post-Soviet – Packing List for Immigration

Pack… Fireworks

We are walking down Saryan Street in full view of the outdoor diners who I think are really only there to show themselves off – they don’t actually care about us. I feel less precarious and take your hand. It’s not something one does around here outside of established relationships because “what will people think?” But I take your hand anyway, and my skin tingles. This is the longest I’ve been home in ages, in more than ten years actually, and I have found myself falling in love. With the tender blush of the sunrises in my city and its empty streets in the early mornings that are just mine, with its smiling babies with enormous eyes, with the easy familiarity of needing haggle at the flower stall on my way to my mom’s house, even though the guy always gives me an extra bunch of flowers for free in the end. I don’t remember what loving these things is supposed to feel like, so when my heart feels full to bursting, I fall in love with people.

*Hiking in Vayots Dzor, Armenia, for New Years 2022 was its own kind of magic. Big thanks to the much talented Sipan Grig for the photo.*

We walk down the street with my hand in yours, despite the sweltering heat of August. It is as if your hand is what’s tethering me down to this city that is both familiar and foreign to me after so many years away. It will all blow away if I let go – the sunrises, the smiling children, the sense of belonging. Or maybe it will be me who is blown away. Either way, I don’t want to find out, so I hold on tightly despite both our palms sweating.

People stare at us. The simple answer is that between the tattoos and the piercings and the strange choices in hair color, my presence is nothing like subtle. Over the years, the more the society has pushed me to conform, the more I have pushed back. You get to have the real me only if you can see the real me, past what’s on the outside. To quote the Little Prince: “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential, is invisible to the eye.” “It’s like dating a firework,” you say. I think I’m supposed be flattered, but it makes me impossibly sad.

Pack… Hiking Boots

A couple of weeks ago I hiked the Northern Summit of Mount Aragats in Armenia. I’ve really loved hiking in Armenia this year – it has helped me feel grounded in what my Armenian identity means to who I am today. But this hike was particularly meaningful to me. And not just because it was challenging and I can’t wait to give it another go when I’m better trained, rested, and fueled. Not just because it’s the tallest peak in Armenia.

Hiking the North Summit of Mt. Aragats, Summer 2021. It was anything but easy. But I loved every painful step of it. Special thanks to Tigran Gasparyan for his company and for the picture.

Aragats has a special meaning to me, it holds a special place in my heart. But to tell you about it, we have to go back, all the way back to the “cold and dark” 90s in Armenia. We have to go back to huddling with the neighbors around the battery powered radio in the dark, waiting for news from the front. We have to go back to how proficient I had become at splitting wood with an axe at 10 years old. We have to go back to going to bed fully dressed with a hat in my head while cuddling a brick heated on the stove and wrapped in rags for warmth. We have to go all the way back…

(As I spend $150 on a pair of hiking pants and a shirt, I am reminded all of a sudden that at one point my mom’s monthly salary was $100. It was one shiny crisp hundred dollar bill, and I was in awe. That month we could afford to eat.)

Pack… Memories of Your First Love

Second grade was the first time I fell head over heels in love. Or so I told my mother when she asked me if I had liked someone. “I don’t just like him, mom,” I’d said “I’m in love.” Mom took the situation with all the gravity it deserved (this had been my first love after all) and took me out for ice cream.

The subject of my ardent affection was Murad, a boy who sat behind me in first grade. He used to torment me mercilessly: I was a huge bow head, and he’d yank on my pigtails throughout the class, until I got fed up, turned around, smacked him over the head, and proceeded to get in trouble with our teacher. As soon as the bell rang I’d chase him down the corridors to seek revenge. Not for the pigtails: I could have lived with that, but I was an uber nerd even then, so getting me in trouble with the teacher was what I deemed revenge worthy.

My 1st grade class photo: I’m the one with a giant bow on my head standing next to the teacher, with “can we get this over with” expression on my face (that tells you everything you need to know about 7 year old me), Murad is the boy standing to my left.

Murad wasn’t all bad though; he would bring me Mamba fruit chews, share his lunch with me, and draw me when he got bored in class (I can’t imagine his drawings were very good, but I remember being rather pleased I was his muse). At the end of second grade we were in our class play together: Alice in Wonderland. I was Alice, of course, in my favorite checkered red dress, and Murad was the Cheshire Cat, and every time we had to rehearse our scene together, we’d both blush to the tips of our ears. But I figured this was method acting at its best: Alice had got to have been flustered by a big talking cat! (Though all this blushing during the play was what had given me away to my mom – I’ve been working on my poker face ever since.)

Pack… Your Patience

I feel very cosmopolitan flying to see my aunt in Amsterdam, hopping on the phone with cousins in Moscow, and writing postcards for extended family in Nantes. But the part of the story that’s less suitable for glossy pages of travel magazines is how folks ended up so scattered all over the world and what they had to leave behind.

At the ripe old age of 4, my interests included bunny rabbits, chocolates (particularly from the russian candy factory called “Red October ” – I was a proper Soviet child), listening to my second cousin Levon play the accordion, and watching the children’s evening program on TV (here’s the YouTube link to the opening and closing themes for all my Soviet folks – try not to cry).

On this particular evening in the winter of 1988 we were visiting Levon’s family, and with him being older, he was put in charge of watching me. This made it easy for me to nag him into playing his accordion for me again and again. After dinner the adults had stayed behind in the kitchen, which meant that the living room TV and candy dish were now my domain (try and stop me, Levon). The sugary sweets would surely keep me up past my bedtime – but the adults seemed to be none the wiser.

Left to right: Grandma Emma, cousin Sveta, 4 year old me, and cousin Lena at the Children’s Railroad park in Yerevan in the summer of 1988.

In the kitchen they huddled around the radio. Every now and then I’d hear one of them exclaim in incredulity and what sounded like maybe anger or fear. But cartoons were on – what did I care about a bunch of adults and their boring radio? When suddenly the phone rang: long rings of a long distance phone calls – back then you could always tell.

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… 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… 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… 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).