Range of Reactions Greets U.S.-Iran Thaw

Parviz Pargari, fledgling interior designer, has an ambitious project. For his masters degree thesis at Cal State Northridge, he is designing and building six chairs, crafting into the wood of each a sign of its role.

“Two have political functions, two have religious functions, two have cultural functions,” he said.

Pargari dreams of having the president of Iran and the president of the United States sit in his chairs and talk about each sphere of life.

“I will be part of the peace,” said Pargari, 34, who came here 10 years ago from Iran. “If by designing the chairs, something would happen, I would be so honored.”

It’s unlikely his sitters will show (they are invited, of course, to his scheduled exhibit next month). Still, it’s more likely than it has been in the past two decades that Iran and the United States will begin to mend the relationship that was shattered by the 1979 hostage crisis.

The optimism began to blossom three months ago when Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said in a CNN interview that Iran may begin cultural exchanges to widen a crack in the “wall of distrust” between the two countries.

In Los Angeles, with its substantial population of Iranians and Americans of Iranian descent--they often prefer to call themselves Persian--the prospect of a rapprochement between the two countries has been greeted with a range of reactions from skepticism to relief.

“This is the first piece of good news I’ve gotten from that country in 20 years,” said makeup artist Tony Persia, an American of Iranian descent who concocted his professional name from the land of his birth. “It’s usually war, terrorism. It’s always something negative from that country.”

For most people of Iranian descent here, no matter what their politics are, the historic interview that Khatami gave to CNN three months ago was an event to behold.

“It was like watching the Super Bowl,” said Ali Soltani, 32, who with his family owns the David Orgell gift store on Rodeo Drive. “For the first time in 20 years, I am actually for an Iranian government official.” He laughed. “I hope I don’t get killed next week.”

In the Persian community, people watched the president’s interview on television, they listened to it on radio, they talked about it over dinner.

Soon after Khatami’s friendly overture, the United States posed “no objection” to American wrestlers traveling to Iran. The athletes received an enthusiastic welcome. But no matter how things develop, the interview is being hailed as the official prelude to the dance toward renewed diplomatic relations.

In Persian gathering spots from a sun-drenched courtyard at UCLA to the small, Persian-run businesses nestled together on Westwood Boulevard in Westwood, Persians continue to reflect on the potential for a sea change in the relations between Iran and the United States. They feel varying connections to the country and its president.

Some immigrated here years ago but speak Farsi at home and bestow upon their children Persian names. Others, who were born here, can barely utter a word of Farsi. Still, everyone interviewed had a profound sense of themselves as ethnically Persian and, as a result, connected in some way to Iran.

A few viewed the Iranian president’s overtures skeptically.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” said Sahm Manouchehri, a 19-year-old UCLA sophomore who was born in Tehran but came here when he was only 4 months old. “I think he’s just talking. It’s beyond his control.”

Some have deeply personal reasons for paying attention to the president.

“I know him from when we were kids,” said Mohammad Ali Yazdi, 48, who grew up in the Yazd province of Iran and now works at Ketab Books, a Persian bookstore in Westwood. The president grew up in the village of Ardakan in that province. “My uncle was a farmer in that village. On the weekends, we would go to my uncle’s garden. His father was the ayatollah in that village. Everyone knows him. . . . I was 7 or 8 years old. He was older than me. He stopped us from taking walnuts from another neighbor’s tree.”

For many of Iranian descent, life here has been undamaged by the long-standing impasse between Iran and the United States. American anger at Iranian students for the infamous hostage-taking of 1979 is rarely focused these days on Iranian immigrants and children of immigrants, say Iranians in Los Angeles.

Some are old enough to have stark memories of growing up Iranian in an American climate that was deeply hostile to all Iranians. Tony Persia remembers leaving Tehran for Boise, Idaho, in 1979--his mother had relatives there--and going to school in a sea of white faces during the hostage period.

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“I was the only Iranian. My name was an unpronounceable Persian name. . . . I was the target of just an unbelievable amount of abuse,” recalled Persia, who changed his name when he moved to Los Angeles and declined to say what the original one was. “It wasn’t America’s fault. It was incredibly generous of America to let me go to their public schools. What do you expect of Idaho farm boys? I was foreign. I dressed foreign. I ate foreign. . . . What I brought from home was wonderful Persian food. Everyone else had hamburgers and hot dogs.”

But all that changed years ago--1984, to be exact--when he moved here. “I don’t represent a typical Iranian. I’m a makeup artist. I’m gay,” Persia said. “I thank God for Los Angeles. I moved here just to breathe again. I needed to go somewhere where there was openness, where there was diversity.”

Ali Soltani, who has lived here since 1971, came with his parents, who immigrated purely for economic reasons.

“I consider myself to have the best of both worlds. I’ve reconciled in my heart and in my daily tasks my nationality and my adopted country,” said Soltani, who is an American citizen and holds a law degree from Loyola.

Soltani lives in Beverly Hills, bestowed Persian names upon his children, and speaks Farsi at home. “It would be un-American to have my children not speak Farsi at my home. If I was Italian on the lower east side, they would speak Italian.”

He suffered some prejudice during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s at Beverly Hills High, “but I brushed it off,” he said. Today, he senses few hard feelings. He watches closely the ups and downs of foreign policy-speak, trying to decipher the sentences of the diplomats who represent the two countries that formed him.

On one sunny Friday afternoon, a number of UCLA students who identified themselves as culturally Persian sat studying and chatting at tables in a courtyard. Few of them were born in Iran. They infrequently refer to themselves as “Iranian.”

They rarely, if ever, go to Iran.

“I’ve been there twice. I went for a month. I didn’t like it,” said Tania Monjazeb, an 18-year-old freshman. “It’s not as modern. You have to leave the house all covered up.”

But they are drawn to the company of other Persian Americans their own age.

“They have this bonding,” said Hadiss Naz DeWitt, a 19-year-old sophomore raised in San Diego. She laughed. “If there are Iranians in a 10-mile radius, I can sense it.”

Their best girlfriends are Persian, the men they want to date are Persian. “You have more of a connection,” muses Rebecca Dehbozorgi, an 18-year-old from San Diego. “They understand you. They understand your morals.”

They know stories of living as Iranians during the time of the hostage crisis. “If you were asked to say you were Iranian, my aunt would tell people she was Italian,” said DeWitt.

And even after the crisis was over, recalled Dehbozorgi, “I remember my kindergarten teacher hated us because I was Iranian. She was so mean to me.”

But for the most part, what happens in Iran has little direct effect on them.

“You know what--it’s not going to affect us,” one student said pointedly. “The difference is we’re not going to be thought of as terrorists.”