CHAPTER TEN
I only stayed in Marina for a few weeks. Soon after I arrived, my friend and his lady friend moved to Monterey, and I went with them. Though the two towns were just a few miles apart, Monterey offered a lot more things to do.
We lived very close to the famous Cannery Row, which featured in John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name. We rented a small apartment for $525 a month just a few blocks up the street from Cannery Row.
I was very excited when I bought myself a bike for $50 at Kmart and began riding to Cannery Row and Fisherman's Wharf, then back, every day. I pedaled all the way to the rugged beauty of Lovers Point in Pacific Grove, where the ocean smelled fresh and the salt air filled my lungs and the view took my breath away every time. For some reason, it stayed in my mind that two lovers either had committed suicide there or they were swept out to the ocean, so I always remember this area having a sad and spiritual feel to it. Not long ago I learned that the area originally was called “Lovers of Jesus Point” because Pacific Grove was a Methodist retreat camp back in the day. Things had such a mystic feel to them in Monterey for a young Turkish teenager like myself. The Dream Theater, Lighthouse Avenue, the Japanese restaurants, the Nob Hill grocery store, the arcade in Cannery Row, and even the 7-Eleven all have carved memories in my mind from those early California days.
Beautiful homes lined the Pacific Coast in that part of California. Each of them almost certainly cost millions of dollars, an unimaginable amount of money to a poor Turkish teenager, and I always wondered who lived in them. Were they very different than us? Although we lived only a few blocks away from some of the most gorgeous homes on Earth, the vibe was a lot different at our apartment complex.
As the weeks went by, reality began to sink in. I was running short on money — my tourist visa (which I was able to extend to six months) didn’t allow me to get a job, and Monterey was an expensive place to live without any income. It was also difficult to make new friends with people my own age. Although I wasn’t a bad-looking kid, and girls usually smiled at me if I caught their eye, communication was a challenge. If one of those same girls tried to talk to me on the street or in a grocery store, I would stumble over my words and she would quickly lose interest. I also remember being very shy. I felt out of my comfort zone in a new country, with limited language skills. Part of me felt inferior compared to Americans, and I think this is something a lot of the Turkish people, especially youth, felt in those days in comparison to many of the citizens of westernized countries.
I can’t remember how we met, but I became friends with a girl who was ten years older than me, with long brown hair and glasses that made her look like a librarian. She lived in Pacific Grove with her mother. She told me she found me handsome, which was very nice for a young immigrant to hear from an American girl. I remember her inviting me over to her house a couple of times and reading books to me. She was very intelligent, and I tried to keep up, but the language barrier came between us, and she lost interest.
The importance of improving my English was becoming more and more obvious, but it would take me many years to become fluent. Why did Americans have to use so much slang? I hadn’t understood every word the characters on TV said, but I usually got the gist. When boys and girls my own age spoke, on the other hand, it was a maze of incomprehensible late-’80s jargon, delivered in thick, slurred California accents. I remember watching a lot of MTV and VH1 in those days, to help me improve my language skills.
Although I was still excited to be in America, I started missing my mom, my grandmother, my family, and my friends. I missed the basketball games, soccer games, card games, playing billiards, backgammon, all the jokes and the laughter, the delicious homemade and street food, my room... I missed singing “L’Italiano,” “We Are the World,” and “Broken Wings” loudly with my cousins and friends. I missed my life as a typical teenager back home.
I spent a lot of time drawing and keeping a diary those early years. Revisiting and looking at those pages makes me realize how lonely and miserable I was back then.
As boredom and depression crept up on me, my theory that everything would be all right as long as I was in California was being tested...and found wanting. The West Coast was indeed as beautiful and exciting as I had imagined, but without money, language skills, a job, or any friends, the American lifestyle was as distant as it had been when I was back in Izmir. I was physically present in California, but I couldn’t truly enjoy most of the pleasures it had to offer. I could see the dream, but I couldn’t touch it — it was like a chicken rotating on a skewer, its juices dripping, only a few inches away from my hungry eyes, but separated from my grasp by a wall of thick glass. So close, but so far.
I’d had a good, normal family life back home and little did I know it was never going to be the same again. To this day, I still miss that comfortable family environment I grew up in, with aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces, all eating together, laughing, and telling stories and jokes. I have never fully managed to re-create the sense of belonging I felt growing up in Izmir, even after more than three decades of life in this country.
Was this the price I had to pay for pursuing the American dream? Was I destined to be a lonely immigrant? If so, it was a high price indeed. Loneliness can be a hard thing to deal with, and is any dream worth pursuing if you don’t have your family around to enjoy it with you?
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