Biologist Maryam Zaringhalam is visiting her family's home country of Iran when the travel ban goes into effect in January 2017.
Maryam Zaringhalam is Story Collider DC's newest co-producer. She's a molecular biologist who traded in her pipettes for the world of science policy. She comes to DC from the concrete jungles of New York, where she received her PhD from The Rockefeller University. She co-hosts the science policy podcast Science Soapbox, and her words have appeared in Slate, Scientific American, and Quartz. Her cat is named Tesla, after Nikola and not Elon Musk's car. For insights like this and more, follow her on Twitter @webmz_.
This story originally aired on Sept. 29, 2017 in an episode titled “Migration.”
Story Transcript
It’s January 20, 2017, and I’m boarding a flight with my mom and we’re going back to the motherland. I hadn’t been back in about a decade and this time we’re going back to see the ancestral cities of my dad and my uncle, places I hadn’t seen before.
I asked my mom to book these flights for us on November 9, 2016, a day on which I thought that things would be changing very quickly and that I might not be able to go back to the place where my parents came from. Because, you see, my family is from Iran.
Like millions of my fellow Americans, my heart broke on November 8th, and like millions of American daughters, I called my mom that night through tears and I asked her how so many people could vote with their hate and their fear against people like us.
Now, my mom had about twenty-eight years of experience with my tendencies towards melodrama and she told me, very calmly, not to fear. That she and my father had been through much worse in their lives. The Iran of their childhood no longer exists. It fell away in a revolution that took place decades ago and they're okay. They came to America so that their children would never have to know that kind of a loss, would never have to know what it is to lose your country.
So as my small act of protest, I asked my mom, “Book those flights. We’re going back.”
I didn’t know then, but on January 21st millions of women would turn out around the world far dwarfing the scope and scale of my small act of protest. And I didn’t know then that on January 27th, just seven days into my trip and seven days into this new administration, the president would sign his travel ban.
For those of you looking to escape the day-to-day political realities of American life, I cannot highly recommend Iran enough. Because it is a country in which Twitter is banned and Facebook is banned and mainstream news sites like the Washington Post and the New York Times are all banned.
My mom and I spent that first week staying in these cute little bed-and-breakfasts that had little by way of internet or television and so I spent that week in a state of bliss. I was walking the streets of Qom and Kashan and Isfahan, thinking about what these places were like when my parents and my parents’ parents were growing up. And I was sightseeing and reading and eating albeit overcooked vegetables because, it turns out, Iranian cuisine is not very vegetarian friendly.
But, at the end of that week, my mom and I returned back to Tehran to stay with a family friend. And while she didn’t have the internet, she did have TV.
So on that Friday night, January 27th, I am in the living room and the news is on. It’s state-sponsored news, but it’s news nevertheless. I can mostly tune it out because it’s in Farsi and Farsi is my second language. I’m reading and suddenly I hear [in Farsi]: “The President of the United States.” Suddenly, I remember why I’m here at this particular time in our history.
I look up and I see an image. It’s a map that has seven countries highlighted. While my geography skills are lacking, I do recognize one of those countries as Iran. I listen and I learn that people coming from those seven Muslim majority countries would be banned entry into the United States effective immediately.
At first I thought this can’t be happening. It’s too fast. It’s too soon. But the thing about Iranian news is that it’s state-sponsored and so they play the same clips over and over and over again. After about three or four times of watching the same clip, the reality of my situation sinks in.
The phone starts ringing and it’s my family from back home and we’re coming up with a plan of what to do in case my mom and I are blocked entry or detained when we try to reenter. Our citizenship set aside because at this point we have no idea what to expect. There's so much chaos and confusion.
It’s getting late and it’s time for bed, but I can’t sleep. I was so angry and hurt and ashamed because I thought that we had moved on from this, that we were better than this. I felt duped into this false sense of security because I'd been here before. I had felt this kind of rejection before.
