Hi there, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think Podcast.

I remember visiting New York when I was 18 and thinking about coming here for college.

How badly I wanted to be from New York. How cool, how real, how substantial that would be.

What does it mean to be from any place?

At what point do you own the culture like you own your native language, your very own

little shard of the broken mirror that adds up to New York or Irkutsk or Tehran?

Actually, you can't own a culture, it owns you, and you can't immerse yourself in a different culture without turning into a different person.

My guest today, investigative reporter Delphine Minoui, grew up in a relatively orderly secular France.

She wanted to know what it meant to be from Iran, her grandfather's country, under the veil of the Islamic Republic.

Over a decade living there,

she found out. Her book, I'm Writing You from Tehran, is the story of that investigation and how it

changed her. Welcome to think again, Delphine. Thank you so much. The book is written as a letter

to your grandfather, and you did originally, at least as you say it in the book, you went to Tehran to try to find,

to try to reclaim that piece of yourself and your family history and so on.

What did you find and how was it different from what you were looking for?

Definitely. When I decided to move to Iran was the idea of to reconnect with the half part of my identity, the hidden

part actually of my identity, because I grew up in a very French environment. I went to

school in France. All my friends were French. My mum is French. My dad, who was Iranian, moved to

France when he was 11 years old.

Okay.

And he never felt the need to teach me, Farsi, or to teach me about his culture.

He was actually even traumatized by what happened to his country, because in 1979 the revolution happened and the clergyman took over.

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