CHAPTER EIGHT
Although I had a lot of fun growing up and was surrounded by friends and family, as I got older, I began to feel a stifling sense of boredom, mixed with worry about my future.
Isn’t it strange? Childhood is such a time of excitement and discovery, with every day seeming to offer the opportunity to learn something new about the vast and mysterious world through which the adults around us have to maneuver. And yet, as we become adolescents and our bodies and minds change, our new maturity (and how much more mature we always believe ourselves to be than we actually are!) brings with it such overwhelming waves of boredom. We barely know more at sixteen than we knew at six, but we think we know everything; we’re sure we have solved all of life’s mysteries and are ready to stride forward and rule all that we survey.
I remember being particularly weary of life during the hot and humid summer days, when the hours seemed to drag on forever. Although I was able to get away from Izmir now and then, spending some time at resorts in coastal towns, the majority of my time was spent in the neighborhood, due to lack of money more than anything else. Making a living was not easy in those years, and most families I knew led simple lives.
Even as a young boy, I spent a significant portion of my summers working. I helped out at a dentist’s office, a teahouse, a jeweler’s, and a chocolate factory, all for very small paychecks. I made friends with other workers, some my age and some older, some from different backgrounds than my own, and listened with fascination to the stories they told. Some of the other kids were working to support terminally ill parents, an idea that filled me with dread — who could live without one’s parents? — but at the same time touched me deeply.
As I got closer to graduating from high school, I began to ask myself what I could do with my life. What did my future hold? What were my options and what opportunities might I have in Turkey?
Things were different in Turkey than they are in the US. In the US, teenagers spend months — if not their entire high school careers — struggling to compete for admission to this or that college or university, choosing a major that they think will lead them to a high-paying, high-status job upon graduation and thus a life of middle-class comfort, if not wealth. (Of course, these opportunities are not available to all and not everyone pursues education or pursues it for financial reasons.)
The educational system is different in Turkey. You don't get to choose your major or even which college you will attend. Instead, you take a nationwide placement test along with everyone else your age in the country. You list your preferred majors and colleges, ranking them from most to least desirable. If you score well on the test, you might be able to get into one of the schools you have your eye on.
The competition is fierce, and students prepare like racehorses, as we said back home. I remember attending summer tutoring classes to prepare for the extremely challenging annual test. It was a big sacrifice for my parents to give so much of their income to pay for those classes, in the hope that I might have a shot at a brighter future. My mom borrowed money from friends and even took out bank loans to give me the best odds of getting into college, but ultimately it didn’t happen.
Some opt to join the military, but that’s one option among many — the US armed forces are entirely populated by volunteers, and for some that is their best option. In Turkey, by contrast, military service is mandatory for all males over the age of eighteen, unless they are already enrolled in college. The requirement used to be eighteen months, though these days it is between six and twelve. I thought about going into the Turkish Navy during my youth, but from what I recall getting a passing score was not easy.
I graduated from high school in June 1989. Even though I had not achieved the necessary score on the placement test to get into a decent university and had no real plans, I felt a great sense of relief. I spent that summer playing basketball, hanging out with friends, and working at a disco in a Kusadasi resort.
One day, while playing basketball in Karsiyaka, I met a guy a few years older than me. He was on vacation visiting from California. We became friends, and after he went back, we kept in touch via mail. The life that he described sounded like a dream to me, a paradise of freedom and opportunity.
Some of my friends had moved to England from Karsiyaka in the ’80s in search of better opportunities, but my heart was rapidly becoming set on the land that the many films and television programs that I loved so much came from. In my mind, in those days, if America represented freedom, California represented the guarantee of those freedoms. To us Turkish youth of the ’80s, California was a light in a galaxy far, far away, the coolest place we could ever set foot in, up there with the Beatles.
Seeing how much I wanted to move to America, my friend was willing to sponsor me to come to California, but when I mentioned the idea to my mom, she thought I was crazy. For a solid year I kept the pressure on her, arguing over and over that she simply had to let me move and explaining that I saw no future for myself in Turkey. After she met my friend in the summer of 1990, she seemed to feel a little better about the idea. I guess she also realized that she had little choice in the matter, since I was now eighteen years old, believed like every eighteen-year-old that I knew pretty much everything, and had always been a stubborn kid. And so it was agreed: I was going to America.
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