“My age was about 40, so I decided to start myself a company,” Harry says. “I started with only $600 in my pocket. She was working, and we borrowed and borrowed from the credit card.”
The business got rolling — “Thanks to God,” says Azadeh, popping out of her seat to find a wood cabinet to knock. When Azadeh was “respectfully fired” from the lab after the company came under new management and moved to San Diego, she became a valuable free agent: “I gave her a good offer,” says Harry. Vice president? “No, president!” he says, dragging out and deepening the “pre-” for emphasis.
Garden of earthly delights: Abbas Mirrashidi reaches for treasure, ripe Persian mulberries. (Photos by Kevin Scanlon)
Sweet life: The Zahirpours and their chocolate factory
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For Shohreh, the elder daughter, who is now getting her master’s in architecture at Yale, the cold-turkey immersion from Iran into the United States was brutal. She quickly realized she would have to work as hard as her parents to succeed in her new life. Very self-conscious about the way she talked, Shohreh tried to cover up her accented English; meanwhile, Neda just refused to talk. A kindergarten teacher called in Azadeh and asked whether her child was deaf or mute. With the help of American cartoons and the interpreting assistance of a Farsi-speaking preteen, Neda soon turned into the chatterbox everyone knows today. She recently moved to the East Bay to take a job at Medea Benjamin’s nonprofit Global Exchange.
Several moments from her daughters’ lives remain viscerally etched in Azadeh’s memory: when she couldn’t take Shohreh to play rehearsal because she didn’t have a car, when Shohreh graduated with full honors at the top of her class, and the sound of her screaming when she got into Berkeley. But there is one episode that lingers, painfully, a terrible reminder of parental impotence.
“It was the day in Iran that we had to sell our house. I didn’t want to take Shohreh with me to Iran, but she insisted. She was 10 years old. I said I’m going to go clean the house and make sure everything is okay. But when it came time to leave, I saw that she wasn’t coming. I went back inside and found her in her old room.” Azadeh’s voice starts to change. “She was kissing the walls; she was crying so much!”
There is a long pause. Azadeh looks at me with devastated eyes, her hands over her mouth, while Harry, respectful of a mother’s right to tell a story, just sighs. “She wanted to say goodbye to our house. I knew this was going to happen, but I never thought it would be that bad.”
I try to lighten the tone: “Maybe, with her appreciation for houses, that’s why she became an architect?” It doesn’t really register.
“It’s not just the parents who have difficulties when you move to a new place,” Azadeh continues. “The children don’t say ?anything, but it doesn’t mean they don’t understand.”
