I Want to Break Free: An Abacus Story

In 1984, fourteen-year-old Koorosh Eslami left Tehran with his father to escape being drafted into the Iran-Iraq War. After living and studying in Türkiye, his unique adventure begins and he flees to Canada alone, illegally where he was detained in January 1986. Eventually, a loving foster home took him into their arms, where the daily fun and chaos plunged him headlong into his first lessons about North American life.

Told through the running metaphor of an abacus-each bead representing a person he lived with, a move, or a new survival problem-Koorosh's story follows him from the group home as he transitions into adulthood. Along the way, he endures multiple basement apartments and roommates, graveyard shifts, backbreaking jobs, bad breaks, hard-won opportunities, and the long climb toward education, stability, and a career as an engineer. Throughout it all, he experiences reunion, loss, and the uneasy realization that his escape didn't erase his past; it only changed the terrain.

I Want to Break Free is a raw, darkly funny, and often tender memoir of survival and reinvention, told by a narrator who never stops asking what freedom costs and who pays the bill.