CHAPTER NINE
“I’m going to America,” I told my cousin Sercan, as we stood together on the balcony of his family’s apartment on 1696 sokak. We were on the fourth floor, right around the corner from my school, Cumhuriyet Ilkokulu, where I had attended from first through fifth grade.
“Yeah, sure you are,” he said, laughing. He was just nine, and he assumed I was joking around, as I had many times in the past. Humor was a huge part of our life in those days in Karsiyaka, but I also remember making sure not to disappoint my little cousin too much and paying particular attention to keep my promises. I didn’t want him to lose faith in the way life worked, at least the way I knew it by the age of eighteen, and wanted to make sure that he never lost hope.
“No,” I assured him, “I am going. Soon.”
As the date of my departure drew closer, my excitement grew, but deep inside, mixed feelings were setting in. The idea that I would soon be in California was thrilling, but I was only eighteen and would be thousands of miles from my entire family and everyone I knew. I could already begin to sense how much I would miss all of my loved ones and my hometown.
I had been issued a passport, gotten a tourist visa valid for three months, and bought a plane ticket to San Francisco. My mom found me an old suitcase while I revisited some of the English-language material from my high school. In those days, the education system required students to learn one of three foreign languages, starting in sixth grade until graduation from high school in eleventh grade. We had to take either English, French, or German, and I had taken English.
Almost every country in the world welcomes Americans, so it may be a surprise to learn that it doesn’t work so easily the other way around. Getting a visa to enter the US was very difficult for Turkish citizens at that time, and it still is. Luckily, one of my dad’s friends had the right connections and enough pull that he was able to get me a tourist visa, although it was only good for three months.
I had no idea what I was actually going to do when I got to America — the only person I knew there was the guy who had encouraged me to come, and we’d only been friends for about a year — but I had all the misguided confidence of any eighteen-year-old boy. I reckoned I would figure it all out once I arrived. And even though it was only a three-month visa, what sense does a young man have of time, really? Three months was an eternity at eighteen.
I took a deep breath, said my goodbyes, and hopped on a big jet plane, with an achin’ in my heart, in November 1990. Mom was full of worries and fears, devastated that her only child was leaving home and moving thousands of miles away, but she showed me nothing but total support at the same time. I had around $3,000 with me, which Mom and Dad had given me. They had taken out a bank loan to get it, which they would spend the next five years paying back.
When I landed at the San Francisco airport, my buddy picked me up and we drove to Marina, a town a couple of hours south of the city. It had a population of around twenty thousand and was a ten-minute drive from Monterey. It had been a long flight and my excitement was now battling exhaustion. These conflicting feelings were making it hard to grasp the reality that I was actually in California, in the “land of the free” that I had been reading and hearing about for as long as I could remember. It felt like a waking dream. I looked out the car window at the vast landscape and the seemingly endless coastline and could feel my head swimming as the reality of where I was, the decision I had made, sank in. I had left my home and was in new territory now.
For the first few weeks I fought off jet lag, tried different foods, and played a lot of basketball, just like I used to do back home. I soon discovered that American food was really fast food, that there was no identifiable “American food” but rather a variety of different cuisines originating from the vast array of immigrant communities in California. With little money and a young man’s taste buds, I found myself eating pizza and Mexican food most of the time, as well as Top Ramen, the ultra-cheap noodles one could prepare in boiling water. When I could afford it, though, I tried Chinese and Japanese food. I found the variety of foods available in California very interesting and exotic. (Most people probably think people from Turkey eat shish kebab every day, but in reality what people cook and eat depends on the region, and being from the west coast, I grew up eating fish, every chance our finances allowed. We ate a lot of salads and vegetable-based meals that included artichokes, eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini, and potatoes. We also ate a lot of street food, which is very delicious.)
Marina was very different than what I was used to in my neighborhood in Karsiyaka. It was extremely quiet during the day, with not a soul on the streets. Where was everybody? On the rare occasion that I spotted another kid on the street, I would try to strike up a conversation in order to practice my limited English. My vocabulary was no more than twenty to thirty words at that stage, and I was a complete stranger to American slang. If people were laughing, I would laugh too in imitation of them, without having a clue as to what was so funny. Fortunately, my buddy lived with a nice German lady, and I got to talk with her when she was at home, which helped. I was slowly and tentatively learning about this new country. Or so I thought.
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