Immigration and Cultural Assimilation Theme Analysis

In her memoir Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas writes about her family’s journey from Iran to the United States in the early 1970s, and her childhood growing up in California. Firoozeh’s father, Kazem, studies in the U.S. on a Fulbright scholarship, and later immigrates to the U.S. with his family to work for an Iranian petroleum company. Although Kazem briefly moves his family back to Iran, Firoozeh spends the majority of her childhood in America, and grows up surrounded by a mixture of Iranian and American cultural values. At its heart, Funny and Farsi is a memoir about immigration and cultural assimilation in the United States—in other words, the way that immigrants adapt to the culture of their adopted country, embracing some aspects of the culture and ignoring or rejecting others.

Throughout the book, Firoozeh shows how different Iranian immigrants in her family adapt to their new lives in the United States with varying degrees of enthusiasm, curiosity, and hostility. Certain of the characters, such as Kazem, embrace American culture enthusiastically. Many of the funniest scenes in the book revolve around Kazem’s fascination with aspects of American culture that many Americans would consider excessively tacky or banal, such as fast food, Disneyland, or all-you-can-eat buffets. Humor aside, these scenes convey an interesting point: being completely comfortable in a given culture doesn’t just entail knowing about the culture, or being enthusiastic about it, as Kazem clearly is. It also entails being able to distinguish between “high” and low” aspects of a culture, and having opinions about these aspects. In a way, what marks Kazem as a first-generation American immigrant, more than anything else, is the fact that he’s so enthusiastic about things like all-you-can-eat buffets—nobody who grew up with these things would be so interested in them. Other characters, such as Firoozeh herself, take a more balanced view of American culture, and of Iranian culture. Firoozeh spends the majority of her childhood in America, to the point where she speaks English with an American accent. While she loves many aspects of American culture, such as American television, she’s much more blasé about others—for example, her father loves going to Disneyland far more than she does. Firoozeh’s behavior, one could argue, is typical of the second-generation immigrant: she’s more comfortable in American society than her parents, and but also less excited about American culture, since she’s grown up with it.

In general, Funny in Farsi portrays cultural assimilation as a delicate process that requires multiple generations of immigrants, as well as a general willingness to embrace the new and the unfamiliar in one’s adopted country. (Interestingly, Firoozeh doesn’t write about any Iranian immigrants who adamantly refuse to assimilate with American culture, or voice strong objections to American culture—perhaps because that wasn’t her family’s experience, and perhaps because, if it had been, American publishers would have been less likely to publish her book.)

But just because the characters in Funny in Farsi immigrate from Iran to the United States doesn’t mean that they abandon their Iranian roots altogether. On the contrary, Firoozeh and her family adopt different aspects of Iranian and American culture into their lives, and the memoir ultimately suggests that this process of cultural “mixing” is the essence of an American immigrant’s life. Firoozeh continues to celebrate Iranian holidays and eat Iranian foods, even as she becomes increasingly at home in American society and embraces American values. The result—which gives the book its poignancy, as well as its comedy—is that Firoozeh is an insider and an outsider, both in America and in Iran. She’s familiar with both countries’ cultures, and yet neither country’s people regard her as a true insider. The memoir concludes shortly after Firoozeh marries a Western, Christian man named François Dumas, and their marriage represents the process of cultural assimilation—an ongoing “compromise” that mixes Western and Iranian values together.