I joked with a friend that I had been Beijing’ed. My family and I moved here last June, and ever since, I’ve felt my connection to the Iranian diaspora slipping–this week hammered that home. My mistake, missing the ever-important kick-off event to the Nowruz season, wouldn’t have been a thing back in DC. But, if I’m honest, this disconnect isn’t anything new. I mean, we grew up in rural Kentucky. So, it felt like everything Iranian happened in a vacuum. While we knew we were Iranian, my father’s maintenance of our cultural touch points was basically limited to rice with every meal and facilitating a love of radishes.

“Japanese,” she said in an aggressive whisper as she leaned in, making it almost conspiratorial like an inside joke, only I had no fucking clue what she was on about.

She’d said it before, too, with her wide hyena-like grin. Those first few times, I laughed it off. What else was I going to do? Her crazy eyes exposed little to no depth other than malice. Was that malice directed at me? It wasn’t quite clear.

The shift in topics helped, kind of. But in every quiet moment between then and now, it returned. This deep sense of emptiness. There was a realization that my race to write every fucking thing I see and tell it to the whole fucking world was some sort of desire to fill that space. To engage in ways that I usually would be but through different means.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch an eager-looking gentleman trying to get my attention. Medium height, shaved head, bushy eyebrows, dark eyes, olive skin, but with a few extra pounds around his waistline. Polo shirt untucked, jeans looking neatly pressed. If I was honest, he looked like a Telly Savalas-Igal Naor hybrid.

For any parent, a road trip can be an extreme stressor. It wasn’t much different for my dad, except it was all compounded his divorce, visiting his family he hadn't seen in years as they were all in California, DC or Iran, and that he had to drive a 1978 Ford Maverick all by himself with three young kids at varying states of defiance.

As far as the language thing goes, well it wasn’t hard to sort that out. For them, unaccustomed to diversity in the ways I manifested it, being half-Iranian obviously meant I had to be fluent in many languages. This way was easier for people to wrap their head around what I was.

But the biggest violator of my mother’s ban on her children’s consumption of sweetened cereal was not my father, it was her father—my grandfather. There is no question whether or not he was aware of the embargo—he was. He willfully and knowingly chose to ignore it. Nothing my mother said or did could have convinced my grandfather of the merits of her moratorium on sugar filled cereals. I am not sure she even put up a fight. Her acquiescence was likely due to her in depth knowledge that his stubbornness—which she picked up from him and subsequently passed along to me—would likely further entrench his position if she were to protest loudly.

Then he stomped his feet as loud as he could have on our wooden porch. Almost instantaneously, the two figures in the garage dropped whatever metal vessels they had with them for carrying the gas they were planning on siphoning from my parent’s cars. And before the containers hit the ground they were scurrying away, reversing their path to our garage. Kicking up dust in their midst. Gravel and asphalt crackling under the their footfalls.

Asking for condiments was a violation almost as grave as not wanting to try something unfamiliar. It was a corollary rookies would often violate. No matter how much we tried to stop or prepare them for the protocol, we’d inevitably fail. One such occasion came in my sophomore year of high school, one of my less experienced friends joined us for the usual Friday feast of grilled meats, rice (one bowl of plain rice, another bowl of rice with egg yolk), and salad.