Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America

Firoozeh Dumas

When I was seven, my parents, my fourteen-year-old brother, Farshid, and I moved
from Abadan, Iran, to Whittier, California. Farid, the older of my two brothers, had been
sent to Philadelphia the year before to attend high school. Like most Iranian youths, he
had always dreamed of attending college abroad and, despite my mother’s tears, had left
us to live with my uncle and his American wife.