Iran - I grew up

Iran - I grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota. It's a place that has nearly nothing in common with Iran, or anywhere in the world outside of small town USA.

Perhaps that was one of the attractions.

Jamestown is the home of Jamestown College. In the sixties, it was the kind of place were kids from well-off-enough backgrounds whose academic aptitude wasn't good enough to get into a serious college on the coast would while away their draft-elegible years, far from the prying eyes of anyone that mattered. Today, JC is a thriving little college, whose enrollment has tripled over the last fifteen years, a time that's seen many similar colleges in the Midwest collapse from lack of interest. Things are good at Jamestown today.

In 1980, things were not good. The college spent the years between the end of the draft and its current prosperity muddling through a long run of nearly-criminal mismanagement. They had to do something to keep the doors open.

And for a few years, that something was recruiting overseas. A few graduates from the fifties and sixties had moved back overseas, and had fond memories of the puritan little outpost overlooking the isolated little island in the sea of wheat. And in the seventies and eighties, as the Gulf states simultaneously rolled in oil wealth and realized they needed to build a cadre of western-trained professionals, those graduates told their nephews and nieces and cousins about Jamestown.

So by 1980, the little school in the middle of nowhere hosted a German, two Kuwaitis, seven Lebanese, three Palestinians, five Jordanians (yes, they all got along just fine) - and about twenty Iranians.

Now, American kids that came to Jamestown tended to be either workaholics attending a few of the programs at which the place excelled (it had superb pre-med and nursing programs), who tended to be found more in the lab than the bars, or kids who were going to JC because they didn't want to go someplace "big and impersonal" like North Dakota State; they weren't social animals. Most were farm kids, kids from the little towns that dot the prairie - and like their parents, they pretty much kept to themselves.

The kids from the Middle East were very different, especially the Iranians. They were cosmopolitan - most had spent time in Europe on their way to America. All were at least bilingual - many communicated with each other in French when the gulf between Arab and Farsi failed them. They had their strange customs; while most were fairly secular, some prayed to Mecca; and every weekend, the entire Gulf community at the school gathered on a big field on the college's edge to play soccer, a game only a few of us had ever seen on TV, and fewer understood. We watched them playing as we biked or endless all-in games, shouting in Arabic and French and Farsi and, rarely, English, a small gaggle of local girls sitting on the sidelines clapping or with their arms wrapped around the one that brung 'em.

They had the kind of money that made most of us Anglo kids goggle-eyed with wonder; I remember standing behind an Iranian kid at my bank, waiting to cash my $100 check from my radio job, and hearing him ask if that month's $2,000-odd stipend check from the government had arrived yet (which was more than my father made as a high school teacher at the time). And as the outgoing, cosmo elites of their societies, they were not content to sit in their dorm rooms, or stand around the keg parties that drew most of the Anglo students - not for long anyway. They came down into the town, they met people, they bought things, and when they gave up on the girls at the college, they started dating the local girls.

And before long, the attitude of many townies was a midwestern echo of the old English lament about GIs during World War II; they were overpaid, oversexed and over here. There was conflict - some of the local rednecks figured flying fists would rake in the babes in a way that their jacked-up Novas and eight-track players stuffed with Bad Company tapes had stopped doing.

It was a strange confluence - the sort of fish out of water story that is probably lost on people from a diverse, major metropolitan area. My kids, growing up as ethnic and social minorities in schools that are mainly H'mong, Hispanic and Afro-American, nod uncomprehendingly when I tell them I was 16 before I met a person that wasn't white or Native American.

A girl who sang in a band with me started dating an Iranian guy, my junior year of high school. He was a math major. And when you got past the language barrier (although his English was vastly better than my Farsi) and the money and the attitude, talking to him was genuinely fascinating. Growing up as I did with the very limited horizons one gets growing up in a typical small town, it was eye-opening to talk with someone who'd seen Paris, who could get around in four languages, and who was going to go home in two years to lead his nation - as an engineer or professor or civil servant in a land where "foreign-educated civil servant" meant big things. I won't say that talking with him "opened my eyes to the outside world" - but it made that world a lot more real, at a time when most of it was still imported via TV from Fargo.

You know how the story ends. Khomeni took over. The Shah departed, unlamented, and died, unmourned by the little slice of Iranian society that I knew.

Then came the hostage crisis - which ushered in a new phase of abuse from the redneck townies - and finally, Hussein's invasion. Nearly overnight, it seemed, all twenty-odd Iranian students packed up and left - some of them parting with a few ill-advised verbal shots at the rednecks and the US, that irritated me then, but I chalk up to adolescent fervor today. Most went home. The few that didn't moved to someplace they'd be less grindingly alone and isolated, if not less hated - Chicago or New York. Word filtered back from the few that kept in touch - things were tough. At least one died in the war; the rest, I have no idea.

They're all my age now, the lucky ones. They probably have kids, and probably shake their heads in disbelief that they spent those years of their young lives stuck in a bucolic, frigid little Ukraininan/German outpost at the edge of the world, before the purges and bombings and turmoil that dominated their early-adult years.

Today, much of the blogosphere is observing the fourth anniversary of the July 9 student uprisings. Jeff Jarvis is carrying a bit of a clearinghouse of Iranian blogs, as well as Iranian Girl. Lileks has his usual terrific, relevant slice of life, and Instapundit is on the case as well.

Posted by Mitch at July 9, 2003 10:12 AM