No strange cars Iranian Tehrangeles!
What happens when Tehran meets Los Angeles? Tehrangeles is not your usual Californian neighbourhood – novelist Porochista Khakpour explains its charms
Tehrangeles was born in the 1980s. The portmanteau is not just catchy, it’s apt. There’s an estimated 800,000 Iranians in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the largest Iranian population outside of Iran. In Beverly Hills, Iranians now account for 20 percent of the population. Iranian-born Jimmy Delshad served two terms as mayor of Beverly Hills after his election in 2007.
The heart of Tehrangeles is a stretch of Westwood Boulevard that flanks the UCLA campus all the way to Beverly Hills. Here you find business signs in Farsi. The sound of Farsi and ‘Fengilisi’ – the Farsi-English hybrid which Iranian-Americans often lapse into – can be heard on the streets everywhere. There are dozens of Persian restaurants from cafés to fine dining, ice cream and pastry stores; there are salons and specialty boutiques for beauty supplies, rug and textile dealers, bookstores and galleries, grocery stores and tobacco vendors. It’s as close to Tehran as one can get outside of Iran.
Iranians in Los Angeles are generally perceived to live nearby in Beverly Hills – but whether they actually have roots in the Valley or Orange County, they still know Tehrangeles well. My parents, whose economic class dropped significantly upon migration – they were of an academic class, but the lack of college-level language skills cost my father greatly, his thick accent always the focal point of student evaluations – moved to the East Side’s virtually Iranian-free South Pasadena, CA. It was about 35 minutes from Tehrangeles and it was decided on the recommendation of a university librarian who enthusiastically vouched for the South Pasadena public school system.
Twenty-five years later, they still live in the apartment complex they thought they’d temporarily call home while they searched for a house. The kitschy 1960s script on the green and white stucco building announces: ‘Tropical Gardens’. With its name changed to ‘Eden Gardens’, it was, alongside New York City, the primary setting of my novel ‘Sons and Other Flammable Objects’. It was incredibly un-Iranian of us to live there. In Beverly Hills Iranians account for 40 percent of the school population, yet we were at most one of three Iranian families in our city of 25,000. In my South Pasadena High School graduating class of 1200 students, I was the only Iranian and one of four Middle Easterners.
Iranian food was what we ate at home and it was also what on Saturday at midday, without fail, we drove to Tehrangeles for. It was there that we really felt just how different we were, driving into the city in my father’s air conditioner-less and radio-free Pinto or Dodge Omni, or my mother’s Toyota Tercel or Honda Civic hatchback in a sea of Iranian Lexuses, BMWs and Mercedes. We’d eat lunch at modest kebab houses and get Persian saffron ice cream after. We basically looked like the people around us and yet so much set us worlds apart – my brother and I in glasses and Target clothes, acned and skinny and suburban-trash epitomes, next to the golden Persian princesses and princes in black designer garb, salon-fresh and plastic-surgery-prone.
What happens when Tehran meets Los Angeles? Tehrangeles is not your usual Californian neighbourhood – novelist Porochista Khakpour explains its charms
Tehrangeles was born in the 1980s. The portmanteau is not just catchy, it’s apt. There’s an estimated 800,000 Iranians in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the largest Iranian population outside of Iran. In Beverly Hills, Iranians now account for 20 percent of the population. Iranian-born Jimmy Delshad served two terms as mayor of Beverly Hills after his election in 2007.
The heart of Tehrangeles is a stretch of Westwood Boulevard that flanks the UCLA campus all the way to Beverly Hills. Here you find business signs in Farsi. The sound of Farsi and ‘Fengilisi’ – the Farsi-English hybrid which Iranian-Americans often lapse into – can be heard on the streets everywhere. There are dozens of Persian restaurants from cafés to fine dining, ice cream and pastry stores; there are salons and specialty boutiques for beauty supplies, rug and textile dealers, bookstores and galleries, grocery stores and tobacco vendors. It’s as close to Tehran as one can get outside of Iran.
Iranians in Los Angeles are generally perceived to live nearby in Beverly Hills – but whether they actually have roots in the Valley or Orange County, they still know Tehrangeles well. My parents, whose economic class dropped significantly upon migration – they were of an academic class, but the lack of college-level language skills cost my father greatly, his thick accent always the focal point of student evaluations – moved to the East Side’s virtually Iranian-free South Pasadena, CA. It was about 35 minutes from Tehrangeles and it was decided on the recommendation of a university librarian who enthusiastically vouched for the South Pasadena public school system.
Twenty-five years later, they still live in the apartment complex they thought they’d temporarily call home while they searched for a house. The kitschy 1960s script on the green and white stucco building announces: ‘Tropical Gardens’. With its name changed to ‘Eden Gardens’, it was, alongside New York City, the primary setting of my novel ‘Sons and Other Flammable Objects’. It was incredibly un-Iranian of us to live there. In Beverly Hills Iranians account for 40 percent of the school population, yet we were at most one of three Iranian families in our city of 25,000. In my South Pasadena High School graduating class of 1200 students, I was the only Iranian and one of four Middle Easterners.
Iranian food was what we ate at home and it was also what on Saturday at midday, without fail, we drove to Tehrangeles for. It was there that we really felt just how different we were, driving into the city in my father’s air conditioner-less and radio-free Pinto or Dodge Omni, or my mother’s Toyota Tercel or Honda Civic hatchback in a sea of Iranian Lexuses, BMWs and Mercedes. We’d eat lunch at modest kebab houses and get Persian saffron ice cream after. We basically looked like the people around us and yet so much set us worlds apart – my brother and I in glasses and Target clothes, acned and skinny and suburban-trash epitomes, next to the golden Persian princesses and princes in black designer garb, salon-fresh and plastic-surgery-prone.
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