The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (15 page)

The doctor, a friend of my cousin’s, spoke no English whatsoever, except for the medical terms he rattled off between sentences. He examined Khash at length, checking everything superficial from his height and weight to the circumference of his head (which I’d never seen done in New York). He checked the measurements off and gave us a sheet showing where Khash stood as measured against normal. Normal in Iran or normal in the West? we asked. In Iran, he said, or maybe Europe, excluding the head diameter. Khash was big, then, and his head growth normal by any standards.

We undressed Khash, removing his diaper, and the doctor poked and prodded. He kneaded his testicles until he cried, something I would have been concerned with back in the United States but oddly wasn’t in Tehran. Then he pronounced him healthy. “Also, magnificent circumcision,” he said admiringly. “Really beautiful.” Karri smiled, a little embarrassed, and I told him our Chinese American, female ob-gyn had performed it in the hospital under my watchful eyes. He was surprised and probably impressed that Khash was circumcised at all, given that his mother wasn’t Muslim, as far as he could tell. I explained that most boys are circumcised in the United States, to which he nodded knowingly. But these days, I added, there is somewhat of a trend not to circumcise. He looked a bit perplexed but said nothing.
Those wacky Americans
, he must’ve thought.

We bade him goodbye, promising to see him again in a few months, and went to pay the receptionist. I was expecting to fork over a decent sum and had my debit card ready, but when she told me it was 10,000 tomans, less than nine dollars, I paid cash, and we walked out in wonderment. Khash’s visit had cost less than the taxi
rides to and from the clinic. If the receptionist had said 100,000 rials to me, I would have probably mistakenly
thought
she meant tomans and been reasonably satisfied with the ninety-dollar charge.

Less than a week later Khash came down with a high fever. We called the doctor, and I described the fever. He said it was nothing to worry about, that it was in all probability a case of roseola, a virus that would show itself with a red rash on his body and face within a day or two. Karri looked it up on the Internet while I was still on the phone. “Baby Tylenol,” he said, “
American
Baby Tylenol—you can get it at a good pharmacy—is all you need, and it will go away in a few days.” Iranian acetaminophen was probably identical to any other, but genuine Tylenol, which gray market dealers had no problem importing into the country, conferred status, if not more confidence. But did the doctor need to see Khash? No, he told me, assuring me that my son would be fine. And sure enough, the red spots appeared and disappeared in a few days, and the fever was controlled by Tylenol. It was thankfully the only illness Khash suffered the entire time we lived in Tehran.

Those first days in our apartment, Karri depended on the Internet to ease her concerns about Khash’s illness, and I was relieved that the connection I’d hastily set up had so far proven reliable. Free, and I don’t mean monetarily, access to the Internet is a challenge for Iranians but one that they overcome with relative ease; for years I had availed myself of friends’ WiFi connections, mostly slow but some faster, and used their PCs with their filter-busting software. Ever since President Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, censorship of sites in Iran has outpaced the growth of Web pages, and Internet connection speeds have been inversely proportional to the advancements in technology, both mobile and static. That is, true broadband is but a dream for most users. While high-speed Internet has been available in Iran for years, until relatively recently most people, even President Ahmadinejad before he took office, used dial-up connections at home. Many still do, based on the number of “Internet cards”
sold at every news kiosk. These cards, in denominations of two or five dollars, have an ISP number to call and a scratch-off PIN code to enter; they buy a good number of minutes of browsing, minutes that are necessary given the speed with which pages load—if they’re not blocked, that is.

Once, during his first campaign for the presidency, Ahmadinejad was asked by a television reporter if he, as a hard-line conservative, had any intentions of limiting Internet access if he was elected. He responded with his trademark smile and amused look, saying that it was a ridiculous notion, given that he hardly had use of his home phone due to the number of hours his children spent surfing the Net. Using dial-up, clearly, in 2005.

