The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

“‘You have disgraced the daughter of Mr. Mahmoodi.’

‘No, sir. I didn’t,’ he said to the table.

‘You are a communist operative.’

‘No, sir, I’m a tailor. I make shirts.’

‘You have been drinking.’

‘No, sir.’ He was so tired. It didn’t matter what he said. A guard entered, whispered with the Sepâh about drug trafficking. They intended for Darius to hear. He wanted to weep—they would never let him go. He would die on a crane, or facing a firing squad, before he turned thirty.

‘You’ve been drinking and you attacked Basiji officers in the street,’ said the guard.”

A common thread in Nayeri’s collected refugee asylum stories is their home nation’s corrupt law enforcement. First, the Basiji volunteer militia assault Darius on the street, then the Sepâh beat him into a months-long coma that leaves him with severe brain damage and forces him to escape Iran. Despite his real suffering, Darius struggles to prove his case to asylum officials, who assume he’s an economic migrant and that the Iranian authorities operate honestly.

“I noted that the last question was germane to the proceedings. That it affected her credibility, her allotment of power against my father. Baba was no sexist. […] If she had said, ‘Dina is chatty, fussy, and odd. She has an itch in the brain and bad handwriting and one of her eyes is too small,’ he would have shown some respect for her methods. I know this because Baba—though he smoked opium and beat my mother and was incapable of lifting a finger for himself—instructed me never to cower to men; if you flinch, they will hit harder. Show your fangs, not your throat. But this was 1987 Isfahan and most Babas didn’t teach their daughters these things. The poor woman didn’t have the training.”

After finding out that one of Nayeri’s teachers tore up her calligraphy pages, an infuriated Baba visits the school and tears her down in an incident that exposes the power imbalance in Iranian gender dynamics. Baba helps Nayeri with her homework and expects her to earn a doctorate like her mother. He tells her to stand up for herself or else she will be forced into a submissive role. At the same time, he benefits from and ultimately stays in a society where men maintain dominance. Later, Nayeri tries to reconcile with her teacher and explain away Baba’s behavior. Understanding the realities of this society, the teacher explains that “the world is brutal for women” and tells her to never betray other women to men (41).

“They pointed to the horizon and said, ‘You see that light? That’s Greece. You’ll be there in half an hour in this modern boat. It was so expensive. Have trust.’ One smuggler controlled the main boat and the other followed in a dilapidated dinghy, promising to follow the fifteen refugees (including two children) the entire way as a safety measure.

Halfway to the island, the boat stopped. ‘Something is wrong with it,’ said the driver. He made a half-hearted attempt to check the controls. Then he said, ‘Everybody in the other boat. Hurry, we don’t want to get caught.’ The rest was so efficient, it was obviously rehearsed. The refugees were loaded into the old dinghy and shown the controls; then both smugglers jumped into the nice boat (now working again) and sped back to Turkey.”

Crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece is a common entryway to Europe due to Turkey’s porous borders and lax visa requirements, but refugees must trust smugglers who can either help them or betray them. Kaweh and others share stories about overcrowded boats that capsize or smugglers who leave them adrift for Turkey’s border control to capture. Majid and his family attempt the voyage three times, one of which traumatizes his son. The officers bring them to the border or place them in a detention facility. While the officers do not deport them directly to Iranian authorities, they will confiscate money, phones, and other valuables, and Turkish officials wouldn’t recognize Kaweh’s UNHCR asylum status. Between January 2015 and March 2016, more than one million refugees attempted this journey, which has intensified nationalist rhetoric and gatekeeping. (Clayton, Jonathan. “More Than One Million Refugees Travel to Grace Since 2015.” UNHCR, 16 Mar. 2016, www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/latest/2016/3/56e9821b6/million-refugees-travel-greece-since-2015.html.)

“We found a convenience store. Maman pulled on the door. It was closed. So was the next one. The streets were emptier than usual. Where was everyone? Then Maman remembered: it was Ramadan; the Muslim world was enduring a month of prayer and daytime fasting. Living in our own timeless fog, our world reduced to a room and a restaurant and a public pool, we had forgotten the Muslim calendar altogether.”

