Ever since I’ve started this blog, a lot has been coming up for me. I’ve remembered incidents I had been blocking out for nearly 20 years. For 20 years I’ve worked on and refined a persona that looks, sounds, and acts in a way that simplifies my daily life. I no longer have people thinking I must be slow, even when they use a slur to refer to something and “the poor little clearly-nor-from-around-here girl” doesn’t understand (did you know that New Englanders call chocolate sprinkles “Jimmies?” – I found this out during my waitressing days).” I no longer have to conduct geography lessons: “no, not Romania,” “no, not Albania,” “next to Turkey and Iran, but no, I’m not muslim” (that last one was particularly popular after 9/11). I no longer have to justify my “immigrant-ness” because to most people I don’t look or sound anything like their mental image of an immigrant. And it was a lot of work.
I worked so hard at English – I got a nearly perfect 790 on the verbal portion of the GRE back in the day, and I was so miffed it wasn’t 800. I worked so hard to get rid of my accent.
Back in my waitressing days the staff would hang out during the lull between lunch and dinner. We rolled silverware (my version of hell – you keep rolling but the pile doesn’t get any smaller) and shot the sh*t. One day celebrities we thought were cute (I already knew what “cute” meant at that point) came up. Back then I was the person who mostly just listened and took it all in – I was painfully shy on account of my clunky English. But on this particular day, my googly-eyed man crush on Brad Pitt was begging to be a part of the conversation. Except neither in Armenian nor Russian (the languages I consider native) is there a difference between the “ee” sound, as in “feet,” and the “i” sound, as in “fit,” – apparently I had spent years calling my favorite actor Brad Peet.
This was in 2002 – a time when America had an all out war on foreignness (people I considered friends had “speak English or get the the f*ck out” bumper stickers). And my accent was shamelessly giving away that I was “the other.” Sure, I spoke English, but was it the kind of English that would prevent me from having to “get the f*ck out?”
Some of the comments were seemingly benign: “your accent is so cute,” or “you sound so exotic” (this may require a whole separate post’s worth of unpacking). But others made me feel like I was getting bullied in middle school all over again: “so funny, you say ‘Peet’ instead of ‘Pitt’ – that’s hilarious.” The comments silenced me for years. They prevented me from speaking up. Which, in turn, also backfired, as I would later get a scathing performance review at a different job that I wasn’t “contributing enough in meetings.”
When I was applying to business schools, one school had a question regarding the applicants’ native language and a requirement to take the TOEFL exam if the applicants were non-native speakers. Having to take the test would have made me miss the application deadline (and scholarship eligibility, in turn, not to mention the additional cost I’d incur), plus, at that point I’d been in the US for over 15 years, and had a 95th percentile GMAT verbal score. So I just checked off the “native speaker” box and moved on with my life. Except that I really really don’t do dishonesty – so I couldn’t sleep for weeks on end.
I tried unpacking it with my therapist. I defended my lie: just like those comments about my accent, it had been benign. Plus, I was just as fluent as a native speaker, so why should it have mattered. Her question, in turn, was about the parts of myself I was having to deny in order to tell the “English-might-as-well-be-my-first-language” story.
Eventually, I went to a business school that did not have the native language question in its application form and am happy to report that my application (and my business school career) did not contain any lies (or extensions of the truth, as you will). But what my therapist told me stuck with me. What were the parts of me that I had been hiding?
The poverty. The hurt. The shame. The otherness. The hard parts. The “I survived that” parts. I had done such an excellent job creating a palatable version of myself that even I believed it. And so here I am, trying to reclaim the parts of myself I discarded along the way. I’m trying to learn to feel proud of the journey that’s taken me here. I’m trying to be both an immigrant and an American. I’m trying to honor all the things that inadvertently became the baggage I’ve been lugging though this immigration journey. And I’m so grateful you are bearing witness as I try to integrate the parts of myself.
P.S. If you’ve ever heard me say “bear with me, it IS my 5th language,” it’s likely that I’m using it as an excuse to get out of debating semantics while the greater point I’m trying to make is likely being ignored. That being said, this is also the reason I am so literal with my words. And the reason that I pause before speaking to make sure I’m being careful and intentional with the words I choose.
Packing List for Immigration 