This story begins 30 years ago or so, in Soviet Armenia. I’m 6, and I’m working on an assignment for kindergarten. We have to make the country’s flag. I keep it high level, skip the sickle and the hammer, primarily due to the lack of skill. But I do the colors: red, blue, and red. And that’s how I find out that the country is breaking apart. My mom takes one look at this flag that I made and says “oh, honey…” And so I have to make a new flag. It’s not red, blue, and orange. And if your markers came from the Soviet Union, that orange still looks an awful lot like red. But still, it’s a new flag… And it’s a new country.
If you’re an extroverted 6 year old, the new country thing is rather exciting. I go to political rallies and demonstrations with my dad, I sit on his shoulders, I pound my fist in the air, I shout slogans like “something-something-independence” and “this is my country,” I sing nationalistic songs (that are still firmly stuck in my brain 30+ years later). The adults eat it up: I get so much attention, high fives, and, if I’m lucky, candy.
I start shamelessly pandering to my demographic. I have this children’s craft book. One of the projects they have is a “make your own candy jar from cardboard.” Theirs is beautiful. It’s made to look like a nutcracker: the mouth opens, candy comes out. I make mine short, bald, with a large birthmark on its head. If you remember what Mikhail Gorbachev looked like then you get it. If you don’t remember it, then you should look it up. My mom is still serving candy from this bad boy on holidays.
A couple of other things that are happening at around this same time: Chernobyl. And no less tragic (albeit with no TV show about it): there is a massive earthquake in Armenia; 100,000 people lose their lives. They way that these two events are connected is that despite being an active seismic zone, we had and still do have a nuclear power plant in Armenia. So after the Chernobyl accident, in order to be preventive, the Soviet government takes one look at the Armenian power plant, goes “ohhh, this could become an adventure,” and pulls the plug (I don’t actually know what the thought process looked like, but probably something like this). And as the Soviet Union falls apart, Armenia, with no backup plan for how to generate electricity is plunged into darkness. No electricity, no running water. And I’m growing up in this.
To me, as a kid, this was actually kind of exciting. I’d read by candlelight and would imagine myself as one of the heroes of Dumas books I was reading. It was much harder on my parents, I’m sure, as they tried to keep me fed and clothed (with varying degrees of success). At one point we tried feeding my cat pickles, as that was all there was for food. At another point my parents sent me to go stand in line for bread. I was the two thousand three hundred sixtieth person in line (or some such number). That’s how I learned to count to two thousand three hundred and sixty.
But it wasn’t all bad, really. No Soviet government meant we now had American TV. Shows like Dallas. You know? “Who shot JR?” There was no electricity, so we couldn’t really watch them but at least we knew they were there. Watching these shows in the post-Soviet context was kind of crazy: for the longest time I thought all Americans had big hair, wore cowboy hats, and oil money. And when with time we started to get electricity (at unpredictable times and for 45-60 minutes at a time), if you got lucky, the power would line up with the TV schedule and you’d catch an episode of the show.
So now I want you to picture this: it’s cold, it’s dark, you come home to an apartment in a gray Soviet concrete block building. The building is tall and nondescript, surrounded by many like it. You’re cooking dinner for your family on a wood burning stove. You don’t have money for wood so what goes into the stove are Lenin books, Stalin books, communism, socialism, ideas, ideals… You are cooking SPAM soup because that’s what passes for meat these days. Then all of a sudden you hear this ROAR: all your neighbours are screaming and applauding with excitement. They are celebrating. The power is on and tonight might just be the night that you find out who shot JR.
P.S. This Wikipedia article is a good reference on the Armenian energy crisis of the 1990’s, that I and all Armenians I know still refer to as the “cold and dark years.”
P.P.S. I wrote this story for the Moth – after years of wistfully going to Moth events, I had finally gathered up my courage to put my name into the hat this time. The topic of this event was “celebration,” and I thought this story was so fitting. Except the event got cancelled the day before due to the pandemic. I was heartbroken. But wanting to share this story (and many others) was the motivation to start this blog.
Packing List for Immigration 