Nayeri’s family regularly traveled to the United Nations office in Abu Dhabi for asylum interviews, and the family couldn’t attend school or make any long-term commitments until they completed this process. This disenfranchisement eventually left them unmoored from events that others take for granted. With the children starving, Maman convinces a vendor to break fasting rules and let them eat in the pantry. Their disheveled appearance may have helped them in the interviews. However, this and Maman’s arrest for distributing Christian tracts demonstrate how the UAE remains a conservative Muslim country despite its vast wealth and tolerance of Western residents.

“Maman told me that in Hotel Barba, no one really knew anyone else’s situation. Maybe the shabby old man at the breakfast table was a brilliant professor. Maybe the red-clad woman humming in the yard was an heiress or a housemaid or a doctor with nimble fingers. Maybe she had escaped political or religious persecution. All we knew was that everyone was bored, watching each other, and why would you want to be their clown only to find out later that the squinting eyes fixed on you belonged to a president or a poet or a judge?”

Nayeri’s time in Hotel Barba makes her curious about others’ lives as a writer, but she is also witness to many experiences that offer insight into the desire for agency and new beginnings. With their highly constrained living situation, the hotel’s residents speculate about each other for entertainment, and there is eventually drama between a hardworking husband and his wife who tries to escape the camp with another man. Many people, including Nayeri, blame the woman, but some of the older women see her flight as an attempt to start fresh or escape the tedium of the facility. When Nayeri later returns to the hotel with her first husband, she recognizes what it means to be “the unhappy wife of a good man” and how escape carries a hope of agency (111).

“Since Hotel Barba, all waiting has been agony for me, and I’ve been obsessed with the idea of it. Why does it feel like an insult to wait for anything? Why does patience seem like one of those manipulative, sinister virtues invented to debase and subdue […] I look for answers in A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. Barthes says that waiting robs you of your sense of proportion. It plays out in scenes, in outbursts and calm, like waiting in a café for a lover to arrive. It is the ultimate indignity, to be made to wait; and power is to impose it. […] At Barba, we sensed the expectation as we waited: the unspoken chides of our native-born rescuers. The inconvenienced. Your life is no longer in danger. You could be more patient. You could behave.”

As a former refugee, Nayeri’s trauma recasts all enforced waiting as an experience of subjugation. The initial promise of a few days’ processing time for asylum can escalate into months. The Romanian woman’s escape and Maman’s travels through Italy are other ways of rebelling against this uncertainty. However, the asylum process feels purposefully dragged out as a power maneuver. Nayeri later highlights her experiences with her grandmother, whom Nayeri sees as has never having stopped waiting decades after her refugee experience.

“Now the skin inside my throat loosens, my body’s crude warning sign from my schoolyard days, at first grating, like an unreachable flap of skin, then maddening. I don’t want to be here. I have a home now; why did I return to this wretched limbo? […] What if I’m stuck at the airport? What if my passport gets stolen? What if I’m detained? Where is my Elena?”

Working with refugees is difficult for those with their own refugee experiences. Nayeri travels to LV Village with a clear purpose: to bring refugees’ stories to the United States and Europe to combat their nationalism. In addition, she seeks self-understanding—but such self-understanding requires re-experiencing old fears. A girl who refuses to leave her backpack reminds Nayeri of her own childhood fears, and she notes that she must resist an instinctual aloofness when sharing meals at the Isoboxes.

“‘Sir, if you tell them you’re from Iran, you’ll spend three months in Turkish prison,’ said the man. ‘The prisons here are spilling with Afghans and Iranians. Syrians are released, god knows why. You must say you’re Kurdish Syrian. […]’ He gave Majid Arab names to use. Then he said aloud, to those sitting near them, ‘No one will say this family is Iranian. They are Arab like us. Everyone here is Syrian. Understood?’”

After their first failed attempt to enter Greece by boat, Majid and his family are advised to lie about their nationality to avoid imprisonment. This discrimination likely stems from Turkey’s complicated involvement in the Syrian Civil War beginning in 2011. Iran supports Bashar al-Assad’s regime, while Turkey both backs anti-Assad forces and maintains a relationship with Russia, another Assad ally. Here, Majid’s experience demonstrates how asylum seekers are at the whim of complicated geo-politics and the favoritism of border control agents. (Gok, Gonca Oguz. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Turkey, Idlib, and the Syrian Civil War.” Australian Institute of International Affairs, 19 Mar. 2020, www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place-turkey-idlib-and-the-syrian-civil-war/.)

