The Iranian Diaspora Is Awake. Now What?
In a guest essay for The Red Letter, Parizad Parchi reflects on the emotional toll of war in Iran and the deeper trauma it’s reawakening across the diaspora.
Welcome back to The Red Letter.
I’m featuring a personal essay today from my friend Parizad Parchi, who I’ve watched up close over the past weeks move through something I think many in the Iranian diaspora are feeling right now — hope, fear, grief, and deep uncertainty.
As the war in Iran unfolds, it’s not just a geopolitical story. It’s reopening something deeper for millions of people whose relationship to the country has been shaped by exile, loss, and distance.
On Nowruz, the Persian New Year — a moment that is meant to mark renewal — this essay reflects on the trauma that has long been carried quietly, and the way this moment is bringing it to the surface.
By Parizad “Pari” Parchi
As I write this, American and Israeli bombs are falling on Tehran. They have been falling for nearly two weeks. The US military has struck more than 5,000 targets across Iran since February 28. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead. Today is Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and the country is under a near-total internet blackout.
For the Iranian diaspora, this is a moment of rupture. Millions who fled the regime, who spent decades despising it and praying for its end, are now watching a foreign military flatten the country we still call home.
The regime imprisoned and killed so many and drove millions of us out. And now the country itself—not the regime, but the land, the cities, the people—is being destroyed while we watch on our phones, helpless.
What this moment has exposed is not just political outrage, but something older: 47 years of suppressed trauma finally surfacing.
Who We Are, and What We Don’t Know
The Iranian diaspora is one of the most accomplished immigrant communities in the world. There are an estimated 8 to 10 million Iranians living outside Iran. In the United States, Iranian immigrants hold advanced degrees at unusually high rates and have built companies worth hundreds of billions.
We have resources. We have education. We have opinions in abundance.
What we do not have, after nearly 50 years of separation, is a clear understanding of what is actually happening inside Iran.
Most of us are piecing together a picture from fragments: a message from a relative, a group chat, a clip on social media. Many of us, myself included, have never set foot in Iran. We form strong positions without a working knowledge of the regime’s inner workings or the daily reality of 90 million people living under it.
We wanted the regime gone. Now it is collapsing, and the country is being bombed by a foreign power demanding “unconditional surrender.” This is not the liberation any of us imagined.
What Exile Actually Costs
My grandmother, Mahin, “Maman,” fled Iran during the revolution with a single suitcase. She never returned.
In Iran, she was a general contractor, one of the first women in the country to obtain a driver’s license. My mother became the first Iranian woman to earn a full professorship in mathematics. These were women who built things.
But the revolution took everything.
On the second day of the uprising, Maman lost her 25-year-old son. My mother was three months pregnant with me at the time. I entered the world shaped by that loss.
Maman left Iran not to escape, but to visit her first grandchild, me. Within weeks, it was too unsafe to return. She lost her home, her business, her life’s work.
For the next 47 years, she kept a suitcase packed, waiting to go back. She never did.
This is not a unique story. Millions left in the decade after the revolution, bringing ambition and trauma in equal measure. What they rarely brought, and what no one asked about, was the psychological cost.
The Silence We Inherited
The revolution and hostage crisis didn’t just destabilize Iran. They made being Iranian in the West dangerous.
As a child in Minneapolis, I was so ashamed of being Iranian that I had my mother drop me off a block from school so no one would hear her accent. Like many Iranian children, I learned early that the safest move was to disappear.
We learned to say “Persian” instead of “Iranian,” distancing ourselves from a country associated with extremism. Many changed their names. Across millions of households, the pattern was the same: make yourself smaller, less visible, less Iranian.
What felt like survival was, in reality, erasure.
The Engine Underneath
The diaspora’s extraordinary success is, in part, a trauma response.
The overachievement, the relentless productivity—these are survival strategies. A displaced people learning that safety comes from being so accomplished that nothing can be taken from them again.
I recognize this in myself. From athletics to Wall Street to entrepreneurship, it was driven by something deeper: a child watching her family lose everything and deciding she would never be that vulnerable again.
And yet, alongside that drive, a paradox: we are deeply opinionated and largely powerless to shape events in the place we care about most.
We debate endlessly from Los Angeles to London to Vancouver about the regime, the opposition, what America should do. But for all our opinions, we have had almost no ability to change anything.
In that absence of agency, many in the diaspora have found themselves looking to Donald Trump—not out of loyalty, but out of a sense of powerlessness, a hope that someone, somewhere, knows what to do.
What This Moment Demands
The bombs falling on Iran have made the diaspora’s unresolved grief impossible to ignore.
We wanted the regime gone. We did not want our country flattened.
The complexity of what we are feeling—rage, grief, helplessness—is the collision of decades of unprocessed trauma with a fast-moving crisis.
The path forward requires honesty about what we don’t know, and vulnerability about what we feel.
A diaspora that cannot confront its own inheritance is not equipped to help shape the future of its homeland.
What Comes Next
Iran is not the regime and it is not the rubble now on our screens.
Iran is 7,000 years of civilization. It brought poetry, medicine, mathematics, and a culture that shaped the world. It is Nowruz and the insistence that spring always returns.
When we stop performing “Persian” and fully embrace “Iranian,” we give our children something more valuable than success. We give them roots.
Maman’s suitcase is empty now. She died a month ago, five days before her 100th birthday. We buried her in Minneapolis, far from home. She never made it back.
But what she carried—the belief that Iran is not the regime but the civilization that will outlast it—has not been lost.
It has been reawakened in us.
Parizad “Pari” Parchi is the founder and CEO of Panorama Aero, a mission-critical aerospace platform and has served on multiple NASDAQ-listed boards as well as an alumni fellow at the National War College. She is an American of Iranian-British heritage and lives in South Florida.
Thank you Tara. This is the perfect reminder of the horrific costs of war to the average citizen of a country under siege. Those in power make the decisions to start these wars, but it’s people like you and me who suffer, lose our loved ones and homes and pay the ultimate price. As Parizad Parchi states: “We wanted the regime gone. We did not want our country flattened.”
Thank you, Tara, for sharing this powerful article, written with Heart, Longing, and a deep Connection to the wounds and the memories of war and control, shared with love and hope.
It is always the Women, Children, Elderly and those trying to Live their Lives, that are most affected by madness. It is always the Land that is torn apart by greed, control and unchecked extremism, that must be rebuilt, comforted and cared for, to bring back to Life.
Around the world, and throughout (his)tory, greed, arrogance and religious fanaticism has destroyed more that it has ever given. When "beliefs" are demanded, upheld by sword, words, and violence, we lose generations of Wisdom. And although we have seen it countless times, we have not yet learned
When the "business" of religions, cults, politics and unholy violence is recognized for what it truly is, then we might begin to come to our Senses - and Learn, perhaps for the first time, that only by Living do we demonstrate who we are - individually and collectively - since we can only grow, mature and Learn as a Species while we Live.
When will we no longer follow, like lambs to slaughter, the words and empty promises of those who have nothing to give but pain?
Thank you,
Elaine M. Grohman