I’m beginning to draft a project proposal for People You Think You Know to send to potential granters. Here’s some writing about my parents as characters that probably won’t be making it into a final draft – nevertheless it helps me think about them as I continue developing the movie:
As a boy, Alborz’s father would go to sleep listening to the sounds of American jazz broadcast by the Voice of America onto his small transistor radio. Abbass followed that music all the way to the United States in the 1970s where he earned his PhD in chemistry. For nearly every morning since, he has gone to work to support himself and his family – all until the financial crisis of 2009 when he lost his job. A self-described political radical in his youth who left Iran a second time for fear of possible persecution by the newly Islamic government, how has nearly 20 years of work in the pharmaceutical industry changed him? And what is he doing living in ultra-conservative Orange County, California?
My future dad.
Shahin (Alborz’s mother) followed Abbass to the United States, children in tow and little else. Hardly a day goes by that she doesn’t think of the rest of the family she left behind more than twenty years ago. In America she did her best to follow in the footsteps of her older brothers to pursue a career in art, however raising two children hasn’t allowed for things to go exactly as planned…yet. Is it enough that through her sacrifices, her children may be able to reach their goals? She wonders if both she and they would have been better off staying in Iran, close to a large and vibrant familial support system and a culture she understands.
My mom talking to family in Iran.
***
These days Alborz’s parents, who came to the U.S. over 20 years ago (in the first large wave of Iranian immigration to the U.S.), find themselves seriously out of place inside the borders of a country hostile to their now tumultuous homeland. The regular pangs of homesickness are coupled with the very immediate fear for the safety of fellow Iranians back in the motherland. Meanwhile, a crumbling U.S. economy has made the original decision to immigrate “for a better life,” an increasingly paradoxical one when their middle-class family in Iran seem to be leading surprisingly comfortable lives financially.