“Then I do something stupid. I say hello in Farsi, wish them a good day. They stare at me, stunned, say polite hellos. I realize I have punctured the brief fantasy of a normal life that Paul envisioned […] My intrusion into their private negotiations makes plain that they are part of a charade, that this is a charity shop. […] I beg the universe to rewind, so I am not the same as those Thanksgiving volunteers in New York, the ones whose help came at such high costs.”

This scene highlights how Nayeri often worries whether her humanitarian efforts come from the right motivations. One of LV Village’s goals is to give refugees a sense of dignity and normalcy through measures like a store that sells donations according to a points system, but volunteers are forbidden from communicating with refugees. Nayeri finds the Iranian couple’s conversations charming, but she learns the hard way that speaking to them breaks the illusion of the store. Her friendliness comes off as intrusion or even surveillance. The experience reminds her of volunteering with a group of New York financial workers, who volunteered mostly to feel good about themselves.

“[S]houldn’t wanting a better life be enough on its own? Isn’t being ‘underused’ in your twenties the greatest tragedy for the mind and the spirit? I would have considered it so, when I was studying at university and falling in love for the first time. Why should these men have to spend their lives idle and mediocre with no hope of accessing their potential? Isn’t a wasted life also a life that is in danger?”

Refugees are unfairly scrutinized for their justifications for resettling. For example, Majid vilifies the camps’ young men who mostly want economic opportunity or are troublemakers. This echoes Western attitudes about migrants living in the country illegally as wage-killing, criminal job stealers. Nayeri, however, engages in lively intellectual conversations at the men’s club, where many men enjoy poetry or other talents, like Darius’s tailoring, that would be wasted in their home countries. She questions why economic migrants should be ashamed of seeking a better life and considers what they might achieve if they had Westerners’ same inherited wealth and career advantages.

‘You want me to take her son?’ I’ve lost my filter. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘What other solution is there?’ Hajira says. ‘They’ve been running for fifteen years and they’re stuck here. Do you think you’ll find someone who’s suffered more?’ […] ‘If you don’t want him, drop him off in a camp in England. He will figure out what to do. He will learn English.’

[…] ‘That’s not what will happen,’ I say. ‘The camps are the same everywhere. It’s worse there, if you end up in detention.’

‘They will take unaccompanied minors,’ says Hajira. ‘The state will raise him. He will have an English education and human rights.’”

When Hajira asks Nayeri to take Taraa’s son, Naser, with her to England, she exhibits a desperation that Nayeri recognizes as common to many refugees. Taraa and Valid have endure much: the Taliban’s threats, the car crash that kills two of their children and leaves Taraa’s body mutilated, and the further injuries she suffers from another assassination attempt. This amassed hardship helps Nayeri understand the family, whose plea comes from refugees’ common hope that any former refugee has the means to help and that their troubles will end once outside the camps. Yet even as Nayeri refuses the request, she thinks of ways to sneak Naser into England. Guilt stricken, she then refuses Valid’s dinner invitation.

“Sometimes Maman complained of slights and insults from Americans, people at work telling her that she didn’t pay attention.

‘Maybe you didn’t listen hard enough,’ I said. ‘You have to learn English, listen hard.’

[…] Once or twice, I heard about technicians who harassed her, or blamed her for their mistakes, and I chastised her.

‘You probably made a mistake,’ I said.

It took willful blindness on my part, since the children of these same people teased me constantly in school. They called me cat-eater, terrorist, sand-n******, camel-f*****. But I refused to believe that the world operated this way. The adult world was my sole hope for the future—it had to function as a pure meritocracy.”

In Dubai and the Hotel Barba, Maman presents the West as a land of opportunity where gender does not limit opportunities. As a result, Nayeri expects her mother to use her doctorate education to quickly establish the family in America with a big house. Instead, Maman ends up in low-level jobs under less-credentialed managers who mock her accent. Nayeri blames her mother for her failure to fit in even though she herself endures harassment from classmates who learn the slurs from their parents. In addition to its racism, Oklahoma’s culture is also hostile towards ambitious and independent women. This drives Nayeri to pursue a scholarship to Harvard to escape Oklahoma’s oppressive culture, she will later realize that anti-immigrant and misogynistic attitudes pervade even elite institutions.

