As news of Iran's election uprising swept the world last week, I spent hours furiously dialing the phone, trying to get through to my friends and relatives in Tehran. The internet and the evening news provided minute-by-minute accounts of the unfolding protests and violent crackdown, but I had no sense of whether my loved ones' daily lives were also unraveling. Many of friends and relatives have children, and I was desperate to know how these little people were faring in the midst of such very adult chaos. Were they still going to school, or playing in the street?
When it proved almost impossible to get through on the phone, I resorted to email. And when my friends' replies started trickling in, I felt inordinate relief. They reported that their kids were still going to classes as usual, and that the scenes of burning streets broadcast on television were confined to particular areas where protesters were clashing with police. "The kids are still playing soccer at the end of our alley," one friend wrote to me. "Life in our neighborhood is the same as always."
Eventually it grew easier to call, and in conversations I learned that school wasn't even in session. Some parents had their kids enrolled in summer classes, and those were being held as usual. This year, I was told, the authorities had ended the school term earlier than usual to accommodate the June 12 election. Apparently things work this way in Iran every four years when the country holds a presidential election — the term ends early so that children are safely ensconced at home by the time voters head to the polls. Why this is no one can quite explain, as until this June Iranian elections were tidy affairs. Children often went along with parents to voting stations, and the exercise felt like one enormous administrative task.
But Iran is a country where politics are fluid, and in this instance holding an election during summer school holiday seems like brilliant state planning. On week days Tehran is locked in the most heinous traffic imaginable — traffic so snarled and unrelenting that it makes rush hour in Los Angeles seem light in comparison. Extricating children from school is a daily anxiety that parents manage with the aid of taxi shuttles and long walks. For over an hour after class lets out, the streets around the city's numerous schools are flooded with young girls in maroon-colored hoods — the authorities recently relented and now allow elementary-school age girls to wear veils in colors like cream and powder blue, rather than the grim greys and olives of years past --- searching the car-jammed streets for parents or shuttles. Had the election protests erupted during the school term, it's painful to even imagine what would have transpired for kids and their terrified parents.
Summer vacation, however, has created other challenges for families with kids. Before the state began repressing demonstrations so viciously, parents who wanted to attend traded baby-sitting shifts so that they could join the marchers peacefully calling for the election results to be annulled. These absences, and the palpable sense that something was quite wrong, had kids asking questions that even adults were hard-pressed to answer. "Cheating is really bad," my cousin's 8-year-old said plaintively. "Why would the president cheat?" Another friends' daughter couldn't fathom why a government would ignore its citiziens' grievances. "If everybody is so upset, why don't they just listen?" she demanded of her mother, perplexed with the opaque answers she'd been receiving. Given Iran's history of democratic protest and violent revolt, parents could do with a volume like "Revolutionary Parenting: How to Talk to Your Kids About Political Unrest." But the country's parenting culture doesn't rely yet on books for guidance (though TV programs on children's psychology are hugely popular), and most parents look to the lessons they received as a child.
When the crisis in Iran first began to unfold, I tried to hide my turbulent feelings from my two-year-old son. I dashed into the kitchen to cry, pretended I had hay fever, and anything else I could think of to explain why I was red-eyed days on end. But my son, like all children, refused to be out-witted. He stood in front of the television news, arms akimbo, demanding to know why there were fires in Iran. Though I knew a two-year-old would have no ability to absorb anything I might tell him about Iran's political reality, I decided it was worse trying to hide the truth from him.
After all, I had grown up in the early years after Iran's 1979 revolution, and vividly remember my family sitting in the kitchen late into the night, weepy or angry. This is our destiny as Iranians, I concluded, to be attached to a homeland that is still experiencing massive political upheaval. This instability meant anguish for my parents' generation, and it looked like it would mean that for mine also.
Sooner or later my son would understand that he was Iranian, and that the country of his birth differed vastly from the modern Western society where he was being raised. A place where, in the words of the critic James Wood, the day's "most arduous choice has been between 'grande' and 'tall.'" I learned that Iran was a rich but fraught nation while playing with Barbies in California. I think this knowledge helped prepare me for understanding the conflicts that grip much of the world beyond the affluent, democratic West. I gave a report in my sixth grade class in Cupertino about the Iran-Iraq War, and felt for much of my childhood that my home — though a place where people were glued to the news and wept about it — was somehow also a window onto the world.
I sat my son down with some bread-sticks and apple juice, and did the same thing my friends in Tehran were doing. I tried to explain as simply and gently as I could that sometimes people in power, just like people on the playground, behaved awfully. Because my son adores Thomas the Tank Engine, the island world of Sodor supplied a useful context for our talk. The Fat Controller, or Sir Topham Hatt, wields a kindly authority over his stable of trains; Thomas, Percy, and the other engine admire him for his justness. Presidents of countries, I explained, must be fair to their people, just as Sir Topham Hatt is fair to his trains. My son took this all in gravely, nodding. These days, however, he's mostly concerned about Iran's phone lines. Why are they broken? Is it the wires? Why don't they send a repair man to fix them?