Aria

Jasmine is a cancer specialist and single mother in Seattle, long estranged from her Iranian parents and heritage. When faced with the sudden accidental death of Aria, her five-year-old daughter, she finds little solace in the healing advice she’s prescribed to her patients and their families. Lacking spiritual scaffolding or comforting rituals to cope, Jasmine buys a one-way ticket around the world. Along the way she writes letters: to her three greatest loves, all now dead, and to her devoted friends who encourage her to return home.

This deeply spiritual novel is the record of Jasmine’s journey inward and a moving celebration of the fundamental elements of life: of planting maize in Guatemala, of silent meditation in the mountains of Tibet, and of the rituals of grieving in Iran. It is only when Jasmine, this modern American woman, connects with her ancient heritage that she can finally heal.

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In this epistolary novel, a woman travels the world, trying to come to terms with her grief.  Jasmine's parents immigrated to the USA from Iran so she could have a big life.  She is now a successful oncologist, but has been disowned by her parents for "living in sin" with the man who became the father of her child.  When her child dies, she travels the world, looking for some way to make meaning out of disaster, ending up with her family in Iran.

Chapter I
 4 Tir 1369
June 25, 1990
Yasaman Azizam,
 Your letter broke our hearts. Baba does not sleep anymore. Truthfully, neither do I. He walks around the house at night like a sleepwalker searching for something he has lost. I tell him you are a grown woman. Thirty-five years old! You have your own life now, but in my heart this does not change anything. I say this only to make him feel better. You do not understand that no matter how old you are or how accomplished, you are still our only child, our baby joon. Nothing can change that. You are our love and our life even if we are far away. I do not know if you can really understand the strength of our love for you until someday, insha’Allah, you become a parent yourself. The love between parent and child is unequal. You can never love your parents more than they love you.
 You may be American born, but, azizam, you are one hundred percent Irani in your blood and have been brought up in our culture. How can you disgrace yourself and your family by living with this Justin fellow before a proper marriage? How can you be so selfish and not think about your parents, who have sacrificed everything to bring you into this world? I want to tell you to not let him take away your precious jewels, that you should save yourself for your husband, but I think it is too late for that now. So I want to scream this now at my daughter, I want to shake you into listening to your mother, but what is the use? Your father, who cannot keep any secrets, even when he swears to keep them upon the grave of his mother, has not told a word of this to our family here. That is how ashamed we are.
 Who is this character Justin, anyway? Who has tricked you into letting him move into your life? You tell me he is a high school teacher as if I should be proud. My dear lady doctor, you have the highest graduate degree possible. You went to the top schools. Do you not think that it is a step down to be with a man who does not have an MD or a Ph.D.? You need a man who is your equal, someone to challenge your brilliant mind. In my heart, I always hoped you would find a nice Iranian boy as good as yourself, but I did not let myself pray too hard for this. And I never dreamed you would be with a man from a broken family. Nobody recovers from the trauma of divorced parents. You say he is a wonderful man, kind, generous, and loving. I hope, azizam, that this is true. I hope he is worthy of you and makes you happy. But mostly I want to make sure he loves you enough to make the commitment of marriage. Joony, you should be thinking about having children at this age. Are you sure you are not wasting your time on a substandard man?
 Americans have such a romantic and unrealistic picture of marriage in their heads. They think they must fall in love before marrying a man. Do you not see that they have it all wrong? Love comes with time, with really knowing each other, with suffering through your differences. Do you think I loved your father when I married him? No! It took me years before I knew what love is. And now we have been married almost fifty years. Just look at the divorce rates in America. More than half of married couples break off their commitment, even when they have children who will surely suffer. Americans do not stick by things. They want everything to be happy and easy all the time. They do not understand that marriage first means compromise.
 Your father is an old man. This week, since your letter has arrived, I have seen him raise his fist in rage and protest this terrible situation as if he were a stubborn youngster again. “I do not care if she wins the Nobel Prize. Yasaman is a failure. She is dead to me if she never marries!” Maybe he is too harsh, your father. You have worked so hard all of your life, joony, but a part of what Baba says is true. No matter how great of a doctor you are, and I am sure that you are, you will always feel like a failure until you have a good husband and stable family life.
 I blame myself for this. I should have taken you home to Iran after you finished medical school. I should have kept a closer eye on you and not let you become so Americanized. Like a fool, I even changed your name from Yasaman to Jasmine to make it easier for the farangis to say. I was younger then, very naive. I did not realize that simple changes like that could forever take our daughter away from us.
 You must remember how much we gave up so that you could succeed. We left our friends, family, and country. Your father left his thriving business to make sandwiches in a deli and drive a taxi. He suffered the humiliation of being treated as a dirty, uneducated immigrant. I changed diapers and wiped the bottoms of retarded children left in institutions to pay our infertility doctors’ bills. I, who had never had to work a day in my life, was raised in a house of servants, and taught English and French to private students just to keep myself busy.
 Having a child was the only thing missing from our lives. We had the perfect life in Iran, except for you. We sold everything to come to the United States, so that we could have the best doctors. You cannot imagine the embarrassment we went through for this problem. Your father felt that he was not a real man or proper husband before making me pregnant. Everyone blamed me for not being able to carry out my wifely duties. Some backward relatives of your father’s even suggested he get a second wife. We had to make our problem a public matter when we filed the papers for immigration. Afterward we went through so much testing, all the humiliating questions the doctors asked us. But we were very determined from the start. And after thirteen years of marriage, God finally brought you to us. But now I see our prize and joy destroyed because we left you in that immoral country alone.
 Thank goodness your father cannot write English, and for once I am happy that you cannot read Farsi. As hard as these words sound to you from your own mother, know that your father would be one thousand times harsher. So listen to me, dokhtaram. Whatever you do, do not let yourself become pregnant with this Justin fellow unless you marry him. I beg you, do not mention his name again or remind us about your living situation. We are dying of embarrassment here and no one knows your dirty secret. Imagine if your uncles find out or if Mamani Joon, God rest her soul, had known about this before she died. Please do what I say. Know that we want the absolute best for you in this ife.
 
