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For Love of a Language
By Arash Karami
My family left Iran after I finished the first grade. Though I remember my school, the playground, my teacher, my classmates, I don’t remember anything about the academics. I don’t remember studying the alphabet, or writing papers, or doing math problems. Growing up in America, I eventually lost my ability to read and write the Persian language.
In high school, for the first time, I began to question how I allowed myself to lose something so valuable. I had felt cheated of being that rare American who is bilingual. I felt like an athlete who allowed himself to become over-weight and immobile in retirement. I made the decision that I was going to reverse this deterioration of my skills before I had reached the point of no return, if I was not already there.
Two factors made this a little easier for me. One: my father had always insisted we speak Farsi in the house. This may have been one of my father’s arbitrary rules, like forcing my brother and me to spend our weekends copying pages out of our school textbooks word for word, but because of his Farsi only rule, my brother and I now both speak Farsi moderately well. This was one of the true gifts of my childhood.
The second factor was that I didn’t need to go far to find a tutor. I enlisted the services of my mother, free of charge. We would study for thirty minutes a day, two or three times a week. Revisiting these strange squiggly letters that had been trapped somewhere inside the unvisited cave of my mind, putting together the words, looking at the pictures of Persian bread, pomegranates, and the families sitting around the sofreh (picnic style) in their homes, I allowed sentimentality to play its part and felt connected to my past, as if I had never left the land of my ancestors.
Though my mother was a patient teacher, and the indulgence in a little nostalgia is never a bad thing, I lost steam somehow and stopped about half-way through the alphabet. Like most everything else in my life, it wasn’t a conscious decision to end my lessons. I had stopped as easily as some people stop exercising. The first time your mind quickly dismisses it because it’s raining, or there is something good on TV, or you’re tired, or you’re sick, or you have family in town. The second time there is an excuse even more lame than the first one. The third time, well, there is no third time, you have already moved on to other things and the thought of exercising only occurs to you once a month when you are driving to work, or going out to eat, but never at a time when you actually can do something about it.
After years of hardly thinking about those days spent with my mother studying Farsi, in college guilt set in once again.. I questioned how I could have been so lazy to stop my lessons in high school. If only I would have continued I would be an expert by now, I told myself. This time however, my mother was out. She had tried once and was unsuccessful and she wasn’t going to be taken for a ride again. So I found a tutor, a family friend who was once a teacher in Iran, and she charged a fair price, which my mother gladly paid.
My new teacher was very professional, very thorough, and very nice. She would stop by once a week and we would study the alphabet, learn various words, and practice writing. At the end of every session my mind would be so spent that if someone were to offer me a million dollars to do long division I wouldn’t be able to do it. I would sit for thirty minutes in front of the television just to remember what it felt like to not use my brain.
During our sessions my tutor would scold me for not reading enough, for not writing enough, and anything else she felt I was neglecting. Then we’d read children’s books. Though I resented this and felt it was beneath me to read children’s literature, I later realized this is one of the best methods in learning a new language.
My lessons continued for a couple of months until, yet again, I lost momentum after transferring from junior college to UCLA. I tried coming back to Orange County every two weeks to continue my lessons, but every two weeks quickly turned into every three weeks which quickly turned into once a month and eventually, not at all. Even when I made it back the last thing I wanted to do was sit with this retired teacher and be told I wasn’t reading enough, I wasn’t writing enough, that simply, I wasn’t doing enough.
The truth was she was right. I truly wasn’t doing enough. I knew I wanted to learn this language, I knew somehow it was important to me, I knew there was a deeper meaning for me to do this, I just didn’t know what exactly, and like other goals I had set for myself at that age, I let this one slip away too without so much as mourning its loss.
Years passed once more until one summer after college, I visited Iran. Everything I had studied in my brief stints in high school and in college quickly came back to me. Being able to read billboards and street names driving through the streets of Tehran was one of the most rewarding feelings I’ve ever had, though I’m not sure why. My cousins and family members were impressed too. “How did you learn to read,” they asked me. “Oh, I had an old first grade book lying around, just studied by myself, it wasn’t too hard,” I lied for some ridiculous reason still unknown to me. “That’s interesting, because your mother said you had a tutor help you,” they told me. Mothers, I thought, they are always there to bring you back down to earth.
After leaving Tehran I swore upon all that is holy in the world I would go back to the States and master this damn language once and for all and put all this guilt, and shame, and disappointment behind me. But, like all big decisions made on vacation, that too was just a promise I made to myself while feeling relaxed and at peace with the world. I came back to the States and within a week of the grind and tear of the average work week I felt grateful just to make it to the weekend alive; education, self-improvement, the acquisition of a second language were distant, and laughable, objectives.
Convinced that my life would be one cyclical existence where the excitement of setting out to learn Farsi would quickly be followed by the despair of quietly giving up the endeavor, I had decided to put an end to it. I decided to stop tricking myself. I stopped telling myself I would ever learn Farsi. I moved on. I was working. I decided to focus on making money, being responsible, and being an adult. Hobbies were for children, not for men with jobs and rent and bills. I was so set on this new era of my life that I even allowed myself to gain a little weight sitting behind my desk fifty to sixty hours a week. I was a new man, with new thoughts, all until I found myself unemployed one summer.
Sitting in my room, pretending to search for jobs, surfing the internet, I thought about that old dream of mine of learning Farsi. I visited the junior college class schedule online to see if Farsi classes were offered. To my surprise, not only was there a Farsi class, but it was starting in two days. I showed up to class, registered late, and somehow, just as easily as I quit my previous attempts at learning Farsi, this time around I somehow persevered and succeeded, so much so that today, with great effort no doubt, I am reading some of Iran’s most famous post-modern writers.
My teacher that summer was very good, and very passionate, but it was not so much what he did, but what he said, more specifically two things that he said. One: it only takes twenty minutes a day, twenty minutes a day for you guys to learn this language! Twenty minutes a day five times a week, that’s it, but you have to do it every day. The second thing he said to us was after he had given the class an assignment on Shahnameh, the one thousand year old epic written in Farsi by Ferdowsi. Most of the class had not done the assignment and our teacher said, “I am really disappointed. This book saved your language. 1,000 years ago this book saved your language and you guys aren’t willing to take 1 hour out of your time to study it. There are languages today that are only 100 years old that their people are willing to die for and what about us? What does that say about us?”
I’m not sure what that says about us. The truth is it is impractical for my generation of Iranian Americans to devote their lives to learning this language. Most of us are completely Americanized and the generation after us will be even more so. Eventually, we will turn out somewhat like the Italian Americans- we will be Americans, though we will be our own unique version of American with our own distinct identity; we will keep our food alive no doubt because no matter how American we become nothing can conquer our nationalism when it comes to our food; we will claim our religion, but only adhere to parts of it we feel comfortable with; and as far as language, we will keep that part of our language that allows us to say hi to someone, to tease someone, and in the end, say goodbye to someone. Everything else will be simply forgotten with each successive generation.
So what does all this say about my trials attempting to learn this language, this language that I still continue to study, that still manages to make me feel guilty when I don’t? Maybe its only sentimentality, maybe it’s a way of connecting to that childhood I would have had if I grew up in Iran, maybe it’s a burden I’d rather pass on to the next generation just so they can kill it off once and for all. I really don’t know. It was just something that was important to me at various points in my life, and somehow, in many ways, it still is.
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