Being an immigrant from Iran has never been a cakewalk. From the moment I landed in the United States as a 6-year-old in the late 1970s, I had to navigate a world where my “people” were the bad guys and I had to represent them on the playground.

While Chinese-Americans had Bruce Lee and Italian-Americans had Rocky Balboa, I had Ayatollah Khomeini and the hostage crisis. What a way to make friends! I came to resent anything having to do with my Iranian background, including one of the oldest Persian traditions celebrated annually by my loud immigrant family, the Persian New Year, or Nowruz.

Nowruz, which translates to “new day” and falls on the exact moment of the spring equinox, is surrounded by many rituals and celebrations. Each year, my grandparents would set up a table called a haft sin with items symbolizing hopes for the new year, including a plate of lentil sprouts (which looked like grass), a mirror, an apple and even a goldfish. My American friends who came over would inevitably ask me what these items were for:

“Dude, why do you have a goldfish surrounded by grass and an apple?”

“It’s for our new year … we’re from Iran … no, we’re not terrorists!”

Because Nowruz happens at the same moment around the world, some years it would fall at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday in California, where we lived, so my dad would wake us up to scream New Year’s greetings to distant relatives in Iran. (We screamed because the phone lines were so old they sounded like tin cans connected by a string.) When I asked my dad why we couldn’t wait and call these people at a normal hour, he would drop Iranian etiquette lessons on me:

“Son, in our culture, if you let them call you before you call them, it’s an insult.”

“So does that mean we should be insulted that they didn’t call us first?”