The assumption in those days was that what you don’t remember won’t hurt you.
Like many other families, our family colluded and shared the unspoken understanding that silence was the best way to erase what was unpleasant. I wonder if my parents ever realized how similar their histories were, how their bond was silently tied with illness, early loss, poverty, and the pain of racism and immigration. My mother didn’t share many childhood memories and therefore those are unknown to me. She lost her oldest brother when she was 10 years old, an enormous trauma for the whole family. Like my father, my mother had also struggled as a baby with life-threatening illness. I grew up with the feeling that he longed for us, his children, to get the education that he could never afford for himself. His father, my grandfather, who was blind from birth, needed my father to go to work with him, to sell newspapers on the street.Īs a child, I was aware that my father hadn’t gone to school and had worked to support his family since he was young. As a baby, he was very ill himself and almost didn’t survive. He had two sisters who fell sick and died when they were toddlers, before he was born. My father immigrated from Iran in 1950 when he was 6 years old. Let it be.” My grandmother believed that some things needed to be left alone, untouched, and she explained that the round lentils in the traditional Adas Polo rice dish represent the circle of life you are born and you die, the rest is gravy. We, the kids, would sneak into the kitchen, watching her cover the pot with a cloth, as she whispered, “Don’t bother the rice. But my grandmother didn’t like to share her secret recipes.
Cooking Persian rice can be an art passed down from generation to generation. My family’s Persian rice is the dish everyone always looks forward to at the holidays.
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