Welcome to Tehrangeles

Continue reading [split] Iranians in Los Angeles are generally perceived to live nearby in Beverly Hills – but whether they actually have roots in the Valley or Orange County, they still know Tehrangeles well. My parents, whose economic class dropped significantly upon migration – they were of an academic class, but the lack of college-level language skills cost my father greatly, his thick accent always the focal point of student evaluations – moved to the East Side’s virtually Iranian-free South Pasadena, CA. It was about 35 minutes from Tehrangeles and it was decided on the recommendation of a university librarian who enthusiastically vouched for the South Pasadena public school system. Twenty-five years later, they still live in the apartment complex they thought they’d temporarily call home while they searched for a house. The kitschy 1960s script on the green and white stucco building announces: ‘Tropical Gardens’. With its name changed to ‘Eden Gardens’, it was, alongside New York City, the primary setting of my novel ‘Sons and Other Flammable Objects’. It was incredibly un-Iranian of us to live there. In Beverly Hills Iranians account for 40 percent of the school population, yet we were at most one of three Iranian families in our city of 25,000. In my South Pasadena High School graduating class of 1200 students, I was the only Iranian and one of four Middle Easterners. Iranian food was what we ate at home and it was also what on Saturday at midday, without fail, we drove to Tehrangeles for. It was there that we really felt just how different we were, driving into the city in my father’s air conditioner-less and radio-free Pinto or Dodge Omni, or my mother’s Toyota Tercel or Honda Civic hatchback in a sea of Iranian Lexuses, BMWs and Mercedes. We’d eat lunch at modest kebab houses and get Persian saffron ice cream after. We basically looked like the people around us and yet so much set us worlds apart – my brother and I in glasses and Target clothes, acned and skinny and suburban-trash epitomes, next to the golden Persian princesses and princes in black designer garb, salon-fresh and plastic-surgery-prone. I hated Tehrangeles. I swore I’d never move back to LA even once I’d left for the East Coast for college. But in my twenties, aside from the occasional holiday or summer break, I ended up moving back twice. Once, out of economic hardship post-grad-school, to work on my novel, in 2004. The second time two years later after a post-book-deal depressive breakdown of sorts; I thought I’d be there for one month and I ended up there, sleeping in that one twin bed I’d grown up in, for another year. Now in my 30s, neither poor nor crazed, an actual happy and accomplished adult, I return to Tehrangeles, a world I’ve often been called upon to speak as a representative. I’m back to the Persian princesses and princes that used to worry me. And the Tehrangeles retired community, peppered with erstwhile icons and luminaries, now finishing out their lives in obscurity.  The club kids, the thugs (there’s a Persian rap scene now!), the rockers and the partiers. Hello, old celebrities; hello, the new actors. Businesspeople, mathematicians, engineers, doctors and lawyers – the stereotypical Persian career types. Inside the many mosques and temples and churches, they are all kinds: Muslims, Jews, Christians, Bahá'is, Zoroastrians. The Tehrangeles series weaves in a history of the Iranian exiles and expatriates who first came to Los Angeles on a temporary basis, and yet are here – very much here – over a generation later, and the young creatives who are also making their own Tehrangeles stamp on American culture. This series presents the story of the establishment of Iranian-America, an entity and a mindset as old as I am, and Iranian-American culture, that only now is beginning to mean something to me and the entire world even.