In Praise of Big Noses

Abstract

When I was a child growing up in the suburban San Francisco Bay area town of Walnut Creek, I was aware of the ways in which my difference was cast in my look. Although my mother was from France, I had inherited many of my father’s distinctly Iranian features: large brown eyes, thick dark hair, long eyelashes, plentiful eyebrows, and olive-tinted skin. Although my father was a handsome man, his exceedingly large nose and well-sized ears were an inescapable part of his distinctively foreign look. Until my adolescence I managed to avoid thinking of my nose at all. It was only when my older sister turned 19, and after a number of Iranian female relatives immigrated to the United States, that I became aware of how the bountifulness of my proboscis presented deficiencies to my blossoming beauty. When my father’s two older daughters from his first marriage in Iran arrived in the United States, I was only ten, but I could see in their faces something of how they both resembled and didn’t resemble my sister and me. Indeed, it was in that central region of their face, the nose, that they lost any familial connection. At one point in my early adolescence, I remember seeing one of my older female cousins at a family party for Norouz, the Persian New Year, with a large white bandage across her face.