Happy birthday, America from the daughter of Iranians who know your value

The dinner table conversations of my childhood were often about Iran, the country my parents had lost.But the life they built in front of me was about the country they had found, the United States.My parents did not raise me on grievance.

They raised me on gratitude.It is a specific, unsentimental kind of gratitude that immigrants from unfree places tend to carry.

They made America home.They worked hard.

They talked, out loud and often, about liberty and opportunity the way people who have lived without them talk.And they made a point, especially to their daughter, of instilling something the regime in Tehran spends its every waking hour trying to strip from Iranian women: the certainty that I could do anything, say anything, become anything.So I did.My father was, in every sense, the epitome of the American Dream.

He arrived in New York City at 17 years old with a scholarship from the Shah’s government, planning to become a physician and return home to Iran to practice medicine.History had other ideas.What followed was an immigrant story with one English dictionary open on the desk, a medical book open beside it, and multiple jobs held not only to pay the bills but to learn the language, absorb the culture and assimilate into the country he was quickly recognizing as his own.

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By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.Never miss a story He never made it back to Iran the way he had planned.

He made a life here instead, and he made his children Americans.That is the inheritance I grew up with.Not a lecture about freedom.

An example of it.From a young age I understood that this freedom was not the default setting of the world.It was the exception.

I think that awareness is the hallmark of immigrants who came from places where those freedoms are still out of reach.Or at...