From Izmir to California: Journey of a Turkish Immigrant tells the story of how my open heart and questing spirit led me to leave my native Turkey as a teenager and move to America. For years, I have been gathering and going over in my mind the hundreds of memories that make up this book. I begin by recalling my childhood and the tough circumstances in which I grew up, including poverty and political unrest in my country and my parents’ separation. I reveal how I first came to America with little money and almost no command of English, and how I struggled to make friends and learn about American life.
Later, I share with the reader details — sometimes funny, sometimes sad — of the menial and difficult jobs I held and the grim apartments in which I lived; of my struggles with money, and against prejudice and bias at work and in my personal life. I also discuss many of the friendships I formed, including my first marriage and the groups of co-workers I hung out with, played sports with, and went to concerts with.
As my professional and personal life takes shape, I share the ways in which I am growing as a person and how my awareness of the world changes. I discuss where I was on September 11, 2001 and explore my feelings about the traumas and horrors people around the globe go through, and how so often we only seem able to see one side of an issue.
For every negative experience, there has been a corresponding positive experience, including my two children, my time in college, my career in the US Air Force, and the patients I have interacted with at the hospital where I work. At last, I have come to the decision that my life experiences, good and bad, are worth sharing with others, and thus I have written this book.
The writing process was neither quick nor easy. I thought about everything that had happened in my life to this point, and whether I saw things differently from others. I wondered how the people who lived through these experiences with me might feel about my take on them, and whether I might cause more pain than joy by recounting these stories. But at last I decided that my story was one that people could learn from, and I knew I had to put it on paper. Still, it took many drafts and evolved considerably from my raw initial outpourings to its final form.
My story is ultimately one of optimism and perseverance, but my life has not been perfect by any means, as the book reveals. I have had some tough experiences with depression, prejudice, poverty and loss, ones to which I believe many readers will be able to relate. I also believe readers of From Izmir to California will gain insight into the immigrant experience and the challenges of life in America, while finding common ground with me through our shared love of American pop culture, particularly the music and movies that shaped me in Turkey and here.
I am a first-time author and, in many ways, just a regular guy. But I believe my story, and the humanistic, “citizen of the world” value system that was instilled in me by my parents and family in Turkey and which has guided me since childhood, offer much to any reader seeking to find their own place in the world. It will also allow native-born Americans to understand the mindset of immigrants, and learn more about my homeland, which has much to offer the world but is often burdened by an unfairly negative public image.
Autobiographies are typically written by people with long and illustrious careers in some public-facing field, whether it’s show business (singers, actors, musicians), politics, or athletics. And those stories are often fascinating, teaching us about the struggles people must overcome in order to achieve fame and renown. But most people are not celebrities, or star athletes, or leaders of nations; as Henry David Thoreau wrote, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and those lives are worthy of examination, too.
My life has been marked by struggle, but it has also brought me great joy. I have chased many dreams, and accomplished far more than I ever would have believed possible, as a child growing up in challenging economic and social circumstances in my home country of Turkey. With the support of my parents, I moved to the United States as a teenager with almost no money and only a few words of English, and once here, followed a path that millions of immigrants have traced before me. I worked low-level jobs in a variety of fields, joined the US military, went to college, got a valuable degree, and pursued a decades-long career in the health care field, where my fundamentally compassionate and humanistic nature proved to be a valuable asset.
From Izmir to California tells my story, with all its ups and downs, tragedies and triumphs, friendships, relationships, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
