Sophie Dream, MD, MPH
My father moved to Chicago at a young age. He and his father had applied for him to get a visa to come to the United States to further his education. The day my father’s visa arrived, his father passed away in a sudden and tragic accident. A testament to my father’s strength and perseverance, he arranged for his father’s burial, set his mother up to have an independent life, in a very paternalistic society where she otherwise would be dependent on my father, and left for school in Chicago. He met my mother through an acquaintance before she had any thought of moving to the States. They fell in love the way people in the movies do and, after marrying, fled Iran at the very beginning of the Iranian Revolution, “as they were canceling flights and shutting the airports down for 30 years.” My parents tell the story of how they got here with a suitcase of Iranian currency that the currency exchange clerk threw in the trash and told them, “Don’t you know what’s happening in your country? This is garbage now.” They began life as full-time college students with full-time jobs, no money, and no family around. My parents were able to make something of nothing, and my siblings and I benefited from their fortitude.
I was raised in a Persian household. We spoke Farsi at home and celebrated Persian holidays; I still consider the first day of spring, Nowruz- a holiday that originated from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, to be New Year. My experience with my culture throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood has been very private. This was not by my choice but out of my parents’ caution and engineering. My parents left Iran because the country they grew up in was changing, and they never went back because that change was permanent. The trouble for them was that their new home was not always welcoming. In 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis created a diplomatic standoff between Iran and the US that only furthered tensions between the two nations. This diplomatic standoff had nothing to do with my college-attending, young, and in-love parents. It did, however, affect the way they saw their new home, and it shaped how they perceived they fit in. Seeing their friends attacked and deported despite being legal immigrants and experiencing discrimination made them feel they needed to assimilate as much as possible. When they filed for their Green Cards, their names read “Heidi” and “Robert.”
My parents always told me not to tell people where they were from or my ethnicity, not to say what religion I was, and would tell stories of what they experienced in the late 70s in Chicago. “You can’t truly trust anyone, and being born here doesn’t mean anything; they can kick you out if they want.” So, I did not talk about who I was when I left my home.
On September 11, 2001, I was a freshman in high school. My father was about to board a 9 am flight leaving LaGuardia to come home from a work trip. I remember that tragic day very vividly; my father remembers it even more so, having witnessed the atrocity firsthand. Our family mourned the lost lives of innocent people that day, along with the rest of America. What our family experienced in the aftermath has stayed with me. The anti-Middle Eastern sentiment that pervaded the country seeped its way into our home. My younger brother was bullied at school; at a sleepover, his classmates called Immigration and Naturalization Service on our family as a prank. This experience made me believe in my parents’ caution, I was really happy that we were not very religious and that I did not wear a hijab. I was happy that I could blend in; being tan and born in New Jersey while living in the Midwest meant I was an ethnic chameleon.
This is where I think this issue is and why I am starting to question the engineered assimilation I thought I was privileged to have.
My heritage is rich, and the values my parents instilled in me are part of my Persian culture. We appreciate the arts and equity in education. I was raised on the principles that permeate my Persian culture of “Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.” I am proud of the strength, perseverance, and fortitude that led to my parents’ fulfillment of their American Dream. This is the experience many children of Iranian Immigrants carry with them, but that all gets washed away when I leave my parents’ home.
Our experience echoes the experience of many other Asian Americans, with a long history of hate and discrimination that has been tolerated because we are “allowed” to quietly succeed. My Persian experience is just the beginning of a generation of a newly minted and growing community. I worry as time goes on that I will lose my culture, that my children will not know its richness, and that no one will be better for what I have to offer.
Dr. Sophie Dream is an Endocrine Surgeon who joined the Department of Surgery at Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin in September 2019 after completing her fellowship in endocrine surgery at the University of Alabama. She holds appointments as an Assistant Professor of Surgical Oncology at Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Zablocki Veterans’ Administration Medical Center in Milwaukee. She is also the Program Director for the Medical College of Wisconsin Comprehensive Endocrine Surgery Fellowship.
Dr. Dream’s clinical practice focuses on the surgical treatment of benign and malignant disorders of the thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal glands. She has brought thyroid radiofrequency ablation to MCW and has successfully grown the non-surgical thyroid intervention program at Froedtert. Her focus of investigation is on identifying and quantifying the more elusive impacts primary hyperparathyroidism has on quality of life to inform the operative indications for parathyroidectomy. Her clinical practice contributes to the Medical College of Wisconsin Endocrine Surgery research program through the growth of prospective databases that support this research. Dr. Dream is an Associate Editor for Clinical Thyroidology and serves on the Editorial Boards of Surgery, American Journal of Surgery, and Surgical Oncology Insight.