lost in translation – 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… A Swimsuit

Starting this blog has brought me closer to my childhood friends, and so many of our conversations start with “remember when?” One of those conversations was “remember when we used to ‘swim’ in buckets of water?” And boy, do I!

A couple of years ago, I was invited to a 6 am swim and breakfast date, to which I foolishly said yes – things I apparently do when I’m head over heels for someone (or is it head over fins?). The culprit of this crazy invitation and I had been going on run dates, so this must have been a logical extension for him. But what I hadn’t told him was that I could barely swim. And I wasn’t about to let him find out now. I hustled and bought a swimsuit and goggles in the next couple of days, and met him bright eyed and terrified at the pool later in the week.

Our swim date was a roaring success, despite the fact that as soon as I saw the bottom of the pool drop away from me somewhere half-way I clung to the pool ropes, wondering if I would make it out alive. I shimmied along the lane line down to the deep end, clung on the edge of the pool, flipped onto my back, and as long as I couldn’t see the bottom, made it back to the shallow end without any problems. I swam a mean back crawl that day and promptly signed up for swim lessons after my date and I had breakfast.

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… 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… 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!).