language – Packing List for Immigration

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.

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!).

Tag: language

Pack… Your Accent

Pack… Your Dictionary