Bibi's Rainbow: Hilarious Ordeals of Assimilation. Majid Amini

three months or so, Parisa would fly to Paris to be with him, to save him from loneliness, and to compensate herself for the happiness she felt she was denied when Mike chose Noshin over her. Carefree, they roamed the south of France, Venice, Monaco, and all the other places that help lovers energize themselves, acting as if they were newlyweds.

      It was during those two years in France, in the absence of his family that Mike tasted the good life of bachelorhood to its fullest extent, and the joy of having a second wife, to compensate for his unadventurous life before his marriage. By the time his family arrived in Paris, Mike had made the acquaintance of an American embassy worker who moonlighted as a document forger. He provided Mike with green cards for his entire family at ten thousand dollars a shot.

      He brought his family straight to Beverly Hills, “the shining city upon a hill,” a city that attracts the world’s richest like Mecca draws the devout Muslims, where most of the cream of the crop of the Shah’s regime in Iran had been settling down since the mullahs had consolidated their powerful grip on Iran. He thought it was only on the sidewalks of Beverly Hills that he could live his life free of fear and paranoia, where he could forget his past by living in a country that didn’t have any history in comparison to his. He wanted to settle down badly and get on with living, to give his children the best education his wealth could provide. He wanted to have a life that could satisfy all his senses: have a happy family life raising his children properly while enjoying everything a free society could offer.

      As for Grandma Naghmeh and Grandpa Ferdous, both physically moved to America all right, undoubtedly with intentions of trying hardest to live normal lives. But mentally the ordeal of adjusting to this new way of life in America proved far more difficult than they had imagined. They behaved as if their minds were left back in Iran. Coming from one of the oldest societies with its etiquette and traditions designed for every conceivable facet of life from cradle to grave, and now trying to survive in a country where everybody longs to be left alone to do their own things, was proving to be too much for the Yazdy elders to manage.

      This reality, this almost proven sociological rule that so painfully applies to the vast majority of other emigrants, for some mysterious reason, didn’t apply to old Bibi. She didn’t allow the Western culture to sweep her away and immediately convert her into a genuine American. Instead, she remained somebody special, someone exceptionally herself. Bibi wasn’t in the business of trading her identity, of abandoning her Eastern way of life and becoming a full-fledged American instantly. She was an unassigned ambassador from Iran with a mission to enlighten the Americans about the exotic beauty of her native land and to open-mindedly prepared to be oriented and enlightened by the freshness of slightly over two-hundred years old America’s extraordinary culture.

      Before even landing on American soil, Mike subconsciously wanted to discard any of his mental baggage that contained anything resembling Iran. He wanted to arrive in America like a blank page of paper so that he could chart a brand new destiny for himself. He didn’t even give a thought to the possibility that he might end up a chameleon changing color to blend into his new environment, or like a silkworm, metamorphosing into somebody brand new. Mike was experienced; he had performed this act once before, changed to match his new environment―when he opportunely married Noshin. The morning he stepped out of his honeymoon bedroom, he became a different man, no longer belonging to the same class that he was born into. His behavior and even the selection of words to express his thoughts changed, and as a consequence, he eventually became a stranger to the rest of his family.

      He purchased an ostentatious house for three and a half million dollars on Elm Street in Beverly Hills and two of the latest-model European cars, a Mercedes Benz and a BMW. Mike, young, adaptable and eager to assimilate, was ready to let the good times roll in this new world. However, for most of the older generation of Iranians who were forced to become refugees in America after the revolution, handling their dual loyalties was often confusing and difficult. Mike was also destined to experience some difficulties. He wasn’t aware that America sometimes asks the new emigrant for disloyalty to his homeland in order to prove his love for America.

      Of the two options that a free enterprise society provides an emigrant―to live so you can be, or to live just to consume and accumulate―Mike purposely selected the latter, maybe because he didn’t know better. He hunkered down to make his fortune by entertaining the thought of investing a large portion of his cash assets into the real estate market, which was booming unbelievably at the time. A fast-talking, wheeler-dealer blond and blue-eyed real estate agent, Robert Fisher, became his exclusive financial advisor. On advice from Robert, Mike purchased several large parcels of prime land in the Palmdale area. He was told there was a plan to relocate the Los Angeles international airport to that desert town. He was convinced that as soon as that plan was implemented, the value of his land would skyrocket, and he would become richer than he had ever dreamed, without even moving a finger. Only the Los Angeles airport remained where it was, and Palmdale continued to be a dusty hot desert town. Within the course of five short years during which he kept investing unwisely, here and there, he was swindled of all his investments by a bunch of shysters and two-bit con men. Meanwhile, his taste for the good life, women and gambling drew him to Las Vegas like a magnet. As he became addicted to more women with more sexual tricks up their sleeves, he would come up with innovative excuses for going to Sin City without his wife and staying longer each time. The small gap between him and Noshin, which was first created by his separation from her in Iran immediately after the revolution and that had widened by his departure to Europe, increased to an enormous gulf by his unquenchable thirst for the good life in the first several years after he migrated to America.

      It is getting late. He feels he has been living in the past longer than he should. He knows he must abandon his reverie and quickly return to the present. He leaves a ten-dollar tip for Julie and lets his half-numb legs carry him to his car, taking him home to face his other set of problems.

      On the way home, no matter how hard he tries to resist revisiting his past, the good old days, and concentrate on his present, he is strangely unable to. But for some unknown reason, only a few minutes later, like the excruciating pain of an open wound that surely returns as the effect of the painkiller wears off, the unpleasant events of post-revolution in Iran mercilessly attack him. And then mysteriously his past fast-forwards to the present, to his ailing wife, Noshin, and how beautiful and attractive she was, and how agonizingly she currently exists in a vegetative state of mind, body and spirit.