DEPARTED FROM
Tehran, Iran

ARRIVED IN
New York, New York

YEAR
1978

AGE
14

COLLECTED BY

At age 14, Pari Noorbakhsh immigrated to the United States in December 1978, a few months after marrying her husband. She flew from Tehran to New York on a Pan Am flight in the early stages of the Iranian Revolution.

She arrived in New York with her grandmother, mother-in-law and her new husband.

"I was really excited, and at the same time kind of anxious and scared," Noorbakhsh says. "I was leaving my family behind, coming to a new land. I didn't speak the language at all. I was wearing hijab," she says. "I looked different but at the same time I was so excited to be coming to the United States that I didn't even think of it."

While she had some family in the United States, everything felt new. She didn't speak English and New York City's skyscrapers, she says, were "kind of cold, dark."

Still, Noorbaksh was thrilled. "It had some aura to it. People just seemed happy. I was excited to see all sorts of different colors, people dressed in different attires I wasn't used to."

"I used to be really in love with all the John Wayne movies, so I thought I'm coming to see horses. That was a little bit of a surprise. There were no cowboys. Not in New York," she remembers.

Noorbakhsh is now 48, and she talked about her first days in the US with her 33-year-old daughter, Zahra Noorbakhsh, in San Francisco.