Iranian American teenagers say their adolescence is still a world apart from their U.S. peers. Some of her female friends can't even talk to boys on the phone or sleep over at another girl's house. Levian is dying to go to college out of state, as her male cousins have. Once they're here, it's like when Columbus sank the Santa Maria. It's do or die.
Women have to make it.
Men would survive back there, women would not. It depressed her to see pictures in the newspaper of adulterous wives being stoned. Her working-class family married her at 16 to a man she had glimpsed briefly from behind a veil. When she bore no children, he took a second young bride. Taboos encircled Nili like an electric fence.