Embarrassing Writing Process
I haven't written any text in Farsi for the last three years. Back in Iran, I used to work as a literary journalist, something that perhaps reveals my decent understanding of the language. Yet after coming to China, I resigned from every position I had to fully concentrate on learning Chinese and improving my English. Similarly, I only met non-Iranians in the first half of my time in Shanghai, which meant I didn't speak any Farsi for a whole year until I met my one and only Iranian friend here. The outcome? A publication I used to work for contacted me last week to write a piece on Jia Zhangke's “Xiao Wu”. I was extremely excited to celebrate my glorious return to Iranian media, only to realize how atrocious my Farsi has become. In my defense, I'm not very familiar with Mac's Farsi keyboard. I remember when I bought it, it had a different order compared to my Asus, and since I didn't need to write anything in Farsi, I just totally ignored the issue and didn't learn the basics (ok, now it sounds like this is also my mistake). How did I finish the piece? I literally wrote everything in English, put it in Google Translate, and finally refined the translation to sound like a normal Farsi text. Yes, I'm embarrassed.
This situation pushed me to find Iranians in Shanghai. Not to be annoying, but I found it a bit difficult to do so. I have a criterion that I don't want to be friends with people just because we share the same language or passport. Normally, I consider the possibility of me becoming friends with this person if I were in Iran, and if the answer is yes, I'll definitely befriend him/her. If not, I don't want to act out of desperation; we all know what will happen when you desperately try to get closer to someone. The Iranians in Shanghai are mostly either engineering students or merchants. Not to denounce those people, but after a couple of interactions, I noticed we're not on the same wavelength, and I just try to maintain a neutral relationship with them. This year, there are one or two new Iranian students that I met and they look fine, but unfortunately, both are too busy to hangout and what can I say, I guess I have no other option but to visit the consulate of Iran in Shanghai and ask them to set me up with a group of Iranians here to work on my Farsi before putting a bullet in my head. Maybe this is the Karma of the many times I trolled Iranian directors and writers in diaspora for having a ridiculous way of speaking Farsi, and now here I am, a laughing stock for my fellow friends back in Iran. Karma is a bitch after all.