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Jahan Kurd Pari and I interviewed Jahan (pseud.), a young man in his thirties, in Los Angeles in 1990. Unlike Rebwar, his memory is that of a city Kurd, one who moved to Tehran as a child and then continued occasional visits to Kurdistan. I include only one of his many anecdotes because it records a moment when the city Kurd becomes aware of a different cultural past, one that will become a part of his constructed ethnic identity. Ever since I was a child, whenever somebody would ask me, “What’s your last name?” I would say “ .” And they would say, “Oh, you’re a Kurd.” So I knew that I was a Kurd. And we would go to Kurdistan, and I could speak Kurdish. I had been raised and brought up with Tehrani values. Yet I understand and can relate to a lot of Kurdish values and ways of life. When I was about nine or ten years old, in Kurdistan, I had long hair and a BB gun, and in one of the tiny villages up in the mountains one day, a lot of the local boys gathered around me chanting, “Are you a boy or a girl?” They said that an old man with long hair is a dervish. But a young boy with long hair must be a girl. Their numbers increased and at one point I had about twenty little kids around me screaming, “Khor i ya kech i?” (“Are you a boy or a girl?”) And then I turned around with the BB gun I was carrying and pointed at one of them, who was the biggest one, and I said, “Okay, I’ll kill you right here. That’s enough.” And he came and grabbed my wrist and actually sort of dragged me to his home and I couldn’t do anything. He was much stronger than I. And I didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t hostile toward me. He just said, “Follow me, come with me.” And he took me to his home and I saw that his mother was making doogh [a yogurt drink]. He told his mother, “The son of so-and-so wants to kill me.” And the mother looked at me and said, “Could you go to that room?” Of course I didn’t know what to do. I just went into the room in the basement. She brought me some ice cream and some bread and some salt. She put it in front of me and she ordered me to have some. I just took a piece of bread, put some salt on it, and chewed a piece. And she said, jahan kurd 105 “Halla ke noon o namak e madaresh ra khordee” (“Well, now that you’ve had the bread and salt of his mother”), “you cannot kill my son.” And when I left there, for a few days I was in a daze. What did I do? What’s going on? Which am I? Am I a Kurd who is part of these clear values or am I a Tehrani who casually threatens to kill one of his mates? But the Kurd lives on another planet. ...

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