My family is from Iran. This means my mother grew up on a small street in the capital city of Tehran, one single block where her entire extended family lived. She played with cousins and second cousins and third cousins and ate delicious chicken and rice dinners at a crowded table on the floor, a korsi, every night. 

But this comfortable childhood only lasted about eight short years. During the Revolution of ‘79, my grandfather was one of many protesters in the streets. His bookshelves are lined with history books of Iran and US relations. He ultimately decided his family would have to leave — so they packed bags meant for a business trip to Italy and told no one. When they landed in the United States with only $300, they told my Mom and her sisters that they were never going back.

So I’m a first-generation American immigrant — half-Iranian, half-WASP. While I was forced into Farsi lessons as a child, and heard the language spoken around my grandparents’ house, I never fully embraced it as a part of myself. I dreaded the lessons every Sunday, reading and repeating old Persian fables meant for second graders. I could feel myself losing interest, and frankly, I think I was too young to appreciate the way the language could connect me to my grandparents and an even broader community outside of my family. And I remember thinking: what’s the rush? I have my whole life to learn Farsi, and I will. When, at around age twelve, I was finally permitted to quit Farsi lessons, I did.

Part of what drew me to Princeton was the strong Near Eastern Studies Department: particularly that Farsi was a language offered. I put it off my freshman year, completing the language requirement with French (which I already spoke nearly fluently), but as sophomore year was approaching, it seemed like it was time. Learning Farsi felt critical, even if I wasn’t willing to admit it to myself, like perhaps I wouldn’t be a fully formed or realized person until I did. I am steeped in American culture every day of my life, but it is Persian culture that shaped me. Of course, there are ways to be connected to a culture without learning the language, but Farsi is beautiful, and poetic, and the language of my family, and I want to speak it. I enrolled in Amineh Khanom’s small intro Persian class.

She’s the only Persian professor at the school, teaching every single Persian class offered — three levels, each with two classes. When I asked her if she’d consider adding a class just for conversation practice, she said the university wouldn’t allow her to teach more hours — she’d reached the maximum that policy allotted for. 

Now, in my second semester, I am the only undergrad in the class, with the other three students being graduates in the NES department. Each Tuesday they have a seminar that meets at the same time as Farsi, so I go to Amineh Khanom’s office and drink saffron tea and read stories, just the two of us. Sometimes, when it’s nice out, we take walks in Prospect Garden and she teaches me the names of plants and flowers. I love sitting in her light-filled room, smelling rosewater and the scents of my grandparents’ house, and seeing what I remember, what I know.

And we’ve discovered that what I know is a funny combination of things. I know the names of almost every Persian dish, cutlery, and household item — window, door, table, room, light. I know basic conversation, the names of my cousins, but not usually what their names mean. The months. The colors. I can understand whole sentences that are spoken to me, but not point out what the words individually mean. I know almost every verb not as an infinitive, but in its imperative form, the commands I’ve heard: be careful! Bring me a glass of water! Don’t scream, eat your dinner, wash your hands. I know three different words for beautiful, but none for smart.

I know things my grandmother says over and over, learning the true meanings of her funniest sayings: if I ever wear a shirt that shows too much cleavage, she says despairingly, dust on my grave! (Essentially meaning for shame). When my brothers and I piss my mom off by saying her name too many times, she says: Mommy mord; I just recently found out that this literally translates to mom’s dead. 

I’m always surprised and usually amused to find out which words I know, the ones that have stuck in my subconscious. It sometimes feels like learning Farsi is just dusting off old artifacts in my mind, available but dormant phrases and grammatical structures. There’s also an interesting (and surely well-researched in a classist sense) difference between spoken Persian, called goftaree, and the formal Persian seen in writing and academia. Goftaree often includes dropping letters and sometimes words from sentences and phrases; in my teacher’s office the other day, I learned this is sometimes called “kitchen-table Farsi.” 

Of course, learning Farsi makes my family think I hung the moon. My grandparents are overjoyed that I’m able to follow their kitchen-table conversations, laughing at all the right spots and fetching them the correct items from drawers at their request. But this isn’t why I want to speak Farsi. It feels almost disrespectful not to speak to my grandparents in their native language. I want to read Rumi and Hafez in their original language, to be able to talk to my relatives when it’s finally safe enough to visit Iran. And I want to cook the recipes my grandmother has always made, and welcome Persian culture into my own household one day. I won’t tell you of the difficulty my mother had assimilating to life in the United States, or of the struggles my grandparents faced with raising their three children in a country where they knew no one, I’ll only say this: in a country that is so cruel to outsiders, learning Farsi seems the least I can do. 

And on a global scale, amidst all the conflict in the Middle East, can we humanize countries whose names we’ve only ever seen in the news next to “threat of nuclear attack”? And how can we ask people to learn about and understand the cultures and citizens of other countries if those of us who are actually, technically, from those countries aren’t even able to do so ourselves? So it feels important for me to walk to Frist 212 for an hour every morning and read Saadi and Rumi and Hafez. And understand what I maybe already know.