When Toys R Us
From “Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora,” Persis M. Karim, editor (University of Arkansas Press: 2006). Available on JStor at https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ffjmww.77
I WENT TO TOYS R US TODAY to see if my brothers were still for sale, and they were.
Neatly shrink-wrapped, they stood straight and tall next to the Navy battleships and the Bradley fighting vehicles. They were toys, with names that echoed the war in Afghanistan and Iraq names like "G.I. Joe Adventure Team" and "Ultimate Soldier, U.S. Desert Special Operations."
I saw my brothers last Christmas, when I went to my local Toys R Us to buy my nephew a present. Despite my better intentions (get in/get Elmo/get out) it wasn't long before I was wandering in a vast wasteland of blinking lights, my mind wiped clean of whatever I was looking for.
Eventually I found myself in the section reserved for military toys, where I expected to see soldiers with blond hair and blue eyes, Barbie and Ken in khaki.
But to my surprise, the Joes I found looked just like my bros.
They were slender and handsome, with wavy hair and neatly trimmed beards. Their eyes were dark and intense and totally familiar. They had the curly hair, trim build and coffee-colored skin of my father, who left his village in Iran and emigrated to the West, more than 50 years ago.
In a word, they looked Persian.
Of course, there were exceptions. Some of the soldiers were packaged with not one but two interchangeable heads, the first a clean-shaven Anglo, the second faintly Arab. One soldier was indeed blonde-haired and blue-eyed, though he was from the war before, a U.S. Marine "circa 1944- 45."
Of all the toy soldiers I saw, he was the only one who was smiling; obviously he had missed the Long March to Bataan, the bombing of Dresden, the annihilation of Hiroshima. But he was the exception, and my brothers were the rule.
Sometimes the resemblance between Joe and bro was enough to make me laugh out loud.
A soldier named "Ultimate Soldier: U.S. Army Afghanistan," looked just like my brother Rick, the morning that I rang his doorbell too early and found him standing there in his bathrobe, exhausted from staying up all night with his baby.
The G.I. Joe "Undercover Agent" came with two heads, one that of a grim, square-jawed man who looked like Tom Ridge, the homeland security czar, and the other a slightly worried, even less optimistic fellow, who resembled my brother Mike, a former nurse for the Red Cross.
Then there was "Dial Tone," a G.I. Joe whose mustache was embarrassingly similar to the one that my brother, Dave, grew just in time for my wedding.
Dial Tone, according to the marketing copy, was a radio telecommunications specialist, capable of setting up a mobile satellite transmitter in less than three minutes even under battlefield conditions.
"Nothing stops Dial Tone from doing his job," the bio read; his messages go out "loud and clear."
I had to smile-my Dial Tone, my David, lives in Germany now, halfway around the world. It's been weeks since we talked on the phone, months since I talked to Cara, my niece. How I wish that either of us was a telecommunications expert.
Alas, in the real world, we're not.
***
The irony of finding my brothers on a shelf was unexpected but delicious.
Like many Persian-Americans after 9/11, I dreaded seeing photos of the hijackers in The New York Times; but for their dead eyes, their empty gazes, they, too, could have been my brothers, with the same neat white dress shirts, the same unruly hair.
Over the past two years, my brothers — middle names Cyrus, Reza and Davoud - have been searched more often at airports, glanced at more closely on the street. They don't protest; like most Americans, they know that these are troubled times. But sometimes the fears are unreasonable, even racist.
My 75-year-old father, a surgeon who has saved countless lives, was openly stared at recently when he boarded a plane; one passenger, a woman, complained to the flight crew that he looked "different."
When David's son was born, the nurses at the hospital called him "the Turkish baby," lumping Johnny in with all of the brown-skinned babies who come from God-knows-where.
So maybe that's why I was oddly pleased by what I saw at the toy store. For the fact is that these playthings reveal a serious truth: Like all of America, the U.S. military is increasingly multiethnic, with growing numbers of loyal, patriotic Arab- and Persian-Americans, as well as Muslims of all races.
At the same time, the people we fight also are increasingly diverse. More and more often, our enemies are who we were, before the diaspora that scattered us to New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. They are Iraqis and not Iraqi-Americans; the Afghans who stayed versus the Afghans who left; Iranians from Tehran, but not the ones who live in "Tehrangeles."
Sure, Persian-Americans sometimes look like terrorists. Then again, sometimes we work for the Red Cross.
Toys have always had an uncanny way of predicting the future. In 1959, four years before the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the introduction of Barbie, with her impossibly long legs and piled-up hair, forever banished the myth of the happy housewife. In 1965, the year that Malcolm X was assassinated and Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested in Selma, Hasbro introduced its first-ever black Joe, a symbol of the integration that was inexorably underway in the U.S. military, if not society as a whole.
This year marks the 40th birthday of G.I. Joe, and Hasbro has released its first-ever Asian-American version; he joins the first female Joe (1967), the first Navajo Joe (2000) and the first Hispanic Joe (2001). One day, I hope, there will be a Persian Joe, an Abu-Joe, whose face will be that of an ordinary soldier, a common grunt who is trying to build a bridge between the culture of his birth and the country of his future. An Abu-Joe who, like most soldiers, dreams at night of nothing more remarkable than returning to his home and family, wherever they may be.
And that's the Joe I might consider buying for my 12-year-old son, middle name Henry. Because, like my brothers, he is an American citizen. But as my father always points out, he is the one who was born "with the Persian eyes."
