Remembering Sept. 11

My dad is from Iran. He was born and raised in the fast-paced capital city of Tehran and moved to the United States in 1978 at the age of 24 to attend college in the Bay Area. He studied architecture.

I am from California. I was born in Oakland, Calif., but have bounced back and forth between the Bay Area and Northern Utah for quite some time.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was a 14-year-old sophomore at Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek, Calif., living with my dad at the time. He did his usual thing getting ready in the morning: placing roughly three to four slices of Afghan bread – a flat, oval-shaped bread also known as Naan baked in a tandoor oven – into the toaster.

Cream cheese, feta cheese and walnuts are traditional staples of an Iranian breakfast and usually accompany the bread. And tea. There’s always tea. The table was all set.

My dad was tying his tie, pressing his shirt and slacks. I was running late for school. I had hopped in the shower when I heard my dad scream.

I grabbed a towel, flung the door open and ran to the living room.

It wasn’t evident at the time, but the next 10 years would be different. For everyone.

“Oh my God,” my dad said. “I can’t believe it.”

There was a gaping hole in one of the World Trade Center towers. My dad and I had been in downtown New York City exactly a month earlier visiting close family friends. We had waltzed right past the World Trade Center.

Watching the chaos unfold, he said, “You will remember this day for the rest of your life.”

I do.

I remember second-period gym class, listening to the radio. None of the exercise equipment was in use. A group of 40 or so students was quietly listening, waiting for what would happen next. I remember seventh-period Spanish class, watching CNN. I remember seeing a man fall to his death on live television.

I also remember my mom calling me from her home in Wasatch County. She called after school that day and told me something I didn’t quite understand.

“I was at the grocery store,” my mom said. “And people were asking me where your dad is from. They were wondering if he had anything to do with the attacks back east.”

My parents divorced when I was five. My mom is pure Irish. She grew up in San Mateo, Calif., a suburb of San Francisco.

Before I began pinballing between the Bay Area and Northern Utah, I attended elementary school in Albany, a neighbor city to Berkeley. It seemed every country in the world was represented in my classes each year.

So it came as a shock when I heard people were honestly wondering if my dad had anything to do with the worst terrorist attacks the country had ever experienced.

Were they serious? I was, at first, afraid to tell my dad because I knew it would hurt him just to hear it.

But truth is, he’d already heard it all before. Going to college in California during the Iran Hostage Crisis, his favorite story of blind and accidental racism was about a classmate who was jumped because a group assumed he was Iranian. Turned out his friend was American – born and raised – and of Irish descent.

While he didn’t admit it 10 years ago, he was hurt because this time around it centered around his son. My dad came to the U.S. at the right time, just prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Funny thing is, my dad isn’t Muslim and, as the youngest son of eight children, he told my grandfather at age 14 he was done with religion.

In the weeks and months following Sept. 11, there were a number of anti-Islamic attacks in the Bay Area. Hate crimes grew increasingly prevalent. Even in the Bay Area, at a predominately Caucasian high school in Walnut Creek, tensions were high.

Suddenly, racial slurs were increasingly used-and tolerated. I was called names.

The world was changing. Flying on an airplane swiftly became more interesting. Second and even third looks came my way. Airline personnel asked about the origin of my last name.

I was raised not to take things too seriously and not let the pokes and prods get to me. And that turned out to be a benefit. When I came back to Utah for visits right after Sept. 11, I was asked questions about my dad by friends and their parents. I was asked about my trip to Iran in 1998 and what I did there.

I knew, and as my dad had reassured me, people were scared and they didn’t know how to react.

In the 10 years since Sept. 11, I have been affected by the aftermath in more than one way. My best friend from high school was killed in Balad, Iraq, on April 4, 2007. Always a goofball, Pfc. Jim Coon would always joke around about my ethnicity. He never meant any ill will; it was just the way he operated.

He didn’t know what else to do beside enlist in the Armed Forces. He was sick of junior college and wanted to get out of the Bay Area.

In one of his last e-mails before he died, Jim apologized about having used racial slurs, jokingly or not. He said war was not what he expected.

“I want to come home,” he said.

A couple weeks later, the jovial 6-foot-6 punter on the football team was dead.

If I have learned anything in the 10 years following Sept. 11, 2001, it’s that it is important to pick and choose what you want to take personally. I still make the occasional quip to coworkers, unfairly putting them on thin ice if they say anything resembling a racial comment. But I do it without malice.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that being who you are and where you come from is important, no matter what conflicting comments come your way.

I am Iranian. I am Irish. I am American.

Christopher Kamrani is the sports editor of The Park Record.