced towards a place that was sad and beautiful, and I had no doubt now that those two were closely related.

I really didn't know what other way to be. You'd go somewhere in America and they would be eating doughnuts. It wasn't the doughnuts themselves, it was the way they didn't know that in other countries they were eating something else. They knew it somewhere in them, but they didn't see that right away when they saw doughnuts. They didn't carry that knowledge with them. I felt sorry for them because I knew more about doughnuts than they did. And the doughnuts would look too sorrowful to eat even if I had wanted to.

When it came time for me to decide that I wanted to be an American writer, the important thing wasn't to start eating doughnuts, it was to talk about the presence of doughnuts like sure, of course, doughnuts, what the hell else are we supposed to eat? Still I kept a secret part of myself that said, by the way, there's all sorts of other things we could eat. I wouldn't even say it to myself. I would whisper it.

But an American writer had to be something other than sad about Americans. He had to be sad and happy and lost and everything else. And I came to a point that my father had not had to come to in his play when it came to Americans. I had to be of them. I had always thought that sadness was as close to being of them as I could get, but there was another way, which was to make the sadness strong enough in me that it looked and sounded and acted like happiness, until it even felt like happiness to me. And then I felt more sorry for my father than I ever had for Americans, because he had written his play without the hope of ever becoming of them. He knew he was of people, and that was enough.

When he showed me the play, my father had already turned it in to his teacher and received a grade. On the top of the first page, it said: A. After I read it, I thought, he damn well better have given you an A. If he hadn't, I would have to go in there and have a talk with this teacher myself.

But there was something sad about the A too, like they shouldn't have even bothered with it, like they should just throw out the whole grading system when it came to something like that, because when a man wrote something like that, with that much generosity toward a people he was just beginning to know, they ought to just listen to him, they ought to just forget about the grade and pull up a chair and listen to everything he had to say about them, because as his son I could tell them that they would leave the better for it.