Since then, companies offering DSL connections to home users have proliferated, and blazing speeds are advertised in papers and on billboards throughout Tehran. One ad, seemingly a takeoff on the Maxell cassette tape ads of the 1970s, portrays a man literally being blown away—as if by a hurricane-strength gust—by how fast his laptop is performing. Curious, since if Internet speed in Iran were analogous to wind strength, the Iranian on the billboard might barely feel the flapping of a butterfly’s wings. Perhaps it’s a cynical nod to state control over Iranians’ access to information, or maybe it’s just the Iranian predilection for gross exaggeration,
gholov
, that’s at play.

Technically, Iran could have fast Internet speeds everywhere—the various ayatollahs’ offices in Qom are equipped with fiber-optic cables—but during Ahmadinejad’s first term in office, somehow the decision was made that Internet speeds should be limited, for ordinary citizens, to 128K (a fraction of the capability of the network and of what Europeans, Asians, and Americans are accustomed to). Pornography is no fun at 128K; videos of fornicating couples, or of protesting citizens for that matter, are impossible to watch at that speed.

But to add insult to injury, even that maximum 128K exists at the whim of the government and seems rarely delivered to home
users, no matter which ISP they contract with. However, at offices and businesses, higher speeds are available and acceptable, so one way many Iranians get around the restriction for home use is to have a letter from their employer, or a friend’s employer, or anyone they know, certifying that he or she sometimes works from home; ISPs will happily accept such letters in order to provide real broadband speeds to users. Yes, beating the system is sometimes a collaborative affair. But somehow, they’re still never quite real broadband speeds, no matter who you know or what your business is.

I could have asked any one of my friends or family members to provide me with a letter that would get me high-speed Internet at our apartment, which I needed not for watching porn or protests but for holding Skype video chats and staying relatively current with the news back home. Karri needed it for working on her clothing business from afar, as well as for checking every little aspect of Khash’s growth progress, and potentially any maladies, against what various medical sites in the United States might say or recommend.

But instead of producing a letter for an ISP, I asked Mr. Bakhtiari, who as a hotel owner is entitled to provide his mostly foreign guests with Internet speeds that will not embarrass a regime that proclaims great scientific prowess, if his apartment building could connect to the network of one of his hotels nearby. Happy to oblige, he arranged for a wireless signal to be beamed to our router. (WiMax, a wireless broadband system, is popular in Iran, where cable lines and copper or optic fibers are rare, except in Qom.) We had thus established our apartment Internet connection easily.

But I still had to use, as most Iranians do, a VPN (virtual private network) in order to use Skype or to connect to censored sites, such as Facebook or Twitter, or even to the BBC, CNN,
The Guardian, Haaretz
, or the
New York Post
. Page Six was a daily treat Karri was unwilling to live without. In Iran, VPNs are available through various brokers whom everybody seems to know, and the rumor is that the government itself provides the service, or maybe the Revolutionary
Guards—everything seems to be attributed to the Guards, but given their reach and power, it is unlikely that they are
not
involved in the VPN business. I was reluctant to use an Iranian-provided VPN, since, if the rumor is true, then the government could also potentially monitor my Internet history. Instead I used a U.S.-based service I had signed up for in New York, whereby I was connected to a server in the city, and for all intents and purposes it would appear to the gods, and to the mullahs of the ether, that I had never left Brooklyn.

This was particularly important for us, since we were trying to keep our presence in Iran unknown to the American financial institutions we used. If we checked our bank accounts back home, or tried to pay a credit card bill, online from an Iranian IP address, our accounts would be frozen until we could prove we weren’t sanctions busters, something many an unwitting visitor to Iran has been accused of being. And if such a thing happened to us, it would be hard for us to make an appointment with our bank manager in New York to explain our reason for being in Iran. One time Karri, forgetting to log on with the VPN, went on her credit card Web site and typed in her user name and password, and as she hit enter, she suddenly realized she was identifiably in Tehran. Panic ensued. She closed her browser screaming, and both us of us worried for days that Chase Manhattan had discovered our presence well inside the axis of evil. Ironically, the slow speed of the Internet connection saved us, the one time we were grateful for its sedateness, as apparently she had logged off before the Web site had been able to verify her identity.

