u/Business-Defiant

Hi everyone,

I want to share something personal that has been bothering me for a while.

As an Iranian Kurd, I sometimes feel very uncomfortable when “Persian” is used as a blanket term for everything related to Iran—whether it’s culture, food, politics, or people.

I fully identify as Iranian and I see all Iranians (Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Lurs, Laks, Baluch, Turkmen, and others) as equal parts of the same country. That shared identity matters to me.

Because of that, when “Persian” is used to describe everything Iranian, it can feel like it erases or excludes the many non-Persian groups who are also part of Iran.

Often it’s just habit or historical usage—but I wanted to share how it feels from my perspective, and as I said it irritates me and makes me feel excluded, and it's something I only see done by westerners or iranian diaspora. In Iran no non-persian says "Man farsam"

Hi guys, I'm an Iranian man living in a European country. When my family came here in 2002, we lived in several asylum seeker hostels before arriving at our final one in 2005. Many families from different ethnic backgrounds lived there.

Interestingly, there was a small but established Mongolian community consisting of about 3–4 families. From the moment they met me, they were incredibly kind to me. I'm talking about 20–30 Mongolian men and women who were always nice to me, constantly buying me toys or clothes, giving me food, and inviting me to their rooms. Two single-mothers bought me a Hasbo Action man action figure and randomly gifted it to me, two of the men just knocked at our door and gave my parents a large packaged truck toy.

I became friends with all the Mongolian children. The boys became my best friends, and one of the girls was my "girlfriend" (we were both about five years old 😄). I still have a picture of me kissing her on the cheek.

To this day, I still can't really explain why I was so popular among them. Many of these families did not have much money, yet they were willing to spend some of it on toys, clothes, or treats for me.

Even years later, when I was around 9 or 10, I met one of the older Mongolian guys again (he was about 19 or 20 at the time) at my mother's language course. Completely out of the blue, he insisted on taking me to a grocery store and bought me a large family-size pack of ice cream. Again he couldn't have had that much money as an asylum seeker, and I remember even feeling bad, but he insisted.

I still look back very fondly on these memories, but I often wonder what I did to deserve such exceptionally kind treatment. Is this extremely kind and hospital behaviour just part of mongolian culture and has nothing to do with me specificially? Some people think it was because of my appearance — I had very fair skin and black curly hair, which they thought might have matched Mongolian beauty standards. Could that be true, or is there another explanation?

The interesting part is to this day I'm the only one among my friends, colleagues who has had any experience with mongolians in this country. Unfortunately they all got deported