American Values Theme Analysis

Funny in Farsi is a portrait of Iranian immigrant culture, but also a portrait of American values, as seen by Firoozeh over the course of her life in the United States.

For the most part, Firoozeh offers a glowing depiction of American values. She highlights the importance of education in America, and the fact that people of many different backgrounds are encouraged to attend college. Similarly, Firoozeh celebrates the feminist values of American society, which she believes encourage women to pursue their passions, educate themselves, and find work: Firoozeh values this aspect of American society so highly that she says she’s thankful for it at her family’s Thanksgiving feast. Also at the family Thanksgiving feast, Kazem offers another important component of American values: America’s inclusive, accepting nature. For Kazem the best symbol of America’s accepting nature is the institution of voting, which allows adults of any kind to vote for their politicians. Elsewhere in the memoir, Firoozeh writes about other iterations of American inclusiveness and acceptance—for example, the time when she can’t find her way home from school, and a friendly American family lets her into their house and helps her find her way back.

One could easily argue (and plenty of people have) that the virtues of American society Firoozeh discusses have a “dark side”—after all, American society is hardly free from racism, sexism, or xenophobia. However, Firoozeh doesn’t offer any such criticism of American values. To the extent that Firoozeh does criticize American values, she faults America for its crassness, its material excesses, and its overall lack of dignity or seriousness. At several points in her memoir, Firoozeh describes her horror at seeing Americans eating food; similarly, she notes the outrageous excessiveness of American grocery stores, and the amount of food that Americans waste every year. In these and other passages, Firoozeh suggests that American society—and American values, too—encourage an undignified, almost childish amount of greed and wastefulness that would be considered outrageous in almost any other country. However, even when criticizing American excessiveness and tackiness, Firoozeh always softens her criticism. Her own beloved father is guilty of these same faults, suggesting that they’re more like minor flaws than serious problems, and also suggesting that greed isn’t even a uniquely American value. Similarly, when describing the bigotry that her family endures, Firoozeh stresses that the America she knows and loves is tolerant, suggesting that any instances of bigotry are deviations from American values, rather than expressions of those values. In all, Firoozeh paints an extremely warm and loving portrait of American values—one which many (but certainly not all) immigrants would agree with.