“He presented his papers, his photos at KDPI headquarters, articles he had written, his acceptance by UNHCR. They asked a thousand rapid-fire questions: What is your name, date of birth, who are your parents, siblings, where did you grow up, how much schooling do you have, why did you leave Iran, what did you do for the party, why did you leave the party, what did you do in Turkey, why did your asylum claim fail there?

‘Why didn’t you move to another part of Iraq?’ the officer asked.

Tired and frustrated, Kaweh said, ‘By another part of Iraq, do you mean the territory controlled by Saddam Hussein?’ She nodded. ‘If Saddam Hussein is such a nice person,’ Kaweh snapped, ‘why did you attack him?’”

Kaweh’s interview experience shows how asylum seekers must tailor their storytelling to the tastes of their host country. He completed a two-hour asylum interview in 2005, two years after a US-led coalition began its war in Iraq, and his political experience gave him an edge: He understood that the interview was “a game of logic” that required honesty and detail (200). However, interview questions are designed to catch contradictory statements, and this frustrates Kaweh, who becomes argumentative. Although he would gain asylum and become an asylum lawyer himself, Kaweh regrets snapping back in an “arrogant Iranian style” or answering a question with another question (199).

“[Kambiz] jumped on a train to Amsterdam, stopping at a shop to buy a box of lighter fuel. He stood in the center of Dam Square, the fast-beating heart of the city, surrounded by cafés, watching tourists and local workers pass by. A family of pigeons pecked at the ground near his feet, and he thought, even the birds have a corner of this city to make a family. He lifted the container over his head, dousing his hair and clothes. He didn’t wait long enough for anyone to notice or question him. He said a prayer, and when he was clear of bystanders, he said goodbye to his mother and sisters and lit a match.”

Kambiz’s public death forcibly spotlights the Netherlands’ mistreatment of refugees, which government officials deny. He spent nearly a decade living in the Netherlands without documentation, preventing him from establishing the roots that he wanted: a home and family to call his own. Additionally, he followed others’ advice only to endure a spirit-breaking year in detention and lost documents. While the public has largely forgotten the suicide, the death is key to igniting Nayeri’s interest in the current refugee plight.

“It was a boot to the gut. I felt like I was dropped in front of a tribunal of asylum officers, unhappy white men openly hating me for coming in and taking too much, wanting too much, their birthrights. Now they would tear up my passport and send me back. I raged at the gall of the man—an Armenian from Iran should know better. Casting doubt as if there is no universe of unseen and unrecorded favors and threats. As if, in Iran, only the guilty are hanged. As if every credible threat of death is recorded in triplicate at the ministry of intelligence. Memory is a tricky thing, I thought, but I have albums, I have vivid scenes in my mind, I have trinkets I carried in a backpack across the ocean. My life happened—how dare they question that.”

Unjust skepticism seems to press from all directions upon refugees’ lived experiences. Some in the Persian exile community (including an Armenian “talking head of sorts”) doubt Nayeri’s story (219). Their incredulous questions include why an educated woman would be foolish enough to distribute Christian tracts, why the Iranians government didn’t punish Maman more severely, and why an official would grant free passports to a dentist’s fugitive family. These questions ignore Iran’s custom of off-the-books favors and threats, and Maman’s story was undoubtedly not a cover for economic immigration when she remained a devout Christian years thereafter and gave up a life of comfort for poverty. Despite the logical soundness of Nayeri’s story, she is nevertheless deeply destabilized by such chronic invalidation; she “obsessed” over these accusations for years (221), and she had nightmares of others deporting her.

“Iranians like symbols and metaphors. Lies aren’t lies if they point somewhere. And you can signal your trauma and shame with a pointed ‘this isn’t something for saying.’ Try that on a Dutch asylum officer who asks, ‘Why did you run?’ Sometimes traumatized Iranians speak in generalities. ‘The government is corrupt. They’re murderers. I cannot say more. Please.’ So, the Dutch officer decides you’re lying; he won’t change his mind. The English and the American will give you a few seconds more. In Iran, our literature is winding and dramatic. We bury the lede. We flourish and twist. The Dutch and Germans see these as markers of deception—in the Western world, literary critics condemn these techniques as false.

