Reza Mollaghaffari

Effective from September 23, 2023 to June 1, 2024, the 232 Caltrain is a local-service train that departs every Saturday and Sunday from the San Francisco 4th St & King St station at 10:58 a.m. and arrives at the San Jose Diridon station at 12:40 p.m. The timing of this specific service is imbued with rich context that helps paint the kind of passengers one encounters on the train.

A weekend train means the passengers are not buttoned-up in corporate outfits and are not taking the train to get to work. 10:58 a.m. departure means the passengers are not the overachieving Bay Area characters who wake up early in the morning to carpe-diem their weekend excursion to South Bay, but it also means they are not late-night partiers who sleep until 2pm. And, if they are going all the way to San Jose Diridon, the 12:40 p.m. arrival means the passengers are characters who have some social commitment in San Jose but would, under no circumstances, make that a morning social commitment in San Jose.

So, who are they? On April 6, a scorchingly hot Saturday, the passengers you find in the penultimate car of the 232 Caltrain are: a group of people in their twenties going to the San Jose Sharks vs. St. Louis Blues hockey game that starts at 3 pm in San Jose, two men wearing fedoras who are talking to the group of people in their twenties going to the San Jose Sharks vs. St. Louis Blues hockey game, two girls talking about Britney Spears’s memoir The Woman in Me (one of them listened to the audiobook on Spotify but stopped halfway through because she “just, like, could not”), and myself, sitting in the last two seats on the upper level, sometimes listening to other people’s conversations and sometimes navel-gazing. I am on my way to San Jose to meet my coworker and friend, Reza, who lives in the city with his wife and—in one month from now—their newborn daughter as well.

When I get to San Jose, I go stand by the station’s main entrance and I wait for Reza. The two girls who were discussing Britney’s memoir are also there, waiting for someone, and are deciding whether to get iced coffee or cheesy nachos. Reza pulls up in his car shortly thereafter, but I do not register that he arrived until he rolls down the windows and says hi.

“Welcome to suburbia,” Reza laughs.

“Well,” I say, “it’s exciting to be in your neck of the woods.”

I get in the car, fasten my seat belt, and take out my notebook.

“Ready to roll and talk about life?”

“Sure,” he answers. “I don’t know that I will have that much to say.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, man,” he continues, “my life is not that interesting.”

Except that it is. Case in point, Reza himself is an interesting character. He is tall, athletic, and dapper, with a sense of humor that is somewhere between piercingly deadpan and amusingly oblivious. As a result, when you first meet him, he appears at once intimidating and disarming. Underneath this surface layer of paradox, however, is an unwaveringly kind, down-to-earth, and principled guy from the arboreal depths of the Pacific Northwest, a humorous blend of an earnest achiever and a counterculture hippie.

When we get to his house, which Reza and his wife Niki had recently bought and remodeled into a chic sanctuary, the first thing that catches my eye is a set of large plant beds in their backyard. Then I realize that, on the garden wall, there are also pots of growing plants, among which I can only recognize parsley. The rest is a mystery to me.

“How did you learn to grow plants?”

“Uh, I’m a Portland boy,” he shrugs, somewhat confused by this apparently self-evident question.

Their house is in impeccable shape and is noticeably well-decorated and functional. Reza keeps describing the details of the remodeling phase, from entirely rebuilding the bathroom to picking out the smallest features of the house decor, and I lose track of what he is saying at some point because I keep thinking to myself: how? I wouldn’t even know where to start. When I ask him how he knows all this, he shrugs again and tells me that his dad used to flip houses, and that he became handy with tools and remodeling as a kid by simply tagging along and helping out.

After hanging out at the house, Reza suggests that we head out and grab lunch at Manresa Bread, a cozy eatery in a nearby city called Campbell. Reza is a foodie, but I must emphasize that he is not the self-indulgent hype-gen foodie who can talk for ten minutes about the foam-drenched prawn he had over the weekend, which he then also happened to review in great detail on Yelp. Reza actually loves making food and does all the cooking in the house. Reza’s dad, once again, had a major role in shaping this interest. When he wanted to take a break from his nuclear engineering career, he opened and managed several Italian restaurants. He was also crafty and creative, which showed Reza how immensely resourceful one can be with very little.

“My dad is a very good cook,” Reza says. “I might open the fridge and see a few things and I’ll think that I can't do anything with those. And then he will see the same things, and he will whip up an amazing meal in twenty minutes.”

It also helped that Reza worked as a server at fine-dining restaurants while he was in college. Similar to how he operates in the corporate environment today, Reza used those opportunities to go beyond his contractual obligations. Whenever he could, he studied the art of food-making from the cooks who prepared meals for the restaurants’ upscale clientele. In between table runs, he spent time in the kitchen, observing their technique and asking how each sauce was made, why the sauce was made this way, why the sauce was made that way. I didn’t even try Reza’s cooking, but I can tell that he’s good at it—when I ask him what his signature dishes are, he doesn’t answer but instead asks me what ingredients I like, and when I give him a few options, he then lists the permutations of dishes that he likes to make with those ingredients.

That said, it wasn’t always like this for Reza. There was a stretch of time during which life was a seemingly unsolvable maze. At Manresa Bread, he tells me that it took him a while to find himself and to figure out who he was. Though he was athletic growing up, and played sports in high school, and was even scouted by a Nike recruiter to do a modeling gig for the brand’s new sports uniform, Reza wasn’t automatically part of the cool boys club.

