AIAW Featured Writer: TISSA HAMI

Tissa Hami - Writer

The classroom was dark and quiet – too quiet. The shades were pulled all the way down, so there was no hint of an outside world. Around the perimeter of the room, just below the ceiling, hung numbered portraits of old white men. I recognized the first, sixteenth, and last, and figured out that I was looking at all the American presidents. A woman sat rigidly behind a large desk in the back corner of the room. She wore glasses with giant frames, and her white-blond hair was swept into a severe pompadour that rose several inches above her head. The do was immoveable – enough to make any anchorwoman jealous – and not one hair was out of place. Her bosom was as unforgiving as her coif, her erect posture making her stiff breasts even more pronounced. She was probably in her early 30s, but her austere demeanor made her seem years older.

The other students were already in their seats as I made my way to the one empty desk in the room, admonishing myself for not having arrived earlier on this, the first day of third grade at my new school in Lexington, Massachusetts. The desks were arranged into groups of six, each with two rows of three desks facing each other. The arrangement positioned the students' heads like the dots on the highest roll of a die. I sat sandwiched between two strangers and looked around at the faces of my new classmates. There was one Indian girl on the other side of the room and three black girls lumped together in the back. The other twenty or so kids were white. Everyone was silent. My previous school hadn't looked like this. It hadn't felt this cold.

A tall, muscular man abruptly entered the room carrying a basketball. A small whistle hung on a lanyard around his neck. He introduced himself as Mr. Channing, the gym teacher. He looked around the room, then put the whistle to his mouth and blew it three times. "I see three new faces," he called out. "One!" his voice boomed as he hurled the basketball at a small brown-haired boy. The move caught the child completely off guard, and the ball hit him in the arm. A few of the boys snickered, and Mr. Channing gave them a harsh look.

"What are you waiting for, sport?" Mr. Channing asked the shaken boy. "Throw it back." The boy picked up the ball off the floor and tossed it to the gym teacher.

Next, Mr. Channing turned his attention toward a bespectacled girl at the far end of the room. "Two!" he bellowed, heaving the basketball at her. His throw was too high, and the girl only managed to catch the ball just as it reached her face, bumping her glasses. She smiled awkwardly, then threw the ball back to him.

I prepared for my big moment. "Three!" Mr. Channing blared out, throwing the ball in my direction. Having had adequate time to prepare, I caught the ball easily and threw it back, counting myself lucky for being last.

Mr. Channing exited the room as abruptly as he had entered it. A few moments later, I heard two whistles come through the walls of the classroom next door.

The hairdo lady walked sternly to the front of the classroom, holding a clipboard in her hand. "I'm Miss Franklin," she announced. "I'll be your teacher this year." Being the imperfect physical specimen that I was – overweight and un-pretty – I wasn't someone who normally fixated on other people's looks, but I couldn't help but stare at this matron's bouffant and those bullet boobs. She could have taken somebody's eyes out with those things. Maybe even their whole face.

"Let me start by taking attendance," Miss Franklin continued, holding the clipboard up to her face. She took a breath as if to speak, but when she eyed the first name on her list, she held in her breath and began squinting. She moved her face close to the sheet of paper. She stared at the name for a few seconds at full squint, and then pulled her head back slowly from the clipboard, her face puckered. She studied the name carefully from a distance, then moved in again with full focus. Several seconds had passed in silence by this point, and some of the students had started giggling. That first day of school in Lexington was the day I learned to hate my name.

Miss Franklin sighed and looked up from the clipboard. "I might have trouble pronouncing some of your names," she said, and then peering at the list again, she continued, "like this first one." I felt my face flush. There wasn't much alphabetically that came before Abedinejad, which was my last name at the time. "T-t-t-iss-s-sap…" she attempted painfully.

I didn't know if I wanted to end her misery or mine, but I interrupted her. "I go by Tissa," I said, knowing she would never be able to pronounce my full name, Tissapeh. No American could ever pronounce my full name. "It rhymes with Lisa," I added in what I hoped was a helpful, friendly tone.