At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, experts instruct fiction writing for Western audiences: Writing should be true to life, but implausible details should be left out; the story should begin in the middle of events and depict a clear life change. In contrast, Iranian storytelling often begins with “the creation of the universe” (229)—which disadvantages refugees in asylum interviews, wherein interviewers disdain dramatics and philosophy. Moreover, such narrative stipulations vary by nation: Americans want inspiring success stories, while Dutch officials latch onto factual inconsistencies to invalidate applications. A refugee must therefore tell a story “worthy of The New Yorker” to an unsympathetic audience (229).

“I swear I want to gather these stories and make a play of them. I used to joke that if a rapist comes, it’s best to ask, ‘Please, sir, take me into a room alone for the rape. Please single me out.’ Then you’ve got a hope. But group rape won’t help you.”

Officers will bend over backward to deny a refugee’s claim for asylum. Ahmed Pouri shares a story of a Kurdish girl who was a victim of a group rape. Despite her horrific situation, the officials denied her claim because she was one of many victims and not specifically targeted—even though the rapists clearly targeted the minority Kurdish village. Officials apply this same logic elsewhere: A journalist who was actively criticizing the government has a better chance than one who just knows friends who are dying; an LGBTQ refugee must perform a degrading stereotype and answer invasive questions to prove their sexuality. Nuance is the enemy.

“We can lie in service of our formative story, but not in opposition to it. Even the most open-minded struggle to accept a point of view that goes against their center of identity. ‘It’s like recent critiques of Cartesian foundationalism. Scholars argue that you can have a set of certainties that determine the place from which you head out. Those certainties cannot be touched. They form your worldview. Changing those means radically changing how you think.’”

The Ungrateful Refugee presents themes of truth and identity, and shows how these things become especially complicated for a refugee. Nayeri tells Pooyan about Houshiar, who failed to obtain asylum for Christianity and may fare better if he claims he is gay. However, Houshiar denies this sexual orientation. Pooyan tells Nayeri that even if Houshiar were gay, he couldn’t accept it because doing so would defy a foundational part of his identity—a change that would alter his worldview. This recalls Kambiz, who refuses to apply as a Christian or gay man even though such applications often fair better. While personal truths form a cornerstone of identity, however, they also vary among cultures: For example, the Dutch believe in internal faith, while refugee converts often prioritize adherence to ritual. Additionally, Pooyan’s mother does not see truth in Nayeri’s first novel—one of a good, assimilated refugee.

“UNHCR data show 68 million displaced people in the world. Of these, 40 million are internally displaced, 25 million are refugees, and 3 million are asylum seekers. But, these numbers don’t specify that most refugees go to neighboring countries. Only a few million try for Europe, and yet, everyone thinks that Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq are emptying into the West. In 2017, the twenty-eight European Union countries had 650,000 first-time asylum seekers. That’s 1,270 per million people in the population, or one refugee per thousand natives. Europe turned away more than half of those. The other half became EU refugees—adding one refugee per roughly two thousand in population for that year. Put another way, you’d need to go to four massive weddings or two graduations or a small concert to encounter a single new refugee.”

The media frames refugee immigration as a “deluge or flood or swarm” (262), and this distortion is common in Europe regarding the Middle East, and in the United States regarding victims from Mexico, Central America, and Afghanistan. Yet the West only receives a trickle of these displaced people—not the culture-threatening masses that nationalists complain about—and Nayeri feels it’s the West’s responsibility to accept those in danger, not only as the largest consumers of world resources but as frequent actors in the very conflicts driving these crises. Nevertheless, it’s the refugee who endures extensive questioning and whose credibility is unfairly undermined by their traumatized desperation. Meanwhile, people unquestioningly embrace nationalist rhetoric because it rains from positions of privilege.

“I called it ‘my great project,’ but only in the privacy of my mind, because it wasn’t just about college, and I didn’t want to hurt my mother any more than I already had. I didn’t want her to know that it was her fate I wanted to escape. Our flight was still so fresh, and the thought that I too could lose everything I had worked for, my entire identity as a smart, capable girl, and be looked down on by ordinary people was like waking to the lid of a coffin sliding shut, like catching a glimpse of a boulder rolling atop it as the light slivers out. I needed a way to protect myself from that fate—my brilliant Maman, all her squandered years of study. My great project was about transforming, becoming someone unrelated to Iran, my family, my dramatic circumstances. It was about proving my worth in every sphere: body, mind, spirit. It was about sitting on a perch from which I could judge Oklahoma the way it had judged my mother.”

