When my parents and I were in the process of emigrating from the former Soviet Union, I got into a huge disagreement with a makeshift friend about whether we’d be going to the United States or America.  Shtatyi, the States in Russian, was a place that our parents talked about in hushed tones.  Good for them, I supposed.

I was heading to America.

Even though I’ve lived in this country for over thirty years now (which is amazing, considering how I’m still in my mid-20s)  I still get an electric buzz to my soul every so often when I hear the word America.  Not the sung version at stadiums, nor the flag waving “love it or leave it”  kind, but every once in a while, when I hear the word casually mentioned, I pause, and I remember what it was like to be nine years old, having left most of my family and all of my friends behind and the aura that the very word invoked for me.

My immigration experience was a charmed one.  I was with my parents, living for the first few months in my uncle’s house.  My biggest complaint was that I didn’t speak English and was mildly alarmed by the laugh track on The Brady Bunch .   Everyone was super nice to me because they assumed that I was traumatized from having had to leave my motherland, so to milk their good graces I kept my joy about missing months of school to myself.

But not everyone was so lucky.  In Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation, Kimberly Chang is 11 years old, and just immigrated to the United States with her mother from Hong Kong.  Kimberly’s  aunt brings them over, but she is far from benevolent.  The aunt sets the mother up to work in a factory in Chinatown, and gets them a heat-free, roach-infested apartment in a non-Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

And yet, there is something about the immigrant experience that is universal and I was happy to read about it.  The italicized English words that Kimberly misunderstands (I, myself, in my early English education thought that the teacher was saying Poison Curls when she was in fact saying Boys and Girls), to the whole sense of just how foreign your new friends, and their customs and families are.

Like Kimberly, I was reluctant to invite my friends over to our apartment, because although it was clean, my parents and I shared a studio.  “It’s small,” I told my new friends who asked if they could come over to my apartment after I’d been to theirs many times.  “We don’t care,” they’d say, and maybe they didn’t, but how could someone who lived in a multi-story home, with each child having her own room, and extra rooms for things like eating and sitting not be shocked to see a one room apartment?  It’s not snobbery.  It’s otherness.

I’m a little alarmed that Jean Kwok already wrote the book that I’ve been working on, but I’m trying to be an optimist.  Because this is America, and anything is possible.  Including plagiarism.

Don’t tell anyone.

Disclaimer:  I received a copy of Girl in Translation from Riverhead Books, in conjunction with my participation in the soon to be defunct Silicon Valley Moms.

I’ve been writing a memoir of sorts. I know you’re thinking that I’m much too young and beautiful to reflect on my life, and you have a point, of course, but I’m forging ahead.

The memoir is about my childhood in Russia and the process of emigrating to the United States when I was nine years old, in the 1970s. It involves my asking mama and papa a lot of questions about the details of my childhood, the whys and the how comes that I sort of think all parents hope their children don’t bring up. Like the other day, I asked my parents if they remembered locking me in a closet when I was little and they most certainly did not. They did not remember it, incidentally, with incredible accuracy and they were more certain of the non-locking in than they are of almost anything else in their lives.

“But I remember being in the closet,” I told them, keeping an eye on the closets in my apartment and calculating what it would take for them to drag me there now.
“You want people to think you were abused?” Mama says. “Child abuse very popular now.”
Papa has already lost interest.
“Closet-shmoset,” he says. “Do you think American reader will understand what Soviet Union was like? Will they know why we had to leave?”
I think about it.
“I don’t want to alarm you,” I had told my 15 year-old stepson last month, “But the cable in my room is not working. The cable company has been alerted and will arrive on Saturday. I am doing okay.”
“You’ve been living in America too long,” he tells me, not unkindly. He’s lived in Europe for most of his life. I know that he means that for most of the world’s population, the cable being out is not trauma. (Except when it’s Project Runway premiere week.)

My parents are having dinner at our house and the conversation invariably turns to who was worse–Hitler or Stalin. At sonic speed, Stalin wins. “I remember when he died, people were crying on the streets,” Papa tells me. “Idiots.”
“Not everyone,” mama piped in. “Many people were happy.”
“They may have been happy, but they were crying, because not to cry was not patriotic.”
“Really?” I say. Because, clearly, I like to contribute to meaningful discussions. “Did people know what Stalin was all about by then?”
“Yes,” papa says; at the exact moment that mama says, “no.”
“Everyone who wanted to know, knew,” papa said.
“People were scared to know,” Mama said. I think that she is referring to the fact that listening to Western radio was illegal, but she may mean that it was frightening for people to realize that their great esteemed leader was a butcher.

* * *

“You should tell the story of how I realized that it was better to have no citizenship at all than to have a Soviet one,” papa says. And I will. Because I don’t want to be locked in the closet again.
Before we left the Soviet Union, we were stripped of our Soviet citizenship. “And we had to pay for the honor,” papa says.
“What do you mean, in rubles?” I ask.
“No, in myrrh,” pap retorts. “Yes, rubles.”
So when we boarded the plane to Vienna, we were, in effect, stateless. We landed in Warsaw a short time later, because of bad weather conditions.
“And the authorities wanted to put us all on the bus to Vienna, but every Jew protested. So, Soviets went on the bus, and others, like us, not citizens, were put up in a nice hotel in Warsaw. And that’s when I knew that being a Soviet citizen was worse than having no citizenship at all.”