Culture Shock

[this was my June op-ed at Modern Republic]

In 1977 I was 15 years old. I lived in a very small town in Colorado between Colorado Springs and Denver. I had lived there for six years – since I was 9 years old. Then my dad got a job with Lockheed on a project in Iran. Just a few days after my sister walked through her high school graduation, we – I, my brother and three sisters and mother - got on a plane to Tehran, Iran.

Our flight included a layover in London and a stay in a very ritzy hotel – both firsts for me. We then flew on. We landed in Tehran late at night, and stayed in the nicest hotel at that time, the Intercontinental. What I saw was sand colored buildings everywhere, cars everywhere, smell of diesel smoke everywhere, cars “parked” on the sidewalk, everyone with dark hair, dark eyes, and an incomprehensible and threatening sounding language.

We – us kids – huddled together. We were four bleach blonde Americans in a sea of Middle Eastern faces. I had not the faintest idea what I was supposed to do, what the new place was. I was frightened, disoriented, hungry and thirsty (I’d always been a finicky eater, and there was nothing on offer that even vaguely appealed to me). This was culture shock.

I lived in Tehran for eighteen months. We lived in the hotel for a short while, and then moved into an apartment in the north of the city. I was frightened to venture out much, and we took private taxis when we did go out. My dad was retired military, so we had Base and Embassy privileges – which I took full advantage of: I ate American style hamburgers at the Officers’ Club, and bought American books (sci-fi) and magazines (Mad) at the base bookstore. My mother shopped for mostly American groceries at the Embassy.

I made American friends, went to an American school, played American football and wrestled American style. I had American girlfriends, and hung out at the American teen club.

At the same time, we lived in an Iranian neighborhood – there was no “American compound” in Tehran. There were Americans living nearby, but also Iranians, Germans, Israelis. Iranian boys who lived next door would throw rocks into our pool, and mildly taunt us when they saw us outside. An Iranian man riding by on a moped slapped me on the cheek once. Some kids threw rocks at us as we walked to a nearby ice skating rink. Iranians poisoned our pet dog: I watched him die from the poison, and I helped bury him in the field across the street.

Also, I smoked a lot of Iranian hashish.

In the fall of 1978, the Islamic Revolution had begun. There were student protests, and various clashes between protesters and the Shah’s military. Some days our school bus didn’t show up. Some days we went home early. My dad’s shuttles to work would take different routes. They put Plexiglas and chicken wire over the windows of the shuttle busses. Our school homecoming events were cancelled. School let out for Christmas break, and never resumed. From the roof of our house I watched tanks roll up and down Saltanatabad Boulevard.

We – Lockheed employee dependents – were evacuated from the city in the first week of January, 1979, in two chartered Pan Am 747 jets. We had boxed up our belongings to be shipped later, and only took onto the plane what we could carry. Many of my belongings – including my nearly new Atomic downhill skis and San Giorgio ski boots – I never saw again.

A month and a half ago I took a two week business trip to Kuwait. This was the first time I’d been back to the Middle East in 30 years. The sand colored buildings were familiar. The traffic and diesel smoke were familiar. The dark hair and eyes, and the incomprehensible language were all familiar.

Also familiar were the building cranes, high rise glass and steel buildings of ultra modern design, wide multi-lane highways, big green highway signs, well lit streets, cell phone toting masses, and late model luxury cars. But I’d seen all this in places like Seattle, New York, London – and not all in the same city at the same time. And the Arabic was incomprehensible, but most everyone I worked with spoke passable, if not perfect, English.

The hotel I stayed in provided almost suffocating service. I never had to open a door myself if I didn’t want to. The hostess in one of the restaurants memorized my name from the first day forward. At six o’clock every evening a hotel employee would knock on my door, and ask if I needed my bed covers turned down. My clothes came back from the laundry looking as if they’d just come off the store rack.

This, too, was culture shock.