survivor – Packing List for Immigration

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 Ability to Survive a Genocide

My grandma Zabelle was my dad’s paternal aunt. But with his mother’s passing when he was only seven, Zabelle had as good as raised my dad as one of her own. And since I had no surviving grandparents, Zabelle was the one grandma that I knew.

In the late 1980’s she was already a tiny old lady. She wore long sleeve black blouses and a black scarf wrapped around her wispy white hair; even in the heat of August, even while cooking, with all four burners of her stove turned on in the kitchen. Zabelle was stern: I’d get a scolding for trying to sneak my fingers into the bowl of frosting she’d just whipped (I was a famous cake batter and frosting thief). But the woman was all love, her eyes crinkled with laughter all the while she was scolding me. She’d chase me with a wooden spoon under the kitchen table and tell me that if I sat there quietly, she’d let me lick the bowl once she was done frosting the cake.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of Zabelle. But here is my christening at Etchmiadzin.

Zabelle was a proud Vanetsi: her family had been displaced from Van in Western Armenia (now Turkey) in 1915, during the Armenian Genocide. But in Armenian culture Vanetsi people are known and often teased for their frugality (if not outright parsimony). And boy, was Zabelle a Vanetsi in that sense! A survivor of two world wars, 1 genocide, 4 different governments, and a number of more personal privations, she was nothing if not frugal. She was known to unravel old, worn out sweaters, and knit new ones out of the yarn. All the dish sponges in her kitchen had once been nylon pantyhose (don’t question it). And I still love Zabelle’s meat pies because she’d always mix rice in with the meat – years later it dawned on me that she used to do that to stretch whatever little meat she happened to have.