Before Immigration – Page 2 – Packing List for Immigration

Pack… Bread

There is a lot of bread in the standard Armenian diet, and I mean both the amount as well as the variety. We have lavash, of course, first and foremost. It serves as a magical vehicle for all other food: you can make wrap sandwiches with it, use it to eat soup, it dries and keeps rather well. We have the unleavened matnakash, which is our standard daily bread (literally what I visualize if I ever say the Lord’s prayer). We also very commonly eat Georgian puri that’s baked in a tandoor oven and Russian sourdough rye (there is also a great number of types of bread that I simply don’t know the names of). I feel like Armenians would probably be awful at the Atkins diet.

Bread is so ubiquitous for us that instead of asking someone whether they would like to eat, you’d ask whether they would like to eat bread. And this applies to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There is always bread on the table at all hours of the day. At my parents’ house, there was also cheese, greens, like parsley and dill, and onions and garlic. I remember my parents always telling me to eat my meals with bread to make sure I’d filled up (no, I had never heard about stopping eating before feeling full in order to avoid overeating until I got to the States – yes, this is truly a first world problem). And I had literally never seen food being thrown away until coming to the US.

In case you needed a visual of me as a princess.

After the Soviet Union broke up, food (among many other things) was rationed out. Cheese was scarce. There was no meat whatsoever (I think we’d get it once a month and I’d invite my best friend to dinner at my house – it was a big deal). We got an allotment of a kilo of butter per family once a month. But every person was entitled to half a kilo, or about one pound, of bread per day. As I write this, it seems like so much bread to be eating every day – who the heck eats a pound of bread each day? But I think the important piece here is that often there was nothing else to eat other than this bread (and I don’t mean this figuratively). Some days you might have cheese or a can of Spam. Some days you are lucky and you come by salo, salted unrendered pork fat – incredibly yucko but highly caloric and helpful when you’re trying to make sure your family doesn’t starve. And some days the bread is all there is. But at least you could always count on bread.

Pack… Donuts and Coffee

I ate a heck of a lot of donuts during my senior year of high school. Going out to eat wasn’t much of a thing when I was growing up. But by 1998 there was a change in the government, the nuclear power plant was back on, and there were early signs of development and Westernization, which brought businesses catering to developing and Westward-looking youth. My aggressive sweet tooth was happy because one such business was Yum-Yum Donuts (with an aesthetic rather reminiscent of Dunkin’ Donuts).

The pink and yellow lettering of the donut shop clashed with the moody image I was starting to cultivate, but unlike being all rock-n-roll and sitting on a cold park bench with a guitar, the donut shop promised warmth and coolness-by-association for the low low price of 25 cents: the price of a donut. The coolness was provided by other Yum-Yum patrons: boys wearing baseball hats, cargo pants, and Timberland boots, and girls with short hair, crop tops, and heavy eyeliner (it was 1999, people). So I would drag my best friend, Karine, to eat donuts and hate watch all the cool kids (we were certainly not cool enough). Until one day when Yum-Yum was full, and two of the really hip boys asked to sit with us.

The boys were Henry and Van (names altered to protect the innocent – y’all know who you are – love you both). I was 16 and moderately boy-crazy. The boys were funny (we’ve already covered how much I love people with whom I laugh), and I twirled my hair throughout the entire conversation. Karine was quickly over my hair twirling and these boys. But on my way out I did something that nice Armenian girls were absolutely not supposed to do – I wrote my number down on a piece of paper and left it for the boys.

Pack… Winter Gloves

Not having heat or electricity was an interesting kind of challenge for schools when I was growing up. It meant that the Fall semester ended sometime in late November and Spring semester did not begin until late February or early March. The rest of the time the students were given assignments to do at home: I remember my parents would go in weekly to exchange my completed assignments for the graded ones returned by the teachers. Occasionally, during the notebook dropoff the school would give out powdered milk allocations for each student. This was always a welcome treat – I didn’t particularly like milk, but the powder was sweet, and I’d just eat it as is to satisfy my sweet tooth.

Kerosene stoves were standard-issue classroom equipment, with the pipe going through the room and right out the window. Sometimes they would burp smoke into the classroom, which wasn’t great, but still better than trying to hold a pen with half-frozen fingers (back then mild frostbite was another thing that came standard-issue – pretty much all my classmates, including myself, would get it at some point or another). Classes ran short, only 25 minutes at a time, to prevent us from having to sit in the cold for too long. Teachers would tell us to go run around during the 5 minute breaks between classes to help keep us warm. Back in the classroom, coats, gloves, and hats never came off. We would pull our long benches around the stove and huddle together, rubbing our hands and occasionally stomping our feet to ward off frostbite the best we could.

