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I got some of the story! Things I learned today:
My parents and sister landed at JFK with $200 in their pocket that my mom's friend gave them on their layover in London. They had no idea how to get to Manhattan from the airport, and were super lost . https://twitter.com/kavithadavidson/status/1260292608061927424
My parents and sister landed at JFK with $200 in their pocket that my mom's friend gave them on their layover in London. They had no idea how to get to Manhattan from the airport, and were super lost . https://twitter.com/kavithadavidson/status/1260292608061927424
My mom's boss had told her to call her when they land and she'd give her directions. (In India esp at the time it would have been customary for the boss to meet them at the airport.) But my parents had no idea how to use a payphone.
So they asked some guy, and he told them they needed a dime. But they also didn't know what a dime was, and they didn't have one -- they had just landed here. So he gave them a dime -- "some nice guy," my mom says -- and called the boss.
They took a cab straight to the Columbia housing building in Washington Heights. "The cab cost $50 or $60, and we only had $200 in our pocket. And we said, 'So much is gone already! What are we going to eat?'"
They ate bacon and eggs for a month and the three of them lived in a studio in university housing, and my mom went to work the very next day.
Meanwhile, my dad didn't have a job, so he went to the university library and asked if there were any odd jobs he could do. They said, "Yeah, you can transcribe and write summaries of these." They offered him $6 per summary, and he gladly took it. "But guess what?" my dad says.
"It was all scientific material, and what do I know about science?" (My dad majored in English lit.) "I had to read these whole scientific papers -- imagine that -- and write one-page abstracts. I didn't know what the hell I was doing! And I thought, 'Oh, maybe they'll fire me.'"
But they didn't fire him -- eventually, when he got a full-time administrative job at Columbia, he told the library he had to leave, and they told him he was the best writer they had and offered him an extra dollar per abstract to stay.
My main takeaways are:
1) Even for educated, English-speaking people, there are so many things about immigrating to a country that can be disorienting or just difficult. My mom could split an atom but a payphone was foreign to her.
2) The writing hustle is in my blood.
1) Even for educated, English-speaking people, there are so many things about immigrating to a country that can be disorienting or just difficult. My mom could split an atom but a payphone was foreign to her.
2) The writing hustle is in my blood.
Every immigrant story is different. My parents had it easier than many and harder than some. But every one of those stories is worth remembering, documenting, and passing along. Our country was built on the retelling of these stories.