"Okay, Tissa," she said, only she said it so that it rhymed with Melissa. She didn't learn to pronounce my name properly that entire year. Eventually I got tired of correcting her and gave up.

"Now, Tissa," Miss Franklin said, "I'm looking at your last name here and I have no idea how to say it." I wanted to tell her that she had no idea how to say my first name either, but I thought talking back to the teacher on the first day of school might get me into trouble. And I certainly didn't want anyone throwing any more basketballs at me.

Reluctantly, I responded, and for a painful few minutes, I attempted to teach Miss Franklin the humiliating art of how to pronounce Abedinejad correctly, all the while trying to ignore the smirks and sneers around me.

"That sure is a lot of letters," Miss Franklin said at the end of our language lesson. "Now tell me dear, what kind of name is that?"

It was the question I would get asked countless times for years to come – one that I've since learned to answer with a smart-ass quip. That's what happens to you if you get asked the same nosy question too many times – you end up making fun of the question, or worse, on your mean days, you resort to making fun of the questioner. But at the time, it was a novel question to me, so I answered it forthrightly. "It's Persian," I said.

Miss Franklin looked at me blankly. "Oh," she said slowly, arching her pencil-thin eyebrows and tilting her head to the side. I realized she had no idea what that meant. She hesitated for a moment, unsure of whether to ask her next question, but then she went for it. "And where are you from?" she asked, the smile on her face too ambivalent.

That's the other question I have since learned to dread being asked. Every immigrant, foreign-looking, or darker-than-beige friend I've ever had has also told me that they hate being asked that very question. But again, at the time, it seemed an innocent enough query.

"Iran," I replied.

I would have been better off telling her I was from the moon. She whipped her head around and glared at me. Despite the swift motion of her head, that do of hers didn't budge. "Oh," she said, only this time her "oh" was abbreviated, curt, snippy. The air got sucked out of the entire room.

It was September 1981, and just about the last place you wanted to be from if you were living in America was Iran. A group of American diplomats had been taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979 by an angry mob of young Iranian revolutionaries. American TV had broadcast their images nightly – fair-haired, fair-skinned Americans being dragged around blindfolded by enraged swarthy, bearded men pounding their fists into the air and chanting "Marg bar Amrika," Death to America.

I was six years old at the time of the embassy takeover and it meant nothing to me then. I simply thought it was funny to hear Persian being spoken on American television, even if everybody did look pissed off. My parents and I had only been living in the United States for a year at that point, and we planned on going back home to Iran in a few years' time, once my parents were finished with their graduate studies. But the hostage crisis, the ensuing Islamic revolution, and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war ensured that we never went back. It was just too dangerous, everyone said, or at least that was my parents' excuse for staying in this country.

"Consider yourself lucky," my mother would always bark at me whenever I got mad at her for forcing me to live my entire life as a foreigner. "Do you know how many people were dying to get out of Iran in those days?" Her words did little to comfort me. "We were already out so we stayed out." The more I remained unconvinced, the more exasperated she became. "You have no idea how lucky you are, do you know that?" she would say before she walked out of the room, mumbling to herself about what an ungrateful child she had. But lucky to me meant growing up in your own country.

Call it world events, call it my parents' fear of their newly unfamiliar homeland, but we ended up staying in what was supposed to be our temporary home. Those first three years in the United States were hectic and unstable. My parents were graduate students – my father in computer science and my mother in dentistry – and we didn't have much money. We moved from apartment to apartment and from town to town, taking the only housing that we could afford and barely scraping by on my parents' meager student stipends.

Our very first apartment was a one-bedroom dump on Buswell Street in Boston, where mice outnumbered humans by at least ten to one. At dinnertime, we would spread out a tablecloth on the floor and sit around it, just as most Iranians did at home at mealtimes. We didn't have plates or real utensils, so we ate tuna fish and kidney beans straight out of the can with plastic forks. Attracted by the smell of food, the mice came out in full force at mealtimes, darting back and forth across the tablecloth as we attempted to eat our meal. I would jump to my feet screaming and hop onto the grimy couch that doubled as my bed. As I lay on that same couch at night, I hoped that the mice wouldn't climb up and eat me during my sleep.