Me, my ungodly haircut (I’m still holding a grudge, mom), and Ashot – boy, did I have a crush on him then!

The teachers were not getting paid. At one point they were owed more than a year’s worth of salary. They made ends meet (or didn’t) however they could. Some were fortunate enough to have family members with gainful employment, others taught private lessons or moonlighted at other jobs. One of my teachers was letting out one of her two bedrooms while she, her husband, her mother-in-law, and her adult daughter all lived in the other bedroom. Folks were figuring out how to do without. But they still showed up, still taught, still cared about the students, still assigned and graded homeworks. This was life as we knew it.

Pack… Your Pet Snake

The thing that happens when you grow up without electricity is that you become really adept at entertaining yourself. Of course, at 10 years old I would have preferred to park myself in front of the television, except in this scenario the television was disappointingly blank. So I read voraciously. First children’s books, then young adult books, then art history books and opera librettos (my mom always loved all kinds of art and had held a number of art-adjacent jobs, so now I’m the person who smugly does not need subtitles at the opera).

But sometimes books didn’t quite cut it. That’s when all the neighbourhood kids went outside to play. I grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in a 14-story Soviet-style building. Ours was one of four identical buildings, across the street from a cluster of 9-story buildings, which, in turn, had a few other buildings behind them. What this resulted in was a ton of other kids to play with. You just had to find your group.

The groups of kids were divided by age, language, and primary activity. The 14-15 year old Russian-speaking girls typically just strolled up and down the street, talking about boys, flirting with boys, making eyes at boys. The 12-13 year old Armenian-speaking girls played games I’d never even heard of (it was amazing how language could define culture, even when you were growing up on the same block). The 10-11 year old Armenian-speaking boys squatted around, ate sunflower seeds, and picked on the girls. And occasionally all these groups would converge to play one big game of gortsnagorts (գործնագործ – similar to dodgeball but different, which results in my thinking that I should be not terrible at dodgeball, but I am).

I was about 10 at the time and spoke primarily Russian (my elementary school was Russian, but after the Soviet Union broke up, all education switched over to Armenian – good strategic move when you are trying to survive as nation of 3 million people, but I had the hardest time learning what I now consider to be my first language; and no, the two aren’t similar at all). And here I was, trying to figure out where it was that I fit in and who my people were.

Pack… Snickers Bars

I grew up in Armenia during a time of severe scarcity. There was no electricity. There were kerosene lamps but no kerosene. There were wood burning stoves but no money to buy wood with. There were candles but no matches to light them with. There were food stamps but no food to use them on. It was a time of creative problem solving and trying to make something out of nothing. Some of the more creative solutions included fueling our stove with anything that would burn. Though, in hindsight, I wonder whether inhaling the smoke from burning old faux leather shoes can explain my adult onset asthma. Another creative approach was utilized in obtaining what at the time passed for chocolate at my house (courtesy of my dad who was a laboratory scientist): you mix clarified butter with sugar and cocoa powder. The result was greasy and grainy as hell but in absence of actual chocolate (and due to the lack of funds to obtain any kind of commercial chocolate product) this was not only an acceptable but a highly lauded alternative. Though I should note that my dad would sometimes get in trouble for his concoction, since according to my mom we needed the clarified butter for “real” food.

Quick aside on the clarified butter (or ghee) situation. Back then we conserved all and any food we could: summer fruit was turned into jams for the winter, unfinished loaves of bread were turned into croutons, and butter (when we got our hands on it) was clarified to prevent spoilage and make sure that it kept even without a refrigerator (no electricity, remember?).

My mom & I out at a New Years event. I’m probably 7 or 8 here.

During this time of weird ghee-based “chocolate,” the 10 year old me had a rampant sweet tooth and came upon a box of real, honest-to-goodness chocolates. You know how in America people get presents for Christmas? When I was growing up for the holidays (we celebrated New Years instead of Jesus’ birthday) you got things like apples and oranges and maybe a quince (it’s a fruit – look it up). Except when really fancy guests showed up and maybe brought you chocolate (and if you were particularly lucky, then it wouldn’t be a box that had been in the regifting cycle since the previous New Years).

Pack… Your Ability to Celebrate

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.