Free The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd

mirroring the revolution itself.
    The newly constructed high-rise apartments and office buildings—none designed to reflect anything other than the enormous sums of money spent—add to the feeling that the city makes no sense. It doesn’t, but nonetheless it functions. From the millions of automobiles that pour into the ill-suited streets and alleys and somehowmake it to their destinations, to the lush parks that the city has built and maintained and that my family and I took full advantage of every day, to the oddly clean streets and pristine water supply, it all does work. And the culture—a mash-up of self-deprecation, prescribed and proscribed behavior, a superiority-inferiority complex, and a Shia sense of martyrdom, prompting Tehranis to proclaim their fellow citizens, and even themselves, savages—endures just fine. It’s a culture not particular to Iran’s biggest, most chaotic city but applies to all Persians. Still, the paradoxes of Iranian life are on extreme display in Tehran, visible to everyone—especially to a couple with an infant in tow.
    For instance, the cultural penchants for exaggeration and exaggerated behavior, the inappropriate-to-Western-ears expressions of love and devotion for a complete stranger, and the obsequiousness toward foreigners were quickly evident. We experienced them all from the doormen in our apartment building, who couldn’t let Khash walk by without picking him up for a hug. (One said, when he first met him, “ Ghorbooneh esmesh beram, khoda hefzesh koneh ,” which means literally “May I be sacrificed for his name, god protect him.”) The doorman of the next building down the block would run out of the building and grab him, lift him in the air, and give him a hug every time he spied us walking by. So did the shopkeepers whose stores we’d frequent daily, the people in the parks we’d take him to play with, and the patrons, waiters, and waitresses in our favorite restaurants and cafés.
    At one of the very few vegetarian cafés in downtown Tehran, which had a hip, artsy clientele—women in tight manteaus and haphazardly worn scarves, men and women almost all in jeans and printed T-shirts—an older man seated at the next table with two young girls couldn’t stop talking to Khash, telling him how much he loved him and also how he wanted to hold him. “Can I borrow your jeegar ?” he asked. Jeegar means “liver” in Farsi and for some unfathomable reason also means “beloved.” It was hard to translate for Karri, but she understood. I told her I know Persians like their barbecued chicken livers, a favorite street food, but no one has ever been able to tell me why or how liver and love became linguistically intertwined, foie gras notwithstanding.
    Another time, outside the same café, near Khosro’s house and a regular stop for us, a young woman dropped to her knees, made a ring out of paper, and proposed to a curious Khash. He happily accepted the ring, but marriage was out of his league, I explained to her, and would be out of hers when it was in his. Another woman, no older than twenty, made us promise we’d bring him back in twenty years so she could date him, while a young man in a different park, who sat watching him with a notebook in hand, occasionally writing, finally mustered the courage to approach me and ask if it was okay for him to give me a poem he’d just written about my son. “I was depressed,” he said, “until I saw your son. What’s his name?” I told him; he scribbled a few more words on the paper, then tore some pages from the notebook.
    I took the pages and tried to make out what he had written, slowly, since my Farsi reading skills still left much to be desired. “Thanks very much.”
    “No, no, really,” he replied. “I’ve been depressed for a long time, really depressed. It’s hard, this life in Iran. But your son awakened something in me. I must thank you.” He left me to decipher his poem, waving farewell to Khash, who