September 12, 2001, was the first time I learned that someone could hate me or fear me or misunderstand me without doing me the courtesy of getting to know me. I was thirteen, and my best friend found me in the hall and she said, “Look, Gina C. has been telling all the kids at school that your parents had something to do with it.” By “it,” she meant those two towers coming down just twenty-five miles from where we lived.
Immediately, I was just completely taken aback. This was so ludicrous. I was freaking out just the day before with all of my classmates because my mom worked in New York City and I had no idea where she was. And there I was being accused of something so heinous and hateful. Fortunately, the rumor was so ridiculous that it died out after a week.
But once you have that feeling that you're different, that you're easily mistaken and that people will jump to conclusions out of fear or ignorance or sheer convenience, you never lose that. I developed this sort of sixth sense for what people got wrong about me, the ways that they would talk about me, sometimes right to my face.
Like I remember this kid after high school biology class cornered me and he said, “Maryam, just so you know, the only reason the teacher is giving you such high marks is because she knows that your parents come from a culture that doesn’t value women.” And I just thought, Well, it seems to me like you don’t much value women, because there he was trying to undermine my success because it allowed him to believe that he was better than me, that he deserved more than I did. And it came at the expense of who I am of where my parents come from.
So while I have this microphone let me set the record straight. My parents come from a country where over 70 percent of the science and engineering students today are women. A country that holds science and engineering excellence to the highest regard. And science, it runs in my blood. My mom is one of the best doctors in the tristate area and my dad is a nuclear astrophysicist turned systems architect. My aunt is a software engineer, my uncle is a material scientist, my cousin is a civil engineer and my grandma was one of the first women to integrate into an all-boys’ school in France.
I could go on and on, but this is just to tell you that these are the strong Iranian men and women who raised me, who lifted me up and who taught me that the sky was the limit because I was at the intersection of two cultures, Iranian and American.
But that night, those two cultures wrestled inside the pit of my stomach until, finally, I gave up on the dream of sleep and it was morning again. I will myself out of bed and out the house and down the street to get a cup of coffee at a coffee shop because I desperately need caffeine. But more than that, I am craving for the first time, in a long time, the Internet. I want to feel connected to what’s going on back home.
So I sit down and I order an Americano, and I open my phone and I connect. While I can’t get social media or the news, I can get text messages and emails, and they are pouring in from my friends and my family and my peers and my professors. They are telling me how concerned they are, how worried they are. They're giving me phone numbers of lawyers they know that are stationed at JFK. But more than that, they're telling me to please tell my friends and family in Iran that this isn’t us. That these aren’t the American values that we hold.
In that moment, I felt completely overwhelmed by a feeling that was so different than what I felt as a thirteen-year-old when I was accused and I was just trying to grieve. In that moment, I felt held and loved and cared for all while I felt nauseous and anxious and so completely exhausted. So I closed up my phone and I headed back home hoping for a nap.
I go and I see my mom is still in the living room and she's watching the news again, but this time there's a new news clip. I look at the screen and it’s footage of all of the protests that had broken out overnight in airports across the country. And I see people holding signs that say “No ban, No wall” that Muslims are welcome here, and they are signs of love.
I realize that I don’t need to tell anybody in Iran who the American people are because there they were, on state-sponsored television no less, telling the world exactly who they were with their signs and their voices raised and their bodies standing side by side in solidarity.
I've never really been one for protests. I really don’t like crowds, and chanting in unison with a bunch of strangers really creeps me out. I always thought that protest was this exercise in preaching to the choir for a change that may never come, but in that moment, I realized its true power. It’s this way of signaling out to the rest of the world who we are and what we stand for when those with all the power failed to represent us time and time again.
I went back to the States four days later, thankfully, without any incident and I came home to a country that felt different but not lost, not like my parents’ Iran. I came committed to joining the movements that were popping up around the country, not just to march for science or environmental justice or women’s rights or affordable healthcare but to raise my voice as uniquely me, to articulate every part of myself, who I am and why I matter as a woman, as a daughter of immigrants, a product of science without borders, an Iranian, an American, and a scientist myself, and what I can only hope is exactly what my parents imagined when they dreamed their American dream. Thank you.