As the daughter of Persian immigrants, my life has been a somewhat messy, chaotic blend of the Persian and American cultural lifestyles. In my daily life, I transition between speaking Farsi on the phone with my mom and chatting with my friends in English, shopping at Ralph’s and then running over to the local Persian grocery to pick up specialty cooking ingredients, and listening to a blend of Persian and U.S. pop music ritually.
I was raised in a particularly white, homogeneous suburb in the Los Angeles area. My pediatrician, from when I was born through when I left for college, was named Dr. Sadd. (In my head, I called her “Dr. Sad”; I wasn’t very found of her.) All the physicians in the small practice were white, and all their patients were predominantly white. Dietary recommendations never satisfied my mother’s Middle Eastern palate, and I was told I had hirsutism–a syndrome of excessive hair–though all Middle Eastern children have hair crawling up their arms and legs and faces, and any one who claims they don’t is either a liar or a genetic mutant.
I didn’t visit another physician until I began shadowing a Persian cardiologist, Dr. Rizi, several years later in college. After my first day, it became clear his patients were predominantly Middle Eastern, and, in fact, almost every consultation was conducted entirely in Farsi, already a stark contrast with my previous experience in internal medicine. On a regular basis, families–grandmother, mother, and son–would attend appointments together. It was as though I had stepped into Little Tehran. After my second week, to my surprise, Dr. Rizi introduced me to patients as the “brilliant student from Duke” and the “intelligent aspiring doctor.” The patients, in turn, seemed delighted to meet a Persian shadow student and inquired great detail regarding my academic endeavors and future plans–all in Farsi, of course. The older women gazed at me with a glint in their eyes that suggested I reminded them of their younger selves. The older men looked at me admiringly, no qualms about enduring stress tests and echocardiograms under my watchful eyes. I was taken aback by how easily I was welcomed into their lives and their enthusiasm for sharing private aspects of their consultations with me. The message was clear: I was one of them.
I wondered if the experience would have been the same had I not been Persian. Would Dr. Rizi have introduced me as his protégé to his patients, clear paternal pride in his voice? Would the patients have been so eager in turn? The language barrier would have been an immense challenge, for one. I appreciated the sense of community, but upon reflection, I feel like this implicit judgment of my capacity as a pre-medical student, though positive, was far too hasty. Though I can’t express how much I enjoyed my shadowing experience, at times I wish I had worked harder to gain Dr. Rizi and his patients’ approval, proving my intelligence rather than seemingly being accepted on the basis of my cultural heritage.