Pack… Your Dictionary

I arrived in the US in August 2000 with one very large green suitcase. I actually checked whether I could fit in it prior to leaving Armenia. The answer was that I could, indeed, without too many excessive contortions. Though you need to keep in mind that as a nice Soviet child, I did ballet growing up, and was in possession of fairly flexible hamstrings at the time. But it was a large suitcase. There were things in it that the 16 year old me would need: my journal, the folded up poster of my favorite singer. And there were things that I hadn’t yet realized were sorely missing: fitted sheets (who knew such things even existed?), bath towels (I had never seen towels that were that large and that fluffy until I came to the US). 

I can still remember the SAT question that had to do with equilateral triangles that I completely bombed because I didn’t know what “equilateral” meant

Thankfully, I was smart enough to remember to bring a small Russian-English dictionary, which started coming in handy rather early. You see, I spoke Armenian and Russian growing up. And my school had French and Spanish for foreign languages. I taught myself English from song lyrics and poorly dubbed old American movies until the day that I realized that I wanted to go to college as far away from my family as I could manage (I was about 15 at the time). This meant that I had to learn English, which would allow me to put an ocean between said family and myself. And so I begged my mom’s friend, a professor of English at a university back home to allow me to sit in on her lessons (she used to moonlight as a private English tutor in addition to her day job to make ends meet because them’s the breaks for academics back home). I learned enough English to manage my way around college entrance exams, although I can still remember the SAT question that had to do with equilateral triangles that I completely bombed because I didn’t know what “equilateral” meant. So when I arrived in the US, my English was rusty at best.

I arrived on campus of my university at the ripe old age of 16, bright eyed and bushy tailed, jetlagged to hell, dragging my gigantic green suitcase down the quad, essentially showing up and telling them “I’m here.” And after some aggressive trying to figure out who I was and why I’d shown up to an orientation with a gigantic suitcase, I was assigned a room in a dormitory (whelp!) and a roommate (double whelp!).

When I met my roommate, I felt little and fumbled with my words in English. My roommate’s name was Rachel. She was blond and had a big smile that made her nose wrinkle, and it was the first time that I saw just how much people in America smiled. She asked me about Armenia, and it was the first time I realized how little people in America knew about geography. I told her about home, about the mountains. Somehow seismic activity and the nuclear power plant came up. Rachel was so impressed I knew these crazy words in English. I came to the conclusion that I liked Rachel. But for weeks I felt this anxiety when she talked to me – she was kind and patient, but English was hard to navigate, and I didn’t always understand her words, “nuclear power plant” and “seismic activity” notwithstanding.

One day Rachel saw me talking to this guy Jose in the cafeteria. Attempting to flirt in a language that isn’t your native one is a whole separate adventure, deserving of a separate post. But I was enjoying the male attention I was getting on campus, even if I had to write down some of the things the boys said to me to go and look them up in my dictionary afterwards.

I’m amazed I still remember Jose’s name, but I think this is more thanks to Rachel than on his merit, really. She and I walked back to our dorm, and she gave me a gentle friendly ribbing about this guy: I was blushing, did I like him? He was just a guy in my Intro to Engineering class, I told her. “Well, he’s cute,” Rachel said. “He looks like he likes you.” I giggled and blushed in response: I liked this idea of being liked. America was turning out to be a pretty good place. 

As soon as we got to our room I dashed to my trusty dictionary and rifled through it, trying to figure out the spelling of “cute” and to understand what it was that Rachel had actually said. I felt so shy and somehow deficient when I didn’t understand things people said to me. Most things I’d try to pick up from the context, but sometimes I couldn’t. “Cute” had been one of those instances. And to my absolute heartbreak, my very academically minded dictionary had decided for me that I did not need to know what it was that Rachel thought Jose was.

After a few minutes nearly consumed by my embarrassment I asked Rachel what “cute” meant: had she or hadn’t she approved of this guy? She had become my advisor on all things American, so I valued her opinion, embarrassment be damned. I could just see her stifling her laughter, which made me blush even harder. “How do you know ‘nuclear power plant’ but you don’t know ‘cute’?” I think I’m still trying to figure this one out. But I did end up buying a different dictionary, a Merriam-Webster, which included the word “cute” and a series of other equally useful adjectives.