squad goals – Packing List for Immigration

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… 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… 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.