I was born into a family of immigrants, making my life more interesting than others. My mom was born and raised in Ukraine until the 1990s. My dad was born and raised in Armenia until the 1980s. They both came to America with less than $100 in their pockets and no set place to live or job. Like most immigrants, this is usually the story you hear to show their triumph by starting from the bottom.
What a lot of people don’t necessarily think about is the barriers that are created by being the first generation to immigrants in a foreign country, even in times like today. I never fully fit in with the kids at school, from the first day of kindergarten to high school. The first language that I experienced as a baby and through my childhood was Russian.
I still remember the first time I went over a friend’s house for dinner. The meal we had was corn on the cob and buttered noodles for the kids, and steak for the parents. I sat at the dinner table thinking, “Ok, where is the real food? What is all this?”
Growing up, I was often looked at as different and it drove me crazy. Not only was I the only girl in my grade with curly hair, tan skin and dark eyes, but I did not know many things they knew. I didn’t know sports that were popular here, like baseball and football. I also didn’t know popular singers that were shown by their families. I knew what my parents knew about pop culture, so I came to learn everything my own way with life in suburbia.
Through the years, my Russian has decreased more and more. Once my mom went back into work after being a stay-at-home mom for most of my life, it was like a totally different person walking through that door every day. Job after job my mom took, I could hear her accent become less noticeable. Today, she speaks English so much better than before.
I feel that we all have this pressure to fit in society’s definition of perfect. When we try to fit in, we forget who we actually are. My mom has had countless jobs that have looked down on her, on where she’s from and have underestimated her abilities because she didn’t go to school here.
The more my brother and I spoke English at school and with friends, the more we forgot Russian. With the pressures of everyday life to be like everyone else, I feel as though we turned into totally different people instead of embracing the people that we are.
When it came to my parents’ drive for success, I did nothing but look in awe of the both of them. They left their lives back in their home country to start a new venture for work and life in the states without any help or knowledge of anything here. Being the first born in this family has been the most eye-opening experience that I ever thought anyone can go through. I got to see what everyone else couldn’t see or didn’t know what to look for in people and in the world. Even though my Russian can be very broken, I have nothing but motivation to get better at it. I am extremely proud of my culture and how much my parents have gone through to get to this point. There’s nothing stopping them to keep going, and nothing stopping me from embracing who I am.
