Rose Jackson will never forget the moment she heard Farsi spoken for the first time in more than six years. She was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, taking her first Farsi class in the hopes of reclaiming a part of her Iranian identity that she had lost.
“I felt like I was coming back home,” she says. “I think in English, but the first language I ever spoke was Farsi, so it feels like I’m walking back into that Persian identity.”