Even apart from the fact that the connection from our apartment to the hotel network seemed to fail almost as often as it worked, the Internet was a constant source of frustration for us. Despite supposedly having an exception to the 128K rule, the speed would vary wildly, and every day I imagined that someone with a big antique dial in an underground chamber somewhere in Tehran (sort of like in a scene from
Brazil
) would dial the speed up or down depending on instructions from the Ministry of Communication (a misnomer
if ever there was one) or, more likely, his own particular mood that day. Internet variability didn’t seem to bother other Iranians much; they took it in stride, and they are at any rate refreshingly blasé about not being permanently and inextricably wired to the world at large, or else they are simply accustomed to not multitasking or interrupting their nonvirtual routine thousands of times a day. But for us, and perhaps especially for Karri, not being connected to the outside world, for hours sometimes, often made us feel isolated from reality rather than the other way around, which is the way I suppose it really should have been, for our reality was now our Tehran home and the physical world right outside our door. In one sense, though, reality in Iran
is
the Internet, for without it and bootleg satellite television, Iranians would be isolated from real information that the censors, often arbitrarily, decide is inappropriate for citizens to have. Which is why VPN is an acronym that everyone in Iran understands, even if they don’t know what it stands for.

Vee-pee-en kar nemeekoneh
, “VPN isn’t working,” is an expression that can strike terror in Tehran. The authorities know well that almost everyone connected to the Net is connected via a VPN, whether it’s the government that is selling access or not, and VPNs suddenly and inexplicably stop working on certain days. Mine, set up in the United States, sometimes worked when Iranian ones didn’t, which led me to assume that the government could monitor theirs but not mine. Iran’s 17 million (yes,
17 million
) Facebook users, out of a total population of 70 million, are particularly incensed when they can’t log on to the social networking site; it’s a useful tool in a society where public expression is virtually forbidden and a virtual friend, boy-or girl-, is better than no friend at all. Checking out who is or isn’t a
duffi—
a “hot chick” in Iranian youth parlance and a word used by boys and girls alike—is somewhat easier if one can see photographs of would-be
duffis
sans hijab. And
duffis
can check out
puffis
, their male equivalents, with anonymity. (
Fench
, a term for younger
duffis
, high school age or younger, is sometimes used disparagingly or humorously
and not in a creepy way, for it is assumed that they are not yet sexually active.) That Facebook would be so widely used in Iran, particularly by the youth, was unsurprising to me, but it came as a surprise that even some conservative and older politicians, journalists, and influential figures had profiles on the site, beating their
own
system while they’re at it. (That the Supreme Leader now has his own Twitter feed and an Instagram account, to which his office posts flattering photos of him, only demonstrates the sheer hypocrisy inherent in the system.)

The Web site
KhabarOnline
is owned by the Larijanis, the most powerful conservative family in Iran: one brother is the speaker of Parliament, another is head of the judiciary, and a third an adviser to the Supreme Leader and head of Iran’s human rights commission. (Presumably he has very little to actually do, hence his active involvement in online media.) A few days after Karri and I moved into our apartment,
KhabarOnline
asked me if I would agree to be interviewed at their offices, at what they call Khabar Café. I agreed and was entertained at what turned out to be a real café, on the ground floor of their building in downtown Tehran, answering questions about America and its politics. The next day pictures of me speaking were posted to the Facebook page of the editor in chief, who tagged me. Given that VPNs had been officially declared illegal by the Ministry of Justice (what did Sadegh Larijani think of
that
?), and given that Facebook, the declared enemy of hard-line conservatives, was forbidden in Iran, it was, to say the least, a little odd.

I asked the editor, seeing as he was liberal-minded enough to venture onto Facebook, if I could meet with Mohammad Javad Larijani, his immediate boss and the human rights commissioner.