He pointed out the park where a recent Iranian New Year’s picnic had attracted so many people that valet parking was required. Dangling one arm over the steering wheel, Parshaw sang along with Mansour, a local Iranian pop singer. On the main strip, Thousand Oaks Boulevard, each tree was tied with a neat yellow ribbon, and luxury-car dealerships shared street frontage with a set of international-themed gardens.
When I visited him last spring, he drove me past Westlake’s jagged hills, which were dusted with a light green that set off the pink mansions along the ridges. He likes to cruise around the neighborhood-a circle of well-kept houses radiating out from the local elementary school-in his black Lexus GS 300, a seventeenth-birthday present from his parents. Now in his senior year of high school, Parshaw is a handsome, loose-limbed boy with dark wavy hair, warm brown eyes, and a prominent nose. Jonathan had always lived among expatriate Iranians, but that evening, on a visit to family friends, he saw them in a different light: “It was the first time I’d seen Iranians all rooting for the same thing instead of arguing about ‘the Shah did this,’ ‘the mullahs did that.’ I saw a sense of unity, and I felt like this was something important.” Soon afterward, Jonathan began to go by his Iranian name, Parshaw. But when the Iranian team scored its second goal, he jumped on his father’s back and they galloped around the house, yelling until they were hoarse. Jonathan was born in the San Fernando Valley, and he didn’t know much about soccer or about Iran, his parents’ home country.
In Westlake Village, California, in a two-story stucco house on a cul-de-sac dotted with lemon trees and oversized roses, a twelve-year-old boy named Jonathan Dorriz watched the game with his father. From Tehran to Toronto, Iranian teen-agers danced on cars and old women in head scarves lifted their faces to the sky and praised God. As millions watched on live television, the players handed white good-will bouquets to their American opponents. On June 21, 1998, Iran’s national soccer team walked onto the field in its first World Cup tournament since the country had overthrown the Shah, installed an Islamic government, and taken fifty-two Americans hostage, nineteen years earlier.