 Your maman loves you.
 
February 19, 1997Aria Talahi Avery, 5, of Seattle died on February 17 in a motor vehicle accident. She was a kindergarten student at Lakeview Elementary. She is survived by her mother, Dr. Jasmine Talahi, Clinical Associate Professor of Oncology at the University of Washington. Memorial service to be held on South Beach, Discovery Park, on February 23 at 2 P.M. In lieu of flowers, donations accepted to Committee to Help Iranian Children & Orphans, c/o Nahid Kashef, PO Box 9347, Bellevue, WA 98004.
February 25, 1997
 
Dear Maman,
 Might your resentment and detachment dissolve if you hear what tragedy has befallen your daughter? Or perhaps you will feel vindicated? My precious daughter, Aria, the love of my life, the product of my joyful union with Justin, has been killed. You have been robbed of a granddaughter.
 
Dear Mother,
 My daughter, Aria, has died. Perhaps you will feel this is my due for living in the modern world, for rejecting my strict Muslim upbringing. You never reached that point of acceptance as a parent where you let your child fly with the wings and roots you provided. No, you never trusted me nor understood m

For many reasons, second-generation Iranian American Assefi's novel should make for an impressive debut. About the death of a young girl and the resulting grief of her Iranian American mother, this epistolary but not always chronological novel cleverly juxtaposes events for maximum for character revelation. There is the fascinating exposition of the story of the mother, Jasmine, who grew up with strict Iranian parents but lives an American's life in Seattle as a cancer specialist and single mother. There is even a descriptive journey across the world, from Guatemala to Tibet to Iran, where Jasmine lives out her grief. Yet Aria fails in the most fundamental way—it does not sufficiently capture grief, as did Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking , through which readers could feel Didion's consuming sorrow over the loss of her husband. This could be a very good novel about immigration and of the pressure of failed parental expectations, but it is too cluttered and has too many focuses to be about this sort of all-encompassing loss. Not recommended.—Shalini Miskelly, Highline Community Coll. Lib., Des Moines, WA

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Devastated by the accidental death of her five-year-old daughter, Aria, and still mourning for Aria's father, Justin, who died months before Aria's birth, Iranian-American Yasaman (Jasmine) Talahi embarks on a somber voyage of grief, with mixed results for Assefi's debut. From Arizona's Sonoran desert to the maize fields of Guatemala (where Aria's father had been a Peace Corps worker) to the holy places of Tibet, Jasmine, an oncologist schooled in rationality, searches for the spiritual enlightenment that might bring about her own healing. In the end, her yearlong odyssey brings her to Iran and to her parents, who reject her modern American lifestyle and with whom she has not spoken since before Aria's birth. Assefi, herself an Iranian-American physician, employs an awkward epistolary format, having Jasmine write to Aria, to Justin, to her long-dead grandmother, to friends and an ex-lover (some of whom write back). The letters are often stiffly formal, and the background information reads as forced. But Assefi's themesâ€"loss as physical distance and the spiritual harm that can result from solitary grievingâ€"come through. (May)

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