Her parents would have laughed at the question, and indeed they had before she'd learned to keep her doubts to herself. But of course, they were from a different generation. They had met as college students in America, where they had come to study and to perfect their English as was the custom among the sons and daughters of well-off Iranians of the day. Her father, Emaan, was pre-med and planned to become an ophthalmologist. Her mother, Ashraf, was studying nineteenth-century English literature and wanted one day to become a professor herself. They married while still in school. Their parents were pleased with the match, and their future looked bright.
Then came the revolution, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy. Amid talk of war, President Carter froze Iranian assets. Their families lost everything. Forget about tuition-it was all they could do to find a way to eat and pay the rent. Ashraf took a job as a waitress. Emaan sold eyeglasses at an optician's shop. They worked their butts off and saved money by sharing a two-bedroom apartment with another Iranian couple who had been similarly afflicted. Eventually, they had enough put away to buy out the optician. Now they owned five eyeglass stores in the Bay Area and some real estate, too, and were damn proud of it. Once, when Sarah had told her father she wanted a job that paid psychic income, he had laughed and said, “Silly child, don't you know that financial income is psychic income?”
She understood his point. But she had more opportunities than her parents did, opportunities they had given her. Wouldn't it be wrong not to take advantage? Shouldn't she build on the foundation they had provided?
And besides, she thought she had seen sadness behind her father's laugh.
She tried to ignore it, but she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more for her, if only she could figure out what.
And that was her problem: all her dreams were inchoate. She didn't know what she wanted. There was a longing inside her, but she couldn't name it. It could be quietly corrosive, feeling so strongly something was there yet unable to express or even identify it. She wondered which was worse: betraying a dream or being too shallow even to have one?
And then she would tell herself she was being silly. She was hoping for too much, that was the problem. She should just be satisfied with all the good things she had.
Sometimes she wished she had a sibling she could confide in. But times had been hard when she was born. Her parents didn't think they could afford another child, and by the time they could, Sarah was already ten. They didn't want to start all over again.
The one thing that really interested her was politics. She read everything, across the political spectrum-newspapers, magazines, books. Blogs especially. There were some great ones out there, and with their diversity and spontaneity she trusted them much more than she did the mainstream media, which was controlled by corporations or driven only by a hunger for access to whoever was in power, or both. The voracious reading was a kind of hobby that had started in high school and intensified as she got older. But what was she supposed to do with it? Look at how Obama's opponents had tried to smear him by falsely suggesting he was Muslim. Or the way they'd destroyed that Iranian-American businessman, Alex Latifi, with textbook malicious prosecution in Alabama. What would people make of an Iranian-American woman who really was Muslim, who in fact found passages of the Koran breathtakingly beautiful? Her given name was Shaghayegh, for God's sake, after the Persian flower-Sarah was just a nickname. Shaghayegh Hosseini, vote for me… Really, she had a better chance of being sent to Guantánamo than of being elected to office.
She had been a freshman at Caltech when the planes struck the Pentagon and Twin Towers. After, she had been approached by recruiters from all over the federal government: FBI, NSA, CIA, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. They were all desperate for people who could speak the languages of the Muslim world, and Sarah, whose Farsi was fluent, seemed to be popping up on all their computer lists. She was intrigued by the notion of a top-secret security clearance, by the chance to fight the fanaticism that was poisoning the culture she came from. But her parents had been against it. Having endured the revolution and everything that came after, they had been badly afraid of another backlash. The Hosseinis were American now, and didn't want to do anything to draw attention to their origins. Education was the key to success in America, her parents assured her. They had long since accepted that she had no interest in becoming a doctor, but she had a strong aptitude for science-advanced placement courses in high school, early acceptance to the information security program at Caltech. Why not go on to a law degree? With a combination like that, she could do anything. And so a kind of compromise had been born.
She loved her parents and wanted to make them happy, but there was a part of her too that resented their obsession with education and status, with the way they used her as a vehicle to pursue their own truncated dreams. That kernel of resentment led to her first real act of rebellion- an American-as-apple-pie boyfriend named Josh Marshall, whom she started dating as a sophomore when he was a junior, and to whom she lost her virginity that same year. Josh was a nice guy, from a nice family, and with good prospects, but he wasn't Iranian, and although there wasn't much her parents could do to stop her, she knew they were quietly appalled. And that was good. She was finally going after something she wanted.
The romance lasted until Josh graduated, when he left for Tucson and a job designing missile systems with Raytheon. They saw each other a few times that summer, but when the senior-year fall semester began, Sarah told him she was just too busy to keep it up. She pretended to be full of regret, but the truth was, she'd gotten bored. Although he was generally a confident guy, Josh had always been intimidated by her, and uncertain of himself as a result. It was as though he didn't quite believe he deserved her, that she was doing him some kind of favor by seeing him. She'd always felt the relationship was on her terms, that she was the one ultimately in control, and in the end she'd been proven right.
The pattern had continued at Berkeley 's Boalt Hall. She'd been at the law school less than a month when she got involved with a second-year, another Anglo-American, this one named John Cole. And later, when John graduated and left for a job with the Justice Department in D.C., Sarah, who had grown bored with her new relationship in much the same way she had grown bored with the previous, again used the occasion as an excuse to end it. After, she wondered about her motivations. Both had been good boyfriends, at least in an all-appropriate-boxes-checked kind of way. But both had been guaranteed to be unacceptable to her parents, and both had come with a kind of built-in expiration date. Was she stacking the odds against herself? And why would she do that?
Had she loved them? She told them she did, after they breathlessly declared the same to her. But although she felt a deep affection, especially for Josh, who after all had been her first, she didn't know if she could really call it love. She wondered if it was not only the expiration date that drew her, but also a certain blandness to the flavor of the food. Maybe she was afraid to taste something that might ignite some latent appetite, an appetite she sensed inside herself but for some reason sought to deny.
The sex had been good, though. Or good enough, anyway. True, she couldn't seem to come with either of them, but it didn't really matter. Just the contact was nice, and she liked having someone to sleep with. And when she needed to really get off, she could always lock the bathroom door, take a hot bath, close her eyes, and touch herself the way she needed to. In her fantasies, she would be at the back of a lecture hall, or surrounded by a crowd at a bar or a party, or in the library stacks late at night. There was always a man whose face was indistinct, but who she knew was watching her, and there was something simultaneously appreciative and arrogant in his gaze. She would challenge him, demand to know who he was, what he thought he was looking at. He would smile and say, I know what you want. She would laugh at his presumptuousness and say something like, Oh, really? The laugh was supposed to make him wilt, but it didn't, and his smile would grow broader, and she would feel he was silently mocking her. You don't know the first thing about me, she would say. He would come closer then, and in a low voice say that of course he knew things about her, and he could prove it if he wanted to. His insolence would enrage her, and she would demand, Prove it how? He would come very close then, and she would try to move back, but there was always something blocking her, and then his body would be against hers and his mouth would be at her ear and he would whisper, I know how you like to be touched… like this, and like this, and like this…