girlfriends – Packing List for Immigration

Pack… Mulberries

As I tumble down the slick rock face with hail stinging my face, I think that this really must be it. The end. Not how I expected things to end, but okay… There is still a lot left undone – bummer. But also there is a lot I got to do – just this morning I was writing how blessed my life really was. My body tries to fight off gravity and find something to hang onto while sliding inevitably down, down, down. It’s both in slow motion and happening in fractions of seconds. And another thought pops into my head – when exactly did I start hating heights?

I am 12: my knees are skinned and scabbed over and skinned again. I pick the scabs, and blood runs down my dirty shins, and my knees never heal. My hair is dirty and stringy – with no running water washing it is a production and absolutely not a priority. It’s school vacation, and the first thing I do when I wake up every morning is run 13 stories down and into the street and figure out what to occupy myself with today.

Gohar, Liana, and I, in Pushkin Park (now Lovers’ Park) in Yerevan, circa 1995.

Summer comes early to Yerevan. The streets are full of voices of children playing, older men seeking refuge in the shade of apricot trees, counting out their backgammon games, street vendors advertising their wares (brooms, ice cream, knife and scissor sharpening), and fine dust that gets stirred up into the air by the wind that descends off the mountains every evening. The dust gets into everything, seeps into every crack, and leaves a fine coating on every piece of furniture, even with the windows firmly shut. Sparrows circle the old gray Soviet-construction cement block buildings and chatter excitedly, catching bugs mid-flight. My street is illuminated by the iridescent orange glow of the sun tumbling into the Hrazdan river gorge. All nice summer evenings are supervised by the BBC network of the neighborhood ladies in their housecoats, hanging out of their windows or off their balconies, eating sunflower seeds, and minding everyone’s business. This is how I’ll get busted dating for the first time at 14. But at the moment, I’m 12, with scabbed knees, stringy hair, a mean badminton high serve, and the best friends a girl could wish for.

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… 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.