America – Packing List for Immigration

Pack… A Rabies Shot

The first time I saw Bambi I bawled my eyes out. This, I think, is universal, regardless of where you were born or where you grew up. Bambi’s mom dying was one of the early traumas in my childhood. But Bambi also has another iconic scene that has stayed with me for the last 30 years: the one where two skunks with sultry eyelashes fall in love (remember when the girl skunk is making bedroom eyes at Flower from inside of a bush?). My conclusions were that skunks are fluffy and adorable, capable of blushing and falling in love.

Growing up in Yerevan, a city of one million residents, the only kinds of wildlife I was familiar with were stray cats and dogs, and maybe pigeons. I had a love thing with stray dogs – I was the stray dog whisperer. I’d feed them my school lunches, brush the dirt and mats out of their coats, remove ticks. Some mornings I’d have a battalion of 3-4 strays walking me to school. I really wanted to have a dog, but my parents were unrelenting.

New Years 1998 (I think): Mom, me, and cat formerly known as Sergey.

I did however end up with a cat. I had to pass this dumpster on my way to school, and one day I saw a box of tiny kittens meowing up a storm in it – someone’s cat had kittens, and they decided to throw away the entire litter. The kittens couldn’t have been more than a day or two old. They were tiny loud balls of fur with their eyes not quite open yet. On my way home from school only one fur ball was left – the neighborhood kids said that stray dogs had gotten to the rest. I figured the last kitten had managed to survive for a reason, so I took him home.

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… 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… 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!).