Russian Bronze
My Russian American DichotomyI was a Russian girl and an American teenager. I had no choice regarding the introductory but I tried very hard to be the second. Now as a grown woman, I largely deem myself a New Yorker. While I never veritably considered myself an American, being a New Yorker encompasses more. New York has a special tolerance for Russians. My immigrant story begins when I was five years old. I don’t recall a sense of fleeing from our home country or the idea that our life was difficult. As a child growing up in Kiev, I recall very little. I do not forget snapshots here and there, for the most part stories retold that have tattooed themselves onto the childhood story log. I do not forget getting my ears pierced when I was three years old. With gold studs in my ears, I descended sub ground to a quintessential ice cream parlor. I do not forget the dark wood paneling and the taste of the vanilla. The memory of that vanilla has solidified itself as the definition of vanilla perfection to me. My grandmother, who came to America three years before us, used to send me clothes. My mother would then go on to dress me up in the fashionable American garb and pose me in front of the navy plaid wool blanket on our couch. To this day I have a portfolio of me as a mini Russian fashionista in bell-bottom jeans, short skirts, and sweaters of the itchiest caliber. Yet at times there were style malfunctions. A roll of film serves as proof of our afternoon strolling through an urban Russian park. Me, a three-year-old with long hair on the swings, wearing as a finish outfit, American Popeye Underoos. My father invented all of my childhood photographs in our bathtub and my mother would send them to my grandmother as proof of wear. My grandmother arranged the visa that got our family out of Russia. I do not forget very little of the immigration process. My mother packed the only life she had known into a couple of suitcases and moved to a alien country that made no promises beyond hope. She was 25 years old. I am now 34 years old with my own 6 year old and can not imagine confronting a task half as challenging. We came to America by way of Vienna primary and then Rome. We were thrust together with other immigrants into a keeping pattern of unglamorous proportions. I can’t recall one iota of our entire time in Europe. The family stories that circulate regarding the European purgatory are few and random. I got motion sick habitually so my mother carried a plastic bag with her everyplace she went. My mother was astonished that so galore Italian men knew her name; she didn’t realize that her name, Bella, was synonymous with gorgeous in Italian. I do not forget my grandmother coming to visit us in Italy; she couldn’t wait the two more months for us to get to America. When we picked her up at the airport, I do not forget seeing a strange woman who I knew had to be an individual essential shoving a doll versus the glass wall. I didn’t grasp if I was supposed to be more excessively affected emotionally when it comes to the doll or the woman. I don’t do not forget being thrilled by either. Early life in America seems distant, a shadow of a childhood where I didn’t in truth fit in but wasn’t completely ostracized. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment all over the street from my grandmother’s identical apartment in Queens. I would look out my introductory floor window and up to my grandmother’s eighth floor window; with binoculars I could see her waving. The whole neighborhood holds few unforgettable moments for me. I do not forget learning to ride my brown Huffy bike there. I do not forget playing on the monkey bars and a grown man came to hang upside down. He was wearing loose running shorts and no underwear. Elementary school in retrospect seems fruitless. My parents were always disappointed with American education. In Russia they told me they were learning my sixth grade math in second grade. My parents would quiz me on my multiplication tables, insisting that I must recognise them so well that I could recite them if they woke me up in the middle of the night. I do not forget the primary day of kindergarten. My grandmother took me and was my translator for the original and only time in my life. The class sat around in a circle and I must have done something that caused the boy next to me made a hand motion that I interpreted to be peeling a carrot. Later I learned it was “shame, shame.” I still don’t do not forget what I did, but I do not forget the shame shame. That was the basi of galore American colloquialisms and childhood jokes that I never learned. We didn’t eat macaroni and cheese or Chef Boyardee. For breakfast I used to have tea with toast and cream cheese. When I was actually little I slurped the tea from a saucer so it wasn’t too hot. Instead of six packs in the refrigerator, my family had vodka in the freezer. I don’t even have a real birth certificate. As authentication of my birth, I am the proud owner of a bronze coin with Lenin on it. My official Russian name and date of birth calligraphied