#21- Tehran Calling (2006) Nam Le
Another great story from this collection, Tehran Calling is
a personal tale surrounded by a political landscape. The narrator Sarah, visits her friend Parvin,
a young Iranian-American woman who’s moved back to Tehran to promote woman’s
rights issues.
It’s a story about identity, identity though culture,
gender, through the eyes of the people around you, by the people you associate
with. It’s also a story about control
and independence. More specifically, woman taking control of their lives. Sarah tries to reconcile the disparity
between her meager independence issues of breaking up with her unfulfilling
boyfriend and the life or death issues of woman in the starkly less woman
friendly Middle East.
Le does a great job of posing hard questions about culture
and gender issues but without jamming it down the reader’s throats. As Parvin, born in Iran but with very
Americanized ideas about the word, rejoins her family in Tehran during a very
radical time, she deals with her own cultural identity. She’s seen as a source of strength but also as
an opportunist interloper, and when she brings in an outsider, we see where
cultures completely disconnect.
Parvin and Sarah’s relationship is strained over this
disconnect. Parvin never tells her basic details about her own family, afraid
that she’ll be defined as “that exotic friend with a traumatic past.”
We’re shown a warning sign in a radio station: PLEASE LEAVE
THE STUDIO IN THE SAME CONDITION. Its kind
of like a Leave No Trace warning on hiking trails, that here reminds us not to
leave cultural footprints where we don’t belong.
Who has ownership over a culture, where does one belong, can
that bridge ever truly be crossed, do you need a shared past to belong, to
understand, to survive? Tough questions.
Notable Passage: “He
was the aberration of her life: the relief from her lifelong suspicion that she
was, at heart, a hollow person, who clung to hollow things.”
“This is why she’d come—to see exactly this—the city as it
was—the proof of this place unthinkably outside herself.”
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