“I didn’t really like high school,” he says. “I was actually very shy and quiet.”

“How come?”

“I was effectively the foreigner in my school in Portland,” Reza adds. “I was the only Persian kid among white kids.”

To find his place in the social fabric of teenage Portland, Reza did what every kid would have done to avoid being under the sociocultural microscope: he suppressed his Persian identity. In its most extreme version, this identity suppression took on an entirely different meaning when he went to college and, for all intents and purposes, turned into a textbook example of a white frat bro.

“That phase was,” he laughs, “it was something. Every guy in my frat was quoting The Anchorman. That was the type of vibe,” he says.

He can see that I have no idea what he is talking about.

“No? The Anchorman?” he laughs. “Alright, well, it’s probably for the best that you didn’t have to witness that.”

Extreme version is not a hyperbole in this case. His new identity was so extreme that Reza ended up with a 0.0 GPA his first semester of college. He lived on campus, partied, dated, and did not show up to a single class. Even his parents, who Reza describes as “very liberal and more on the hippie side,” became gravely concerned. He had to drop out, and shortly thereafter he transferred to Portland State to major in political science, which gave him a bit of space to figure out how to navigate his twenties.

He started his career at Nike, where he stayed for almost seven years and did data analytics and project management. What really helped him get back on his feet, however, was not the job. It was meeting his wife Niki. Reza, at the time, was dating casually and was not interested in settling down, but when Niki came along, something changed.

“She just had her shit together,” he adds. “She was getting her board certification in periodontology in Portland, but knew that she wanted to move back to the Bay Area and open her practice. She was also Persian and did not hide her identity. I think I quickly realized that I needed to make a decision. I was either going to commit to this girl or, I guess, just keep floating.”

In 2018, Reza and Niki moved to the Bay Area together, first to Mountain View and then to Santa Clara. What started out as a stable, promising relationship turned into something much more profound. By being with Niki, Reza started to change. Both personally and professionally. Niki helped him reclaim his Persian identity, by encouraging Persian traditions and by speaking Farsi with him (they both speak it fluently), and she inspired him to proactively shape his sense of purpose.

“She is hyper-organized, hyper-ambitious,” he continues, “and, I think it made me realize that I really needed to step up as her life partner. To be honest, if we didn’t get together, I have no idea—”

His voice quivers and his eyes tear up.

“Um, wow,” he smiles, “I am getting emotional. I did not expect that.”

It’s worth noting how powerful this moment is, not just because I am watching a self-proclaimed ex-frat-bro admit that he owes much of his growth to his wife, but because it shows how authentic Reza really is, and how unafraid he is to wear his heart on his sleeve. Rarely is authenticity a trait in people who have only known success and who have never failed. It takes a high degree of comfort with yourself to know that you have nothing to lose by sharing yourself fully with the world, and very often, that degree of comfort can only be achieved if you have allowed yourself to fail and get lost.

And how great that he went through all this, because the Reza I met at work a few years ago was already an impressive powerhouse. Since last year, we have been working together on a highly technical—and sometimes painfully tedious—project, which would not have progressed the way it did if it hadn’t been for Reza. Reading outdated contracts, getting up to speed on compliance, project-managing due dates, setting up operational processes, analyzing data, influencing business strategy, training people—these are just few of the many uncharted territories that he conquered but that others were afraid to even approach. His most prized corporate skill turned out to be the skill that he learned by having to apply it on himself: the ability to untangle a mess and fix what’s broken.

“How did you become good at so many things?” I ask him. “I feel like you really are a jack of all trades. You can handle a lot of very gnarly problems.”

“I think I felt, and still feel to some extent, that I fell behind in comparison to others. It was almost like I suddenly felt this need to learn as much as I could, to catch up. Plus, I guess I always liked that messy type of work. I would rather be putting out fires than finessing something that already works.”

Reza suggests that we go to Neptune Aquatics, an aquarium shop in San Jose where aquatic nerds and hobbyists go to buy all the equipment, sea creatures, plants, and corals that one would need to set up a home aquarium. It’s another hobby that Reza enjoys, which I was entirely unaware of until he showed the aquarium in his living room today, filled with colorful tiny fish and fluorescent coral.

“Niki teases me about this,” he says when we get to the store.

“Why?”

“I think because it’s a bit boujee and nerdy,” he laughs.

He shows me the corals and the anemone he likes to look at when he comes to the store. For the record, I tried to keep up with the names of all the biolife by writing them in my notebook; all that I was able to discern later from my notes was “cute red choraly thingy.” I keep thinking what an unusually nerdy hobby indeed this is and how oddly apt it is that Reza likes it.

Because, it’s not just an aquarium of gorgeous fluorescence that he is taking care of. It’s a mini aquatic ecosystem, where there is a constant give and take between the water and the creatures in the azure, where the equilibrium is always in danger of getting messy. Which means it requires intervention. Which means it requires fixing.

Later in the afternoon, Reza drives me back to the Diridon Caltrain station. I ask him how he feels about becoming a father in less than a month, which, to me at least, sounds like one of the most stressful experiences that guys have to navigate. That doesn’t seem to be the case for Reza, who lights up the moment I bring up the topic and starts telling me about the names he and Niki are considering for their baby daughter. It’s both comical and heartwarming in this moment to remember his comment about feeling that he fell behind in comparison to others, when it is so apparent that Reza—the Mr. Fixit, the operator, the strategist, the cook, the gardener, the soon-to-be father—is so far ahead in life already.