In my early years, my father and I were partners in crime. Every night I would wait for him on the stoop of our house in Isfahan, Iran. I would tease him by greeting the melons and sour cherries hidden in his coat before saying hello to him. We would sneak ice cream together, eating it with spatulas in the bedroom so my mother wouldn’t see. I walked barefoot on his aching back. I was always on his lap at dinner tables. I have his chin, his eyes, his smile that looks as if it belongs on a six-year-old’s face.

In 1987, when I was eight, my mother, brother, and I escaped our home. My father was rooted to his childhood village, and, when we found out that it was harder for entire families to leave together, he stayed behind. On our way to the airport, we were driven past my father’s dental office so we could wave goodbye to a darkened figure in a third-floor window. My encounters with him since then have been brief; I’ve seen my father four times in thirty years, for a total of forty days, give or take. The first visit was in Oklahoma, a year into our American asylum. I was eleven and everything had changed. I had lived in refugee hostels. I had learned English and endured the South. I refused to let him touch me or kiss me. This must have stung the most—he is a hugger, a kisser. He wanted to pick me up and wave me around like he used to do, to squeeze my face and bite my cheek and check my teeth. I hardly said hello, arms crossed over my very American T-shirt. At that age, all I wanted was to disappear, but this stocky, red-haired, mustachioed man had shown up ready to experience America loudly. He ate ice cream twice a day, counted the price of everything by the number of root canals he would have to perform to earn it. Despite our shared bookishness, he laughed at the intensity of my ambition to go to Harvard or Yale. He offered pistachios to the plumber. Though we lived in a small town, he found Iranians with whom to drink and recite poetry until the early hours. He bought us season passes to a local waterpark, where he spoke loud, boisterous Farsi and flashed a wad of cash wrapped in a rubber band. He stood shirtless by his deck chair, hands on hips, pale body covered in red hair, surveying the place. When he asked me to apply sunscreen to his back, I gave him a few cursory dabs and stopped the instant the stuff started to foam.

Later, as we ate lunch on the balcony of a rib joint, I noticed a teen-ager loitering near our table. Without a word, my father got up, gave him two cigarettes, and returned to the table and tore open his daily Twinkie. Later, when I caught the same kid trying to jimmy open our locker, I realized Baba had been giving loose bills and cigarettes to gangs of teen-agers in exchange for beach chairs and towels and errands. I was mortified. Soon, he became addicted to one of the scarier waterslides, one that included a second of free fall. “That slide is like a shot of whiskey,” he said as he breezed by us. But Baba had a taste for stronger substances, and, even in a foreign town, he knew where to look. On the last day before he left, I found him in a trance, slumped on the bathroom floor, sweating through his shirt, his eyes far away.

The second time he visited, I was fourteen and had adopted a rigorous Tae Kwon Do practice as part of my Ivy League entrance strategy. I never smiled. I baffled him. My brother kept protesting about his cigarettes. Neither of us asked about Iran. Baba was older, of course. His age was jarring—his bulbous nose, the unnatural arc of his back, his varicose veins and hashish smell. I saw more clearly the risks he took, the smuggled caviar and pipes sewn into his suitcase lining, the phone calls to random Iranians who lived nearby, the foggy spells. I kept my distance and hushed him when he spoke Farsi.

He took us to a restaurant called Shogun, and when he started on the sake I demanded to go home. He said, “Next time, before I visit, maybe I should stop in Dallas for a brain disinfection and stomach pump, to wash away all the embarrassing Iranian things.” Later, he asked why I had chosen to play a boy’s sport. I explained that fewer girls competing meant I could win more trophies and get into Harvard. “Huh,” he said. And then, “Enjoy this life, Dinajoon.” He downed more sake. A few days later he brought home some nails. “These are to nail down your good name,” he said, “So you can stop worrying about misplacing it all the time.”

Within a few days, he seemed exhausted by our piece of America. When my mother’s church tried to convert him, he said “O.K., I believe,” and let them baptize him the following Sunday. He made a good show of it, brandishing his Bible. In private, he said, “Dinajoon, this God business will mess you up. There are two things in life: science and poetry.”

In 2001, Baba tried to come to my college graduation. His visa application was rejected in both Dubai and Istanbul. In 2003, he tried to come to my wedding. That visa request also failed. I wrote to Hillary Clinton, explaining all my efforts and asking for help. An intern called me back and sent me to the U.S. immigration Web site. Secretly I was relieved, not in small part because we were now living in the age of suitcase scans. I left a seat empty for him at my wedding: place card, chocolate box, napkin.

The third time, we met Baba in London. I was twenty-five and my brother Daniel, twenty-two. Daniel had just graduated from N.Y.U. and was working in publishing. I had just left my job as a strategy consultant, at McKinsey & Company, working fifteen hours a day, to take a job as a strategic manager at Saks Fifth Avenue. I was a Princeton grad with a job managing people twice my age. I had just married my college boyfriend, a man who definitely thought his family was better than mine. I was proud, and insecure, and insufferable.

My brother and I were so preoccupied with our new lives in New York that we almost missed the fact that our father had brought his second wife and a two-year-old daughter to London. What did we have in common with an overindulged, fat little Iranian girl begging for Kit-Kats? We were children of asylum and borrowed books and multi-variable calculus, of the Socratic method and cram sessions and lecture halls and alumni grants. We had hard bodies and East Coast brains and pale-faced partners who believed in themselves and adored us for our neuroses. My new stepmother wore floral-print polyester, her toenails painted cherry red and a touch too long. Her daughter’s accent was atrocious. “Babajoon, stop calling her my sister,” I told my father. I asked him to enroll his daughter in an English class. He dropped his head, nodded, and said, “I hope one day, maybe with your new husband, you learn to enjoy this life.”

The next day, in the National Portrait Gallery, I started to panic—for many reasons. The only one I revealed to Baba was that I had accidentally taken an extra birth-control pill. “Is just hormones,” he assured me. Then he asked to see my pills. Before I could object, he had eaten one. “See? Now we both took one too many.”