By Jill Szoo Wilson
I grew up in Los Angeles. I was a little white girl with blue eyes and light brown hair who spoke Midwestern English, including words like “warsh” (wash), “far” (four), and “ope!” (excuse me).
I was born in Missouri and lived there through first grade, so my earliest circle was made up of white people and black people. That was it. Maybe there were Chinese families at the grocery store, church, and in other public spaces, but my child-sized world was small and mostly familiar.
Then we moved to Glendale, California, and everything changed. My entire circle of friends was from the Middle East, Mexico, and the Philippines. Not a white girl in the bunch. Rousing afternoons and weekend days spent riding bikes, playing hide-and-seek, and staging epic rounds of capture the flag usually ended at someone’s house, and every house had its own signature aroma. My Middle Eastern friends’ families were often cooking with warm, earthy cumin. The Mexican homes smelled like chili peppers and tortillas. The Filipino homes carried a garlic-and-ginger mixture I still associate with cozy evenings around tables filled with soups I didn’t recognize and meat that tasted just a little tangy.
At my house, we served spaghetti or some kind of beef dish. The smell my friends remember has been reported to be cookies and pot roast. Missouri was doing its best, and honestly, it held its own.
By around eleven, I was conversationally fluent in Armenian and Spanish, with an honorable mention in Arabic. I remember my best friend’s mom laughing when I tried, very earnestly, to ask in Armenian if my friend could come out and play, and then letting her come anyway. In other homes, I was called “azizam” and “mija,” terms I didn’t understand at first but quickly came to recognize as affection.
Today I want to share a story I heard in the home of a girl with whom I went to school and who joined my Girl Scout troop at my invitation. I’ll call her Susie. That’s not her real name, and it doesn’t matter. Even if I shared it, you probably wouldn’t pronounce it correctly unless you heard it spoken. Susie was born in Kuwait. Her family immigrated about a year before I met her, and they lived down the street from our apartments in a small rented house. Three generations lived under one roof. No one had their own bedroom because there were only two to choose from. Even so, they had a small, carpeted kitchen that likely used to be a front porch, and no matter what time of day I showed up to play, I was offered something to eat. Usually it was fruit. Sometimes it was a kebab with yogurt sauce on the side.
No one in Susie’s family spoke English, so she became their spokesperson. Looking back, I can see how that pulled her into responsibility early. It gave her maturity, and it also gave her a kind of pressure she spent her teenage years trying to outrun. Even so, she was fiercely loyal to her family and proud of the country they came from.
After visiting Susie’s house several times, I met her grandmother. I was shocked, though I tried not to stare and felt bad about the surprise that must have registered on my face. Susie’s grandmother did not have legs from her thighs down. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t want to draw attention to it because I didn’t think it would be polite. Susie told me later, when we were out of earshot, that her grandmother had lost her legs in a bombing in Kuwait during the early 1980s.
At the time, I only understood it through the language Susie used: “the Ayatollah.” Years later, I would learn that Kuwait, though not ruled by a religious leader, was caught in the aftershocks of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the long Iran–Iraq War that followed. In December 1983, a series of coordinated bombings struck Kuwait, carried out by militants aligned with revolutionary Iran. Civilians were injured. Families were changed. For Susie’s family, the name of the Ayatollah—whether Khomeini or Khamenei, the distinction unclear to me as a child—became shorthand for the violence that rearranged their lives. History sorts out geopolitics. What I saw was a grandmother in a small house in Glendale who moved through her kitchen without legs and still insisted I take a second piece of fruit.
There were other stories, too.
Katrina was my closest friend. I’m changing her name as well. I was such a mainstay at Katrina’s house that I had a favorite pillow, and her dad made sure my favorite Armenian snacks were always on hand. One of which was called Nazook, and looked like a little rolled-up cookie.
Katrina’s family immigrated to the United States about three years before I met her. The neighborhood we lived in had a large Armenian population, and her dad was in his early fifties. He tried to learn English, but it didn’t come easily, so Katrina often interpreted for him. He welcomed me into his home nearly every weekend and tried, in his careful English, to talk with me anyway. One evening, he told Katrina and me stories from home. I remember jokes I didn’t understand and geopolitical truths that wouldn’t come into focus for me until the last decade of my life. What I remember most clearly is his passion: for justice, family, and God.
One night, Katrina’s dad told us about a bar he and his friends used to frequent somewhere in Armenia. I’ll condense the story to get to my point: there was a framed picture of Jesus over the bar. One afternoon, a group of Muslim men came in and told the owner to take the picture down. Tension rose to the point that Katrina’s dad assumed a brawl would break out. Instead, one of the Christian men sitting at a table invited them to sit, and the argument moved from fists to words. They talked openly and intensely about the differences between Jesus and Muhammad. Katrina’s dad said the tension diffused, but a palpable passion rose on both sides of the debate. In the end, the men shook hands and the strangers left. He ended his story with this moral: “All your life, remember to follow Jesus. Never Allah.” I was ten and already a Christian, so I didn’t hear it as an abstract opinion. I heard it as a kind of warning, spoken with the urgency of someone protecting what he loved.
Whatever you think about his views, I remember hearing words and names I had never been aware of before that conversation. Muslim. Allah. Muhammad. Genocide. Maybe even Azerbaijan (he was a thorough storyteller). I remember trying to compare Katrina’s dad’s stories with what I had heard from Susie’s family. I didn’t understand the geopolitics. I was mostly fascinated by the rising intensity in his voice. Years later, I researched the history.
In the 1970s, Armenia was still a republic within the Soviet Union. It was officially atheist, yet deeply and unmistakably Christian in cultural memory. The Armenian Apostolic Church had shaped Armenian identity for nearly seventeen centuries, and faith remained woven into family life even when it could not be openly displayed in public institutions. When my friend’s father told us that story, he was speaking from more than a single incident. He carried the inherited memory of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenians were killed under the Ottoman Empire, and he had lost members of his own family in the long shadow of those conflicts. For him, the story was not abstract geopolitics. It was a warning shaped by history and grief. When he urged us to follow Jesus all our lives and not Muhammad, he was urging steadfastness in a faith that, for Armenians, had become inseparable from endurance, identity, and survival.
In the weeks before the current U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iranian targets began on February 28, 2026, Iranian women filled the streets with uncovered hair and lifted faces, moving in broad daylight as if their bodies belonged to them again. Men walked beside them, chanting and clapping, holding the line with a relief that looked almost like grief. The Islamic Republic, born in 1979 and enforced through decades of moral policing, surveillance, imprisonment, and economic theft, tightened its grip until ordinary life felt like a cage. These marches rose from lived experience: futures narrowed, dignity rationed, women punished for fabric, young people trained in obedience as survival. When a woman pulled off her hijab and danced, the gesture carried the weight of years endured in silence. When a man shouted beside her, he carried his own ledger of losses.
In the streets of the United States, some protest the way that freedom is defended, while elsewhere its absence still shows up in bodies, in kitchens, in the quiet insistence to feed a child who has come to play.
Freedom is not an abstraction. It smells like cumin and chili peppers and garlic and ginger. It sounds like accented English and laughter layered over grief. It looks like a grandmother without legs navigating through her kitchen and still pressing fruit into a child’s hand.
There are moments when restraint preserves peace, and moments when action preserves people. I am grateful that there are still men and women willing to stand in that line. I am grateful for freedom. I am grateful to live in a place where children like me could grow up listening to stories from Kuwait and Armenia without fearing the knock on the door.
But what do I know?
I still say “bolth.”
Jill Szoo Wilson 