"How could you make me live there?" I asked my parents over and over again when I was older.

"It was only for ten months," my mother always snapped at me. But ten months is forever to a five-year-old – almost twenty percent of her life, in fact, and probably half her memory.

That building was filled with other foreigners, and the squalid hallways reeked of dirt, smoke, and curry. At the time I thought we had to be the poorest of the poor. Years later I found out that the wretched building had been the international married student dormitory at Boston University.

Three years later, my parents had saved enough money to buy a house. I think the idea of settling down somewhere scared them, but by then they had tired of our nomadic existence, despite having centuries of it in our blood. We bought a small, three-bedroom ranch in Lexington, in a neighborhood with rows of identical small, three-bedroom ranches. Lexington was a nice, middle class suburb of Boston – a great place to live, as long as you had the right sort of name and skin color. I'm sure we were the first Iranians that town had ever seen. And we certainly were not welcome. If the yellow ribbons still hugging all the trees in town didn't tell me so – this despite the fact that all the hostages had been released in January of that year – then Miss Franklin's reaction to me certainly did.

The woman must have gathered her senses because she stopped glaring at me and returned her attention to the attendance list on her clipboard. She called out all the other names on the list without any pronunciation problems – names like McCormick, Murphy, Quinn, and Reynolds. She even got the Indian girl's name right. Turns out the girl had an older sister who had been in Miss Franklin's class three years earlier.

Miss Franklin was the kind of teacher that any American president would have been vehemently proud of. For one thing, she hung all their portraits in her classroom. Then she made us memorize their names, home states, birthplaces, unusual facts, famous nicknames, and dying words.

"Who was the quietest president?" she would ask.

"Calvin Coolidge," we would answer.

"And what was his famous nickname?"

"Silent Cal," we would say in unison.

You could have asked me anything about any of those presidents and I would have known the answer. Which president's favorite flower was the goldenrod? Benjamin Harrison. Whose dying word was "water"? Ulysses S. Grant. Who was the tallest president? Lincoln. The fattest? Taft.

"You children are lucky enough to be growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts," Miss Franklin was fond of saying. That proclamation would be followed by her favorite phrase, "This is the birthplace of the American revolution!"

The White House should have given that woman a medal.

Miss Franklin made us learn all the words to every patriotic song – songs like "My Country 'Tis of Thee," "America the Beautiful" (all four verses), and even "The Yankee Doodle Boy."

"I am a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam's," the entire class would sing, even the girls. "I am the Yankee Doodle Boy."

I would sing these songs at home too, not because I particularly liked the songs themselves but because I loved to sing. If my parents were mortified by my sudden patriotic fervor, they never let on. Either that or their English wasn't good enough to decipher the song lyrics.

Miss Franklin's initial contempt for me at the announcement of my birthplace never faded. Sometimes I wondered what she hated more – where I was from, or the fact that I turned out to be the smartest kid in the class. She fumed anytime I handed in an extra credit book report, and she positively seethed whenever she handed me a prize for winning yet another spelling bee. By contrast, whenever Heather or Ann or Jill handed in extra credit book reports, she lavished them with praise and even stuck gold star stickers on their work. How I wanted one of those stickers for myself.

I tried hard to win Miss Franklin's favor that year. I even tried throwing a spelling bee once, thinking it would please her if I let somebody else win for a change. But much as I tried, nothing I did that entire year satisfied her.

In subsequent years, I often daydreamed about that first day of school in Lexington. I pictured the dark classroom and the clipboard and I heard the shriek of the gym teacher's whistle. Only this time, when the gym teacher threw the basketball to me, I didn't throw it back to him. I stood up, turned around to face the large desk at the back of the room, and aimed for the stern figure in the big chair. I didn't aim for her head or for her breasts, but for that ridiculous platinum blonde pouf on top of her head – for that part of her that was inflexible, immutable, unyielding.

Tissa Hami

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