Surviving Marmite: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in New Zealand

In 2000, when I was just seven years old, my family immigrated from Iran to New Zealand. Fresh off the plane, we settled in Timaru, a port ‘city’ where everyone farms and wears gumboots under their rugby shorts. There, we stood out like a bunch of Middle Eastern immigrants in a town where everyone farms and wears gumboots under their rugby shorts. We arrived with zero knowledge of our new country nor the English language. Surviving Marmite chronicles our wild Kiwi journey; brimming with serious culture shock to hilarious misunderstandings and everything in between.

It features my unconventional family: my overly optimistic taxi-driver father, my overly pessimistic eyebrow-threading mother, and my sister and I, frizzy-haired, confused and clearly incongruous third-culture kids.