Creative Nonfiction by Amanda C. Leong
I don’t know why I started talking to him. Maybe I just wanted to hear something other than the ‘20s jazz music that they were spinning in this winter formal. Maybe it was because I was having too much of the Yellow Tail they had been serving in the open bar and he reminded me of a boy I used to date back when I was in Berkeley. But one thing I think I know now is this: you talk in order to listen so that you can know what you should know.
My name is Mehran, he tells me. You know Tehran, the capital city of Iran? That’s where I’m from. The music pauses before it launches back into something that makes me want to kick a flapper in the face. But it is enough for me to hear the not-so-silent exhale of an h. Mehran. Tehran. I picture the now-extinct Caspian Tiger and the last breath it took after being hunted for days in the snow-capped Alborz Mountains of Iran. I think of the Asghar Farhadi films I had to watch for a film class and their ambiguous endings. I hear Iran and I think more of the Muslim Ban, of how Iran is one of the banned countries in the executive order President Trump just signed, no ordered, “to protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals to the United States.”
Being Asian American myself, I am aware of how immigration tethers between the fine line of easy welcome and grating contempt. My half-Portuguese mother and my Chinese father were welcomed to America with my father’s PhD position in the Math department at Purdue University. But I have learned about the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the Immigrant Act of 1924, and the Japanese internment camps. I am aware of the June 1982 murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin in Detroit and hate crimes against Asians during the Vietnam War. I am aware of the past, but most of the time, I shudder to think of what it is like to be a Muslim now.
With Mehran standing right beside me musing over the wine selection, looking less like the boy I used to date and more like Mehran from Iran, I wonder how it feels to be him — to not be able to leave the country and go back home. Catching our reflections in the bar’s mirror, I am struck by how alike we look. Me with my Eastern heritage and him with the Middle Eastern blood. We both have the same pale skin and dark hair with darker eyes. Only, I will never truly know how it feels to wonder when life will go back to before the ban. To be unwanted because you’re a liability for national security. To have a revoked visa. To be subjected to longer border checks. To not have rights. To be prohibited. This winter formal, with its theme of Prohibition, feels like a bad pun. I drink more of the equally bad wine and dump the rest into the trash bin.
“Wanna get out of here?” I ask. “I live in close by in North Park.”
He nods and we step out of Collis Hall into snowy Hanover. The world is quiet. I try pronouncing Mehran’s name with the h. It sounds like Me-he-ran. He laughs. I think I want to hear it again. Mehran tells me he is a PhD student from the PBS Program. Psychology and Brain Sciences. I ask him what his research focus is about. He tells me computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
“Basically I’m trying to map out the entire human brain so that I can recreate it.”
Why? I ask.
“Because I believe in eternity.”
Mehran is seated on the floor of my room with my camera in his hands. “Can I see your photos?” he asks. I want to say no. I don’t want him to see proof of how easy it is for me to run when all he can do is stay here. Summer before Dartmouth I was everywhere. Macau. Norway. Switzerland. Germany. Portugal to visit my mother and her boyfriend. Autobahns and airports and autocarros that barely gave a glance at my passport before waving me through their borders. Christmas was three weeks ago and I was back in San Diego visiting my sister and father. The world is getting smaller, true, but only for some.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Germany,” he tells me as he hands me back my camera. But I can’t. Mehran doesn’t sound bitter. In fact, he sounds more wistful. Mehran yawns. It’s way past bedtime and he wants me to tell him a story. I tell him about Norway’s midnight sun and how moved I was during my flight to the Lofoten Islands when I saw an old man walking around the plane holding a sign asking other passengers whether they wanted to talk. I ask him to tell me his stories about Iran because I am not just Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights — I can also be King Shahryar, demanding and curious for stories.
He first tells me how he had to travel out of Iran to Turkey to apply for his visa to come to America. He talks about how yes, he is Muslim, but he is not a practicing one. “Coding was my family’s religion,” he says as he describes his father, a computer science professor. We swap stories regarding our experiences growing up as children of academics. I admit that I’ll never be any good in math like my father and he admits how he wishes he could have majored in philosophy. He shows me pictures of his newborn niece, Aniyah, who he won’t get to hold for a long time. He tells me about not being able to also go back to Iran because he hasn’t completed his final year in compulsory military service. “I’m a man without a country,” he chuckles as he goes on to tell me how caviar is Iran’s black gold because it’s believed to have cellular regeneration properties. Good caviar, he teaches me, should never contain a layer of water or oil when opened from a vacuumed jar. Just as good rice should always contain a pinch of saffron. I disagree. Good rice should only contain condensed water. He calls me bland. I deflect by calling him bourgeois.
I wish President Trump could see us now.
I ask Mehran what exactly he meant when he said that he believes in eternity. Mehran smiles shyly as he tells me how he believes that it is only by extending the brain’s lifespan that we can have enough time. Enough time to solve all present problems. Enough time to experience everything.
“I have a 10 a.m. class tomorrow, will you wake me up?” I promise him yes and he soon falls asleep. Lying down on my bedroom floor, me in my pink slit gown and him in his tux, I wonder whether Mehran actually wants time to go backwards. Back to before Trump’s travel ban. Back to before the Islamic Revolution. Back to before the Iran-Iraq War happened. Back to when he was eight, when military service seemed like it was never going to happen, with him playing dress-up with his older sister in Zanjan.
Amanda C. Leong grew up in Indiana, California, Lisboa, and Macau. She is currently a creative writing major at Dartmouth College.
Arcturus 