Funny In Farsi By Firoozeh Dumas

At one point or another, everyone experiences an embarrassing moment in their lives. It could be as simple as falling in the hallway while going to the next class, or it could be a student having their mother tag along on their first day of first grade. The latter option mainly pertains to a young girl, Firoozeh Dumas. In the memoir, Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas, Firoozeh talks about her childhood and how she moves to America from her hometown Abadan, Iran. As a young child who does not speak any English with her mother who also does not speak English, miscommunications will lead to embarrassing misunderstandings for Firoozeh and her family. On Firoozeh’s first day of elementary school, her father thinks that he should have his wife accompany his daughter to learn as she did not have a chance to back in Abadan. Both Firoozeh and her mother do not speak a single word of English. As a result, Firoozeh experiences a rather embarrassing moment when her mother cannot find Iran on a global map. Later in her …show more content…
A new student arrives with her mother, both of which do not speak English. The students are dumbfounded to see Firoozeh’s mother fail to locate Iran. Firoozeh later says, “Now all the students stared at us, not just because I had come to school with my mother, not because we couldn’t speak their language, but because we were stupid” (6). Firoozeh is more upset on the fact that her mother cannot point out Iran on a map leading her peers to think that Firoozeh and her mother are unintelligent. In short, since Firoozeh cannot speak any English, her peers think of her as a bizarre human being from another planet that speak a foreign language, where children have strange names, and where mothers go with their children to elementary school as they the mothers are too foolish to know anything at