Packing List for Immigration

Pack… Your Textbooks

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.

At the ripe old age of 4, I used to “write” letters to president Reagan, asking him to end the Cold War. Who would have thunk back then that one day I’d end up in America?

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.

Pack… More Bread

I looked forward to summer the entire school year. Summers were as careless as one could get those days: there was no homework, no need to help dad cut firewood, no need to worry whether my only outfit would dry by Monday morning for me to have something to wear to school (I wouldn’t see a drier until I got to the US), and the sun shone late into the evening, so that we could stay out and play until 9 or 10 pm.

The summer of 1994 will go down in history as the time when I got really good at jumping rope. The girl gang and I had been together for a year now. During this time we had managed to climb and fall out of trees together, adopt a few stray dogs, organize a holiday pageant show and performance, get in trouble for stealing green apricots from a neighbor, and a number of other adventures befitting 10 year olds. But this was the summer that we’d dedicated ourselves to jump rope.

6th grade class field trip to Geghard. I’ve apparently managed to grow out of my pants that year.

We jumped long rope and double dutch: we would ask some of the older girls for their ropes, tie the ropes together, and play into the evening, until we couldn’t see the rope anymore. I had never jumped rope until that summer and I was determined to get at least as good as the others. I’d practice at home by tying one end of the rope to a chair and making my dad spin the other end (my mom would absolutely not get involved in my shenanigans – that was not what chairs were for). The chair would often come crashing down and I’d have to try and dodge it, but I think that just added to my jump roping skills.

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… Your Accent

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.

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… Personal Care Items

I’ve already told you all about my huge green suitcase that I arrived in the US with. I’d packed so many things that felt critical to my survival in a foreign country, like the poster of my favorite singer. But what I hadn’t thought of were the practical basics needed for daily life in college: anything from pens and notebooks to bedding and a laundry basket (at that point I actually hadn’t realized that laundry baskets existed in the world, my laundry had just always gone into a plastic bag that wasn’t specifically manufactured for that purpose but continued to serve it with a fair level of success regardless).

When I first moved into my dorm room, my roommate Rachel who had a car and who must have seen the look of concern on my face over not having said laundry basket was kind enough to offer to take me to Walmart on a shopping trip (the concern I had wasn’t really about the laundry basket but it was in fact about all the things I realized I didn’t even know I needed).

Spring of my senior year in high school. I already know that I’ve been accepted into a college in the US but I don’t yet know whether I’ll be able to afford to go.

A Walmart is overwhelming on the best of days, let alone when you’ve never been to a Walmart nor have ever seen any kind of retail outlet on that scale. When I left Armenia in 2000 the country was only just starting its journey towards westernization: we didn’t have malls yet, there were almost no Western brand retailers. And until then I had been buying all my clothes from hawkers at bazaars or from a secondhand Goodwill store that did have Western fashions but from 10 years prior. My clothes shopping was relegated to one, maybe two, occasions a year, before each school semester, to make sure that I had more than one outfit to wear to school. This was a strategy that would allow me to have something to wear to school while laundry was being done.

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 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!).