More than just a place

Immigrants appear at a swearing in ceremony for U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by P_Wei for Getty Images)

I didn’t grow up in the United States, but America was never far from my childhood. The United States appeared everywhere in the Iran of the 1960s and 1970s. My school was modeled on the American system, American films were a mainstay, and American ideas – about individual freedom, modernity, women’s rights, and the possibility of shaping one’s own life – circulated freely in conversation, even when people disagreed with them. To Iranians like me, America was never just a place. It was an idea: powerful, confusing, admired, resented, and argued about.

That distinction – between the United States as an actual country and America as an idea – mattered then, and it matters today. America is what I would call an argument, one about power, freedom, authority, responsibility, and who gets to speak. What makes it unique is not that it gets these questions right, but that it insists that they remain open. 

When I arrived in the United States in 1974, I’d been shaped by a very different relationship to authority. The Iran I came from was not lawless – far from it. The state’s authority was pervasive and rules were learned early. But these rules were not necessarily trusted, and they rarely worked in the service of ordinary people. They were also arbitrarily enforced, making them something to navigate, endure, or outmaneuver.

As a freshman at Stanford University, what struck me almost immediately was how differently rules are treated in the United States – not as traps or tools of control, but as shared agreements. This was driven home while taking my first test as a college student. I could tell that the woman sitting next to me was struggling. So without thinking, I slid my test booklet toward her. She shook her head – firmly, quietly. There was no drama in the way she declined my offer to cheat, no self-righteousness, just a refusal. What struck me was not her moral superiority, but her obvious assumption that rules mattered, that they applied equally, and that honoring them was part of ordinary life here. I didn’t yet have the language to describe what I was seeing, but I felt it immediately. It was a clarity; not moral clarity, but structural clarity. It was a shared sense that the system, imperfect as it might be, should still be taken seriously. 

That clarity did not stay confined to small moments. I soon encountered it again, much less gently and far more publicly. One day, in a large lecture hall, a student stepped onto the stage and smashed a cream pie into a professor’s face. This was 1974, and, unbeknownst to me, “pieing” politicians and other public figures had become something of a fad. Shocked, I waited for the inevitable punishment. But the professor just calmly wiped his face, dismissed the class so he could clean up before his next lecture, and walked offstage. There was no immediate fallout.  

What startled me most about this moment was not the challenge itself, but the space made for it.  I began to understand that America was built not on obedience, but on friction – on the assumption that disagreement, even when clumsy or excessive, was a part of the system. Authority didn’t collapse when it was questioned; it simply absorbed the blow and moved on, and the system worked as intended. 

This part of America is the hardest to explain and the easiest to forget. It is not a myth of perfection or of moral purity. It is the idea that power must justify itself, repeatedly. Its legitimacy is never permanent. Authority in America must either earn its mandate again and again – or risk losing it.

Stanford also taught me about another key feature of the United States: openness to and trust in new ideas and new people. I saw this openness reflected in the ethnic- and identity-themed residences, houses, and centers that dotted campus, such as the Black House or the Gay and Lesbian Center. At these places, belonging was not assumed, it was articulated. These institutions allowed people to show up as they were, without having to check their true selves at the door.

I soon witnessed an even more powerful demonstration of America’s openness during the Iranian hostage crisis. In 1979, more than 100,000 Iranian students were studying in the United States. All of a sudden, we found ourselves guests in a country whose diplomats were being held hostage by a hostile regime. Thrown into an impossible situation, many of us tried to quietly disappear. 

Audience members at a Naturalization Ceremony at the George W. Bush Presidential Center on March 18, 2019. (Photo by Grant Miller)

I was looking for my first real job, however, and didn’t have that luxury. After eight interviews with the Burroughs Corporation (the second-largest computer company in the world at the time), I went with trepidation to their San Francisco, California, office to hear the verdict. The office was run by a man named Barney Pizzoli. He had every reason to hesitate; hiring a young woman of Iranian heritage in the middle of the hostage crisis for a sales and support job that required daily contact with customers was not an obvious choice. But he smiled broadly, made me an offer, and welcomed me in. It felt like a gift from the heavens.

Less than a decade later, when I took my oath of U.S. citizenship, I began to understand what made this kind of trust possible. My promise to “defend and protect the laws of the United States” was not a mere formality. Nor was I pledging allegiance to perfection. I was committing to a country that allowed disagreement, argument, and reinvention. The moment inspired me not just to live here as a beneficiary, but to want to take responsibility for the country’s future growth – not only economically, but socially and morally. I wanted to be accountable to the system that had put so much trust in me. 

And so, in 2004, I ran for Congress in Oregon – one way I would seek to repay that debt. Over the course of the campaign, the country would astound me yet again. During the Republican primary, my opponent attempted to make an issue of my Iranian heritage. But he ended up receiving more blowback than I did. 

Later, when I served as assistant secretary of state responsible for the bulk of U.S. public diplomacy, the U.S. Embassy in Paris invited me to meet with leaders from the Muslim North African communities on the outskirts of the city. During this meeting, the young activists I encountered struggled to understand how a woman of Iranian heritage could hold such a position – let alone take the time to visit with them. They told me that no French official, nor any official from any other country, had ever done so. 

As such experiences reminded me, America remains one of the rare places on Earth where belonging is not inherited but earned through participation; where trust is extended broadly enough to allow people to grow into responsibility; and where opportunity is made possible through openness, acceptance, and a willingness to take people at their word.  

It is why the idea of America still matters, after 250 years. And why, if we remain faithful to these ideals and principles, it always will.