on it with what looks like white gel pen. After five years in America we got our citizenship. I do not forget thinking there would be galore sort of a test but I didn’t have to take one even even though I was in fifth grade. Sixth grade was the year of the Challenger crash. Back in the days when public school let you go home for lunch, I went to my grandmother’s house and watched the Special Report on TV. A few months later, just timid of my elementary school graduation, my parents moved us to Staten Island. I went from Russian to American over night. Sixth grade was junior high school, not elementary school in Staten Island. I had to learn to put on red lipstick and black eyeliner in the cafeteria. Girls had boyfriends, kids smoked in the schoolyard, and the mall was center of it all. Kids categorized one another as Guido, Preppy, or Jappy; I didn’t fit into any of them. It was also at this point that I actually hated being Russian. Russian was the anti-cool. The 80s Cold War had pitted Russia as the supreme enemy. In each James Bond movie, in each Tom Clancy book, we were the foe. My name brands me with my nationality so it was hard to hide. When I hung out on the block, the annoying boy would call me Commie. Living in Staten Island shielded me from Russians. They largely settled in Brooklyn, exceptionally Brighton Beach. I didn’t have any Russian friends and didn’t want any. I didn’t want to associate with anything or anybody Russian because Russians gave other Russians a bad name. Russians came to this country expecting freedom and carried with them a sense of entitlement. They knew how to milk the scheme like professionals. They gathered welfare, SSI, unemployment, Medicaid, feed stamps. They learned to get phony divorces to gather two checks. Old ladies signed up for jobs as home health aides and then would “take care of” their non-sick friends, splitting the paychecks. No one paid taxes, but the government had a great deal of payouts. The women of Brighton Beach would wear their Cartier watches and Gucci purses over their fur coats. They purchased their feed at the imagination Russian gourmet stores and employed feed stamps to buy caviar. There were plans to trick the scheme prepared for them before they even got here. Why does this country owe these immigrants anything? My family, in contrast, worked diligently from the time they arrived in America. My parents worked two jobs and took ESL classes. We never received a dime of public assistance. We had pride and work ethic. I resented these crooks that gave me a bad name – tarred the road I was engaged in a struggle so hard to pave. They didn’t earn that right. Life got posing no difficulty after Perestroika. All of a sudden, Russia got cool. Gorbachev was a hero, Russian letters were fashionable. We went from foes to friends. In college I embraced my inner Russian. While I in the first place taught myself the Russian alphabet from the Russian newspaper at my grandmother’s dining room table, I thought college was time to at long last learn to write in script. So I placed myself in Russian 5 and and sailed through because I knew the answers based on what sounded right. I don’t do not forget at what point I gained the appreciation and gratitude toward my parents for bringing me to this country. I don’t do not forget a defining moment when I it sank in that they did it all for me; all so I may have a better life. A life of freedom and opportunity. It’s a continuous internal conflict, like a child of divorced parents, you’re not sure to which country to pledge allegiance. Watching the Olympics, we always rooted for both the Americans and the Russians. Why were we still rooting for a country we fled? Whenever anything tragic or abominable happened, it was “Americans!” or “Only in America!” I didn’t get it. I thought we were those Americans. America promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. America celebrates birth with a paper certificate as opposed to a dictator-branded bronze coin. For that, I am thankful. When you immigrate as a child, you don’t question it. It just happens to you and you go along with it. But someways plucking a leaf off a tree and replanting it in a new country doesn’t come without consequences. I feel like I have a perpetual wanderlust, not one thing keeping me down anywhere. New York is as good as it gets; a multicultural Mecca with no judgment. But New York bears no roots, no collective history, no cemeteries bearing headstones with names of generations of my family. I haven’t been back to Kiev, but I’d very much like to go. I hope that walking the streets, smelling the trees, hearing the language around me will in some way give me that inner resolve – galore sort of conflict solution of future meeting the past. I speak Russian – fluently and rarely. It was my primary language but will evermore stay my second. But I still listen to Russian pop icon Alla Pugacheva, love caviar and fetch bread and salt into each new apartment I occupy. But in English I read, I write, I dream.
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