I keep looking back and wondering whether it was courage or stupidity of a 16 year old to think that I would figure things out when I got to America. I never really stopped to think how I would figure them out. Just that I would (which, I suppose, I’d have to – what other choice was there?). And so I got off the plane in Boston with $200 in my pocket and headed to college.
One major thing that I had not counted on was the exorbitant price of textbooks in this country. Nor the fact that publishers changed the editions and the content (like the numbers of the homework problems) every couple of years to discourage the resale of textbooks. What?
Back home, even the fact that the language of instruction had recently changed hadn’t stopped us from using 20 year old textbooks: physics was physics regardless of the language, right? There were also other ways of saving money on textbooks. One method included making a list of all the neighbours who were one grade ahead of me, and hitting them up before the school year started to make sure they hadn’t yet given their books away. Another method centered around splitting up school subjects between 4-5 classmates: each of us would buy the books for 1-2 subjects, and we would rotate who got to keep which books when. This required doing the homework ahead some of the time, but worked very effectively. Method number three came with having enough money to be able to afford photocopying the entirety or at least portions of somebody else’s book. This would sometimes devolve into photocopying photocopies (and so on, and so forth) until the material would be rendered illegible, and then you’d have to track down a person with an actual book after all.
In grade 10 I garnered a lot of favor from my classmates: my dad had gotten his hands on a dinky IBM with an Intel 386 processor (I googled it to make sure I was remembering it correctly, and just found out that these processors were launched in 1985 – so apparently we were 15 years late to the game – what can I say: they were cool in Armenia at the time). What this meant was that I borrowed the Armenian and world history textbooks from one of our classmates who was able to purchase them and spent the weekend retyping the entire books. On Monday, my classmates had their own unauthorized but free versions of the textbooks (yes, I realize that there are copyright laws, but I also doubt that copyright lawyers are having to choose between feeding their children and buying their textbooks).
But when I got to the US, I was quickly confronted with the fact that my textbooks would have cost me upwards of $500, while I currently had no dollars available to me. It was a particularly confusing situation, since I thought that paying for tuition would mean that I was paying for my education, but apparently things were not quite as straightforward as that. And here I didn’t have neighbours who were one grade ahead of me to ask them for their books. What on earth did Americans do in this situation?
The dilemma was as follows: either not be able to do homework or suck it up, get over my crippling shyness (if you know me today, can you even believe that this was a thing?), talk to someone, and pray that they liked me enough to let me borrow their books. Thankfully, a lot of the same folks were in most of my classes. There was Terry, who was Greek – we bonded over our shared love of Nine Inch Nails, black nail polish, and baklava. Rosie, who was a US-born Egyptian – she was one of the kindest, gentlest people I had ever met – she not only let me borrow her books, but later flexed her Sears employee discount to help me buy an outfit, and would endlessly and uncomplainingly listen to me prattle about one boy or another. And there was Komal, an Indian woman – her family ended up taking me in during Spring Break (I was completely unprepared for the fact that the dormitories would just close and that for a week I’d have no place to live), and it was my very first experience with Hindu traditions as well as Spring skiing. There were also a number of guys on whom Rosie and I would have rotating crushes (and since this was Massachusetts, many of them were either Irish or Italian, with names like Matt or Mike).
It was the kindness and trust of these women that got me through my first semester of college. They lent me their books. They would help explain things to me if I didn’t understand the professor’s accent (and this happened more often than not, particularly with one French-Canadian physics instructor). They would help usher me into a lot of American experiences for the first time: eating McDonalds, pulling all nighters, getting ready for dates (I was painfully slow catching on that when people asked whether I wanted to get coffee it had nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with their romantic interest in me). And it would later turn out that the pretty glass vase in Terry’s dorm room was actually a bong.
Thanks to my new American friends I didn’t end up having to buy textbooks during my first semester in college. I did, however, magically, end up making Dean’s List. I wasn’t entirely sure who the Dean was, nor what their list entailed, but this came with a $500 check in my name, so I was rather pleased with it. This was the $500 that I used to buy the textbooks for my second semester of freshman year. (There is also a separate story worth telling that has to do with my trying to get actual cash money outta the check – because what’s a bank account and how does one use it?)
Packing List for Immigration 