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Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas7/7/2023 As vendors begin selling T-shirts that read “Iranians go Home,” Dumas’s father loses his job and his pension and is forced to sell all the family's belongings. But these trials pale in comparison to the family’s difficulties during the hostage crisis. The author has the usual problems of a stranger in a strange land-nobody can pronounce her name or has any awareness of her homeland-but Dumas tosses in some new ones as well: the communal showers at sleep-away camp (she doesn’t bathe for a week) and the disappointment when her father fails to qualify as a contestant on Bowling for Dollars. Although the adventure in their new country begins with the author and her mother getting lost after elementary-school orientation, the Dumases rapidly embrace their new home: Las Vegas becomes their default vacation destination, and they spend every Christmas watching Bob Hope. In 1972, Dumas’s father, an employee of the Iranian National Oil Company, which had landed a two-year consulting contract with an American firm, came to the US and brought along the entire family. Light-as-air essays about an immigrant childhood in California.
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