Nayeri struggles with her own identity as a refugee. After resolving to attend Harvard, Nayeri pursues a slew of impressive academic and extracurricular credentials to bolster her admissions. Her main motivation is to prove her oppressors wrong; she pictures Sepâh officers, sexually predatory pastors, and school bullies as she pursues her goals. She also wants to escape the fate of her mother. Looking back now, however, Nayeri has a new perspective—Maman’s dialect is beautiful, and it’s wrong to disown her heritage. Refugees often obsess with rules because they no longer trust their instincts, and Nayeri relates her efforts to a child who refuses to stray from a recipe’s instructions.

A sign says Integration, not multiculturalism! It might as well say don’t stop time! Refuges will assimilate just as surely as time will pass. Some will live for three decades as if they’re in the home country, then call it a done deed when they enjoy their first bite of Marmite or peanut butter. Others will be indistinguishable from their hosts in a year or two. Most will become chameleons, able to go back and forth. But whatever their place on the spectrum, assimilation begins in unseen places. […] No one wants to transform. And yet no one can avoid it—we alter with every breath.”

Nayeri passes a sign from the nationalist, anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party. Native Western citizens expect refugees to assimilate overnight. While refugees’ reformed conduct can first appear fake, most new behaviors are challenging until they become habit. Nayeri compares this to religious conversion: St. Augustine’s desire for a prolonged conversion, William James’s acceptance of instantaneous conversions, and Maman’s likely unnatural first prayer to Jesus. Nayeri feels that foundational life aspects can’t change so rapidly, and she wonders what her own moment of change was.

“‘Train us, don’t detain us!’ one said, her accent thick and melodic, a hard emphasis on the rhyme. Though the ladies were prone to bouts of elation, no one laughed at that. ‘Yes!’ they said. Others chimed in. ‘I have a brain,’ said one woman. ‘Why can’t I use it here? I am being wasted.’ Others wanted to ask MPs about the cruelties at Yarl’s Wood detention center, or the use of the National Health Service (NHS) to root out undocumented immigrants. ‘If I am sick, treat me! Don’t try to find my status. My status is that I’m sick.’ Most wanted freedom, a status so they could begin living.”

The students in an intersectional feminism class rally against the injustices they suffer in the United Kingdom. The class’ goal is to empower refugee and “undocumented” women (304), many of whom suffer at detention facilities or fall into an exploitative economy of underground housekeeping, childcare, and sex work. Nayeri remembers the greatest lesson she gained from her mother: that she is valuable beyond what she can offer men. Rather than advising immigrants to fulfill their host nation’s expectations, Nayeri wants refugees to become capable and take risks without shame.

“A young woman sat up when I mentioned that I would divorce soon. The table shifted a little, as they glanced at each other, leaned forward: they knew that, as an American, divorce wouldn’t devastate my life, but a woman owning up to it so gleefully was absurd. I wasn’t gleeful; I wanted to perform my Americanness, and I wanted to show disdain for sexist Iranian ways. ‘It was a good first marriage,’ I said. ‘Maybe my next will be an Iranian Javad.’ I giggled at my own joke […] They didn’t laugh. Why didn’t they laugh? Had I offended? None were that kind of Iranian. Maybe I was being too much again—why did being around Iranians turn me into a fanged and skinless monster, striking and retreating and afraid of my own shadow?”

Nayeri’s painful experience with other Iranians reveals her fragmented sense of self as it results from compulsory assimilation. Following her college career and divorce, she feels that she abandoned her Iranian heritage in her quest to become a perfect American and joined a group of Iranian medical students. Her good times with them carry a tinge of awkwardness: She enjoys speaking in Farsi, but her accent is nearly gone. She jokes about Javads (the Iranian version of a hipster) without realizing that her friends feel too close to the stereotype for comfort. Eventually, Nayeri realizes she is performing in “new exile theater” with people who are still adjusting to new lives (317). She distances herself from them, a decision that she questions today. But even happy immigrants are traumatized in some manner, and every new interaction will change them as they become part of society.