About the Salon Series

We invite you to MEI Salon, a series of special events conducted in a casual relaxed setting aimed at making Middle Eastern culture more accessible to everyone. We strip away the academic jargon, and keep things light-hearted and interactive with topics that range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Abstract

In 2013, a last minute decision to visit Iran led to two magical weeks of passion and friendship experienced by Ms Mandy Tan. Her video of her Persian trip showed the world a very different side of Iran and attracted some 20,000 views within one week on YouTube and Vimeo. In this session, she will share her experience working in Dubai as a trailer producer and how travelling in Iran as a solo female traveller transformed her.

This public talk will be conducted online via Zoom on 28 July (Tuesday), from 3pm to 4.30pm (SGT). All are welcome to participate. An e-invite will be sent to you closer to the event date.

This event is free, however, registration is compulsory.

Photo by Steven Su on Unsplash.

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Read Event Summary ‘I have never really left Iran’

At MEI’s second Salon event for the year, Dubai-based trailer producer Ms Mandy Tay shared about her time in Iran and what she has learnt from it.

By Tan Yang Long
Intern, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore

Her time spent travelling solo in Iran in 2013 was life changing, but Ms Mandy Tay said her journey started due to a stroke of serendipity. Based in Dubai as a trailer producer for NBC2 then, she hosted an Iranian on Couchsurfing, a global homestay and social networking service. He/She offered to show her around Iran if she visited. Excited by that prospect, she packed her bags and left for Tehran four days later without telling anyone apart from her best friend.

Map of Iran. Photo: Mandy Tay.

From the capital, she took a long-distance bus ride to the northern-most city of Tabriz before heading south again to Isfahan. Her last stop: Shiraz. Even though her trip lasted only two weeks, the myriad interactions she had made her declare it was “the best trip I ever had (and will always have)”. Iran left a deep impression on her and she wished she had more time to visit other places like Yazd and Kerman.

One of her most memorable experiences was taking the metro in Tehran and having to manoeuvre gender-segregated train cabins and peddlers selling hair accessories. On one trip, a local who noticed she was a foreigner took the initiative of trying to make space on the crowded train for her. That got the other passengers shuffling to give her additional space in the cabin. It was this hospitality which convinced Ms Tay that travelling solo in Iran, even as a female traveller and despite the concerns of her friends, was very safe.

In fact, it was in Iran that she learnt to “throw caution to the winds” to trust complete strangers and accept their invitations based on “gut feeling”. Ms Tay added that the best part of travelling around Iran was being able to “meet someone rather than see something”. She never had to rely on her tourist map for directions because Iranians would unfailingly walk up to her and ask if she needed directions.

The effort she put into learning Farsi helped cement this connection with the locals. By the end of her trip, Ms Tay could hold a five-sentence conversation and exchange pleasantries. Learning Farsi not only helped her to communicate with the locals but also became a gateway for her to understand Iranian cultural practices. For example, if she had to sit in the front of a car and face her back to the other passengers, an act deemed culturally impolite, she would apologise by saying go posht o ru nadareh (which translates into a flower has no front or back).

At the end of her trip, she put together a video montage entitled “Discover Iran in 2 minutes” which was shared widely by Iranians worldwide with one commenter thanking her for “showing the reality of my country to everyone”. In contrast to the usual media portrayal of Iran as a dangerous place, Ms Tay said her video shows off a side of Iran that one will never be able to see on media outlets like the BBC and CNN, one that she argued is a “more accurate representation of the real Iran”, and the Iran that Iranians want others to see.

During the question and answer segment, an MEI researcher commented that her presentation was refreshing because the tendency for the mainstream media to look at Iran through the eyes of politics could lead one to not trust Iranians. To that, Ms Tay’s response was the first tourist she met on her trip was a middle-aged American lady visiting Iran with her teenaged children. This was her second trip as she loved her first visit so much, to which Ms Tay concluded, the tourist would not have brought her children there if Iran was as dangerous as touted.

As a trailer producer, she admitted that her job sometimes made her feel like a professional liar due to its power and ability to shape one’s understanding of a place and its peoples. During her trip, she shared how she used her camera as a prop to initiate conversations with strangers as it gave her a reason to approach someone. Asked about her preference for stills or videos, she said she goes with her “gut feeling” because what matters more is whether one’s subject is comfortable with the camera.

This village elder had not wanted Ms Tay to leave. Photo: Mandy Tay.

Despite the fact that her Iran trip was seven years ago, Ms Tay said she “has never left”. In fact, during her trip, one village elder had jokingly called out “do not let her leave” when she was about to depart his village after a day trip as she had achieved such a rapport with the locals. Since then, she has been doing her bit to spread the word that Iran could be a really special place to visit.