Searching For Hassan, by Terence Ward

At the heart of this generally excellent book there is a giant hole of motivation. What is it that drives the Ward family to, after decades of separation, visit Iran in 1998 to search for their old cook with nothing but a vague knowledge of his home village and an old photograph of the man with his wife, young son, and mother-in law? Over and over again, the author returns to this obvious question and says things to the effect of his mother considering it a debt and an obligation, but the question is nowhere answered completely and honestly, and it hangs over the entire book in a mysterious way. Given the excellence of Hassan as a cook, it seems strange that he would cook for the family for so many years but not be willing to cook for another family. It seems that there is something going here that is not disclosed, but the end result is a book that has a lot of value, and is written with a lot of hope about cross-cultural interaction between the United States and Iran, but is also strangely incomplete, full of things not said, silences that cannot be communicated by someone who (for understandable reasons) wishes to protect something larger going on in the relationship between the two families.

This book is a bit more than 300 pages–almost 350 if you include the afterword–and it is divided into fourteen chapters. The book begins with a short preface that hints at the gap of motivation that is at the center of this book. This is followed by a prologue that discusses the importance of Hassan to the Ward household when they lived in what was then the outskirts of Northern Tehran. This is followed by a discussion of the family’s background (1) and of the plans to return to Iran (2). After that comes a discussion of the past (3) as a vanished country, as well as a discussion of the experiences of the author and his family in Pasargadae (4) and Persepolis (5). There are discussions of the enjoyment of gardens, poets and taverns (6), the history of the Shia as it relates to their journey (7), and the enjoyment of the sites of Yazd (8). The author comments on his family meeting Khatami’s relatives (though not his mother), their visit to Hassan’s village of Tudeshk (9), and then how they spent plenty of time catching up with Hassan and his family in Esfahan (10, 11), before enjoying video nights at Khomeini’s tomb (12), and visiting the valley of the assassins (13), and commenting on the corruption of conservative mullahs (14), before his discussion of the new dawn of Iran-American relations (epilogue) that sadly did not long last (afterword). The book ends with acknowledgements and suggestions for further reading.

Besides the massive motivation gap at the heart of this story, the only other notable flaw (and it is a common one) is the politics of the author. It is perhaps unsurprising that the author would condemn populist politics, but given the author’s family’s own notable (and tedious) socialist bent, it is perhaps more surprising that the author does not recognize the kindred spirit between his own father’s willingness to suffer for the sake of his own leftist politics, with his ideals for the betterment of common folk, and the fact that populists have the same professed aim, and often better performance than socialist governments at providing for some of what populists want, at least. When you strip away the politics from this work, though, there is a lot of genuine humor in the way that the author portrays his family’s trip to Iran, and how strange it seemed and how much courage that other people ascribed to him for taking such a trip on such a slender motive. Given the experiences of the author and his family, I can see that a trip to Iran would be at least minimally feasible, under some very strict limitations. With the awareness that someone would certainly be following me around, it would not be hard to imagine that a great deal of enjoyment could be found in some historical explorations of a country that most people in the United States view as being completely off limits.