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She was talking to Laleh in rapid-fire Farsi, something about school, I thought, because Laleh kept switching from Farsi to English for words like cafeteria and Heads-Down, Thumbs-Up. Mamou’s picture kept freezing and unfreezing, occasionally turning into chunky blocks as the bandwidth fluctuated. It was like a garbled transmission from a starship in distress.
In this quotation from Chapter 4, the Kellner family gathers around the computer to call Mamou and Babou. While Laleh can easily communicate with her grandparents in Farsi, Darius can only guess what they are talking about. Language is one of the barriers that keeps Darius from connecting with his Persian family, culture, and identity. This disconnection leads Darius to view his maternal grandparents as being “less real” than actual people. Because Darius has never met them in real life, Mamou and Babou feel somewhat fictitious, like the characters in Star Trek, a show that at this point is more tangible and relatable to Darius than his own relatives in Iran. Darius uses terms from Star Trek to describe the poor quality of the video call. He feels like he is flying on one starship and the family in Iran is like a completely different species, sending a message from a damaged ship, asking for help. This comparison, it turns out, foreshadows the announcement that his grandfather, Babou, is in poor health.
We sat around the table, drinking and laughing and smiling, but then we got kind of quiet. It was a nice kind of quiet. The kind you could wrap yourself up in like a blanket.
In this quotation from Chapter 39, Darius enjoys a comfortable silence with his family while they drink a pot of tea he prepared. Most of the moments of silence in Darius’s interactions are awkward and uncomfortable, so this tea service reveals the extent of Darius’s internal transformation. Being comfortable in silence is, for Darius, one sign that a relationship is working, a feeling he learned to trust with Sohrab during his time in Iran. For most of the book, Darius’s family struggles through tough circumstances: Babou’s tumor, the misunderstandings between Stephen and Darius, and other difficulties that arise during the trip to Iran. These are all incredibly significant moments in the Kellner family history. Darius’s transformation is thus revealed by the contrast between his anxiety and discomfort regarding these events and his contentment with silence, with others, and with things as they are at the end of his journey. As many characters point out, it is important to go back to where you came from, something Darius’s internal journey proves true. When the Kellner family returns home to Portland, Darius is able to feel good in his family’s presence, verifying a marked change in him.
Mom and Dad always took us to Chaharshanbeh Suri celebration at Oaks Park, where all the True Persians and Fractional Persians and Persians-by-Marriage—regardless of faith—gathered every year for a huge nighttime picnic and bonfire approved by the Fire Marshall of the City of Portland.
In this quotation from Chapter 5, Darius explains the difference between how Persian people are viewed in the United States compared to how they are viewed in Iran. In America, anyone even tangentially Persian is included in traditional rituals. Whether or not someone is 100% Persian is of no importance, so in this regard, Persians are shown more tolerance among one another. However, in the U.S. Darius also experiences bias and bullying because he is Persian, something he does not endure in Yazd despite being born and raised in America. At school, for example, Darius is called a terrorist even though his skin is very light, signifying that in America, the extent to which a person is Persian is inconsequential. However, Darius has come to understand that there are subtleties to Persian-ness. Because his father is white, Darius is really only a “Fractional Persian,” something he is well aware of. This delineation is more significant in Iran. There, Darius confronts those ethnic and cultural complexities when Babou expresses his devastation that his grandkids will never be Zoroastrian, and in the way Sohrab is treated by his neighbors because of his faith.
