Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora

When Toys Are Us

When Toys Are Us H BEATRICE MOTAMEDI I went to Toys Us today to see if my brothers were still for sale, and they were. Neatly shrink-wrapped, they stood straight and tall next to the Navy battleships and the Bradley fighting vehicles. They were toys, with names that echoed the war in Afghanistan and Iraq—names like “G.I. Joe Adventure Team” and “Ultimate Soldier, U.S. Desert Special Operations.” I saw my brothers last Christmas,when I went to my local Toys Us to buy my nephew a present. Despite my better intentions (get in / get Elmo / get out) it wasn’t long before I was wandering in a vast wasteland of blinking lights, my mind wiped clean of whatever I was looking for. Eventually I found myself in the section reserved for military toys, where I expected to see soldiers with blond hair and blue eyes, Barbie and Ken in khaki. But to my surprise, the Joes I found looked just like my bros. They were slender and handsome,with wavy hair and neatly trimmed beards.Their eyes were dark and intense and totally familiar.They had the curly hair, trim build and coffee-colored skin of my father, who left his village on the shore of the Caspian Sea, and emigrated to the West, more than fifty years ago. In a word, they looked Persian. Of course, there were exceptions. Some of the soldiers were packaged with not one but two interchangeable heads, the first a clean-shaven Anglo,the second faintly Arab.One soldier was indeed blond and blueeyed ,though he was from the war before,a U.S.Marine“circa –.” WHEN TOYS ARE US 225 “ R ” “ R ” Of all the toy soldiers I saw, he was the only one who was smiling; obviously he had missed the Long March to Bataan, the bombing of Dresden,the annihilation of Hiroshima.But he was the exception,and my brothers were the rule. FRO M TO M RI D G E T O T H E RE D CRO S S Sometimes the resemblance between Joe and bro was enough to make me laugh out loud. A soldier named “Ultimate Soldier: U.S. Army Afghanistan” looked just like my brother Rick, the morning that I rang his doorbell too early and found him standing there in his bathrobe, exhausted from staying up all night with his baby. The G.I. Joe “Undercover Agent” came with two heads, one that of a grim, square-jawed man who looked like Tom Ridge, the homeland security czar, and the other that of a slightly worried, even less optimistic fellow, who resembled my brother Mike, a former nurse for the Red Cross. Then there was “Dial Tone,” a G.I. Joe whose mustache was embarrassingly similar to the one that my brother Dave grew just in time for my wedding. Dial Tone, according to the marketing copy, was a radio telecommunications specialist, capable of setting up a mobile satellite transmitter in less than three minutes even under battlefield conditions. “Nothing stops Dial Tone from doing his job,” the bio read; his messages go out “loud and clear.” I had to smile—my Dial Tone,my David,lives in Germany now,halfway around the world.It’s been weeks since we talked on the phone,months since I talked to Cara, my niece. It would be great if either of us was a telecommunications expert. Alas, in the real world, we’re not. 226 BEATRICE MOTAMEDI TH E T RU T H I N T OY S The irony of finding my brothers on a shelf was unexpected but delicious. Like many Persian Americans after /, I dreaded seeing photos of the hijackers in the NewYorkTimes; but for their dead eyes,their empty gazes,they,too,could have been my brothers,with the same neat white dress shirts, the same unruly hair. Over the past two years,my brothers—middle names Cyrus,Reza and Davoud—have been searched more often at airports, glanced at more closely on the street. They don’t protest; like most Americans, they know that these are troubled times.But sometimes the fears are unreasonable , even racist. My seventy-five-year-old father,a surgeon who has saved countless lives, was openly stared at recently when he boarded a plane;one passenger,a woman, complained to the flight crew that he looked “different.” When David’s son...