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Chapter Fifteen & Epilogues

Summary: Chapter Fifteen: I Am a Spork

On a scorching summer day in 2005, Sara, now twenty-six, pulls into an enormous parking lot in Pomona, California. Inside the Fairplex, which usually hosts the county fair, she joins hundreds of other people to take the naturalization oath and become a citizen of the United States. Sara can’t hear much because of poor acoustics, so she uses the rest of the ceremony to catch up on work. But at the end, when new citizens are introduced by country of origin, she cheers for Iran and for her new country, which welcomes people from everywhere.

Sara expresses her pride in being an American citizen by voting in elections and by campaigning for candidates and causes she cares about. She recognizes that she will always have to balance being Iranian and being American. Ali and Shohreh have now lived in America longer than they lived in Iran, but they don’t feel at home in either country. Sara lives with her American husband, and she feels like she belongs in the United States. One day, Ali notices that Sara eats rice with a fork, like an American, instead of with a spoon, like an Iranian. Sara concludes that she is a “spork” and that she’s proud of who she is now.

Summary: Epilogue: An Open Letter to Myself

Sara writes a letter to “the Sara who never left Iran.” She imagines a Sara who speaks Farsi fluently and gets to deal with a bad hair day by just throwing on a scarf. She wonders if the Iran Sara is considering a university career or getting married and having children and if the Tehran Sara ever wonders about life in America. She believes Iran Sara probably cooks better Persian food. She tells Iran Sara how the Americanized Sara voted in an Iranian election during the Green Movement of 2009. The Americanized Sara believes she would find much common ground with the Sara who might have been.

Summary: Your Undocumented Immigrant Refresher Course

Using her family’s experience as an example, Sara reviews the steps to becoming an American citizen. Like most new arrivals, her parents arrived in the United States on a visitor’s visa. Her parents then applied for political asylum, on the grounds that returning to Iran might put their lives at risk. This application was lost. Next, Sara’s parents applied for adjustment of status. Sponsored by family members who were permanent residents, they applied for green cards, which eventually led to citizenship.

Sara warns readers that the path to citizenship is long and rough. She describes some of the current debates surrounding immigration and calls for empathy toward people who are still struggling to belong.

Analysis: Chapter Fifteen & Epilogues

Saedi uses the symbol of the spork to express her hybrid Persian-American identity. Throughout the book, Sara struggles to reconcile her love for her Persian ethnicity with her love for her American identity. By the end of the book, she finds she has become Americanized in some ways while retaining Iranian characteristics in other ways. When her father expresses dismay that living with her American husband has given her the habit of eating her rice with a fork, she initially feels guilty and returns to the Persian practice of using a spoon. However, rather than remain conflicted, she states that she herself is a spork. Like a spork, she combines aspects of two identities, and she is no longer troubled that this hybridity makes her different. Although she is now a full American citizen, she remains proud of her Iranian culture, planning to teach her child Farsi even as she also enjoys canvassing for American political candidates. Rather than settle on one identity or the other, she has made peace with the ongoing work of balancing the two, finding joy in both.

In this section, Saedi utilizes the memoir genre to craft an open letter to an imaginary version of herself and to discuss current events in Iran, with the goal of giving the reader a greater understanding of Iranian culture. In the first part of the letter, Saedi contemplates whether continuing to live in Iran instead of immigrating to the US might have given her different priorities; for example, she might have focused more on her work if she weren’t distracted by American peers staring judgmentally at her hair, or perhaps she would have valued marriage over education and professional achievement. Her list of possibilities subtly suggests that contrary to the way Iranian women’s lives are portrayed in American media, Iranian women are as diverse in their values and goals as Americans. The final moments of the letter emphasize the common ground between the real Sara and her imagined double, suggesting that Americans and Iranians have more that unites them than divides them, whatever politicians and the media may claim. Saedi’s description of the election following the Green Revolution serves as a reminder of the diversity of political thought within Iran. This section paints a hypothetical portrait of a more progressive Iran, one that has a strong diplomatic relationship with the United States.

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