MARCH 1981. My mother, all curves and decorum in her uptight Chanel suit, and my father, all stutter, glasses and advanced degrees, walked into an Alhambra, Calif., apartment: two bedrooms, one bathroom, furnished, $450 a month. It’s not nice — it’s not Paris of the last several months, no Tehran of the ’70s — but they took it. Everything is going to be different, but just for now, they kept telling themselves, this is temporary, all the change.  Exactly 30 years ago, they had succumbed to Los Angeles, the American capital of the Iranian diaspora, and for several weeks my family had been living in a decrepit hotel downtown that had been recommended at the tourist information booth at LAX. My parents worried that our first American Nowruz — the Persian New Year being celebrated Sunday evening, at the precise time of the vernal equinox — would be spent there, amid the cockroaches and over soggy home fries from the diner downstairs. So when Dad collected his first paycheck as an adjunct at California State University, just days before the year turned 1360, the Alhambra apartment came to the rescue.  I loved our new world. During phone calls to my grandparents, who were still in Tehran, I could speak of only one thing and in a long spray of gushes: strawberries, which were aplenty in America, as sweet as candy and even good for you. Can we get her to talk about something other than strawberries? my grandmother would mutter to my mother.  They were even less enthused by my second, less wholesome, obsession: Wienerschnitzel (the fast-food chain, not the Viennese dish). One mustard dog, one relish dog, one medium Coke, every night beginning when I was 4 for years and years. It was the reward after those long hard days at the preschool where I first discovered English, where I learned fitting in would be a full-time job.  On that first American Nowruz, my mother’s cousins came up from San Diego, where they had settled a few years before. And in that little apartment, my parents laid out the traditional Persian table settings made up of seven foods beginning with S: sprouts (sabzeh), wheat pudding (samanu), dried oleaster (senjed), garlic (sir), apples (sib), vinegar (serkeh) and sumac fruit (sumac). Decorated eggs, mirrors, goldfish, Persian pastries and hyacinths flanked the centerpiece. It was a beautiful mess. The smell was earthy, pungent, stimulating, green, overwhelming — what spring will always smell like to me.  That night, with everyone except me full of too many helpings of sabzi polo and mahi (the traditional herb rice and fried fish), my parents drove me to Wienerschnitzel, where I ate my usual two dogs under the brown-pink Los Angeles sky. I remember loving the lack of stars, because my scientist-father had told me that some of them had died ages ago. I hated the past, the fleeting; I wanted the new, the permanent.  Somewhere, everywhere, Nowruz kept being itself, no matter where or when; as long as there was spring, there was Nowruz. Even as we changed more and more, to the point of being unknowable even to ourselves, it was the only thing that could anchor us to the old within the new, an idea that took me decades to wrap my head around.  They were never easy holidays, though.  Nowruz 1363 (1984). The tahveeleh sahl — the exact moment of the vernal equinox — fell around 3 a.m. We now lived in an apartment in South Pasadena, where my brother and I shared a room (and would through my high school years), so getting us up involved a single holler in the dark. Then our mother frantically stripped us of our pajamas and put on newly purchased T-shirts, as part of Nowruz tradition is to wear something new at the exact hour of its commencement. I was crazy-eyed and delirious and grumpy. Why couldn’t we celebrate like normal Americans, same time each year, at a good honest midnight? On the TV, the music (always too heart-wrenching and drummy and hard to ignore) and the dancing (always too sexy and fancy and hard to ignore) seemed both foreign and familiar, a startling combination.  Nowruz 1369 (1990). We were on a Sequoia National Park road trip, in my father’s air-conditioner- and radio-free hatchback, and stopped for a late lunch at a Marie Callender’s in Bakersfield, Calif. There, we had tahveeleh sahl among ham stacks, country-fried steak and razzleberry pie. This was how I imagined Dorothy’s Kansas family ate.  And then as my mother and my father tried to enlist us in a silly song about the new year and my brother complained that he was carsick even though he wasn’t in the car — all in loud Persian — I realized the dining room, everyone a pink-faced blond except us, had gone silent and all eyes were looking our way. I, the self-conscious preteenager, shushed my family. I realized Nowruz was safest kept to the house.  Porochista Khakpour, the author of the novel âSons and Other Flammable Objects,â is a professor of creative writing and literature at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
In a time of revolution and upheaval, the author finds solace and hope in her familyâs Persian traditions.