Summary
The chapter “Tehran Calling” focuses on a thirty-five-year-old American woman named Sarah Middleton who travels to Iran to meet her friend Parvin, whom she first met in college. Sarah hasn’t seen her friend for a long time and doesn’t know what to expect.
Sarah and Parvin share a long history as friends. In college, Parvin had started a weekly call-in radio program for women’s rights reform in Iran called Tehran Calling. Although Parvin was born in Iran, she had moved to Europe as a teen and then moved to America for college. Because of this, Sarah had struggled to see why Parvin was so passionate about Iran when she didn’t live there, causing the friends to drift apart.
Parvin had eventually quit her job to dedicate herself to the show and ultimately emigrated back to Iran. At the same time, Sarah had begun seriously dating a man named Paul who worked in her company. Sarah had worked at a successful law firm in Portland and enjoyed her life with Paul. However, their breakup destroyed her and caused her to seek solace in Parvin, who eventually invited Sarah to visit her in Iran.
The story opens when Sarah arrives at the airport in Iran and meets Parvin’s friend, Mahmoud; she’s a little suspicious because Parvin was supposed to pick her up. Mahmoud takes Sarah to a hotel where she rests, and Parvin meets her there later. Mahmoud, Parvin, and Sarah go together to a city square to enjoy the festivities from the religious holiday Ashura. Then, the three go to Parvin’s family’s house for dinner and a meeting. At the meeting, Parvin discusses her desire to stage a reenactment of a young girl’s torture and execution in the square where the religious rally will be held. Parvin hopes that this will help to bring awareness to violence in Iran, but others at the meeting think the plan is too dangerous.
At the dinner, Sarah discovers that Parvin has a sister and had two older brothers who had died fighting wars in Iran. Sarah feels slightly betrayed for not knowing these things about her friend, and Parvin and Sarah get into a fight about it but make up the next morning.
Parvin speaks of rumors of people being kidnapped and goes to the square to make sure everyone is okay. Mahmoud and Sarah go later to the square to watch the religious rally and witness an attack where a group of men with weapons come and beat young girls. They threaten Mahmoud and Sarah, but they let Sarah go because she’s an American citizen. After that, Sarah learns that Parvin has gone missing.
Shocked, Sarah and Mahmoud seek shelter at a nearby hotel. Mahmoud comforts her, gives her a pipe to smoke, and then takes advantage of Sarah sexually. The drug seems to numb Sarah's emotions and slow her perception. She pushes herself against a window that looks out on a city street. The story ends without revealing whether Parvin is okay.
Analysis
Many of the stories in The Boat are linked by the theme of immigration and identity. This theme is central to "Tehran Calling." Parvin was born and spent her early years in Tehran, spent time living in Europe as an adolescent, attended college in the United States, and then returned to Iran. Because of these many journeys and transitions, Parvin is treated like an immigrant in both the United States and in Iran. She struggles to assert her identity as an Iranian to her friends and colleagues who have lived there for their whole lives, but she is also afraid of being seen as an "exotic" (p.207) foreigner by her peers in the United States.
Another central theme of "Tehran Calling" is gender, particularly women's empowerment. Both Sarah and Parvin are empowered women, though their lives are very different. Sarah symbolizes the empowered American woman: she has a good job in a career field once dominated by men (law) and feels confident in her safety when traveling alone to a foreign country. Meanwhile, Parvin is an empowered woman of another sort: she is a political radical who explicitly puts herself in danger by advocating for women's rights in Iran. This contrast starkly shows Sarah's privilege and demonstrates how ideas of feminism depend on social and historical context.
Le furthers the depiction of Sarah as a privileged American who lacks introspection through Sarah's reaction to Parvin's revelation that her brothers died in a war. Sarah's immediate response is self-centered anger; Le writes, "She glared at Parvin. 'Why didn't you tell me?'" (p.207.) Then, after Parvin tells her that she didn't want to be exoticized or tokenized, Sarah's feelings turn to "a strange, abstracted pity" (p.207), which is exactly what Parvin would not want her to feel. Next, Sarah quickly switches to feeling envy that Parvin experienced excitement in her life, even though those experiences were clearly traumatic. Finally, this envy crystalizes into bitterness, demonstrated through her melodramatically stating, "I'm sorry...that my problems...were never as impressive as yours" (p.210-11). Throughout the conversation, Sarah focuses on how Parvin's experiences affect her rather than truly listening and empathizing with her friend.
Parvin parallels many other characters in Le's stories in that she expresses herself, particularly her pain, through art. This is similar to:
• Henry and Jamie's mother, visual artists who communicate their physical pain through painting
• Nam, who translates intergenerational trauma into works of prose
• Elise, who devotes herself to the cello
In "Tehran Calling," Parvin attempts to stage a play to showcase the brutality that young women face in Iranian society. She also produces a call-in radio show about feminism. However, in comparison to the artists in Le's other stories, Parvin is not particularly successful, and she even faces great danger due to her art.
The ending of "Tehran Calling" is strange and unsettling. Mahmoud takes Sarah to hide in a hotel after they realize that Parvin has likely been kidnapped. Sarah is consumed by fear and allows herself to be controlled by Mahmoud, who lays her on her back on the bed, brings her an unnamed drug to smoke, and then initiates sexual contact with her while she is intoxicated. This is a shock because Mahmoud has been respectful and even prudish toward Sarah since her arrival in Iran. The narration never reveals what happened to Parvin, giving the story a purposefully unfinished, mysterious quality.
