I immigrated to the US in the summer of 1996. Because I was only one years old at the time, I do not remember what it was like to be a recent immigrant and I was largely spared the burden of having to adjust to life in a new country. My parents, however, still struggle with it seventeen years later.
When we first arrived in New York, my family lived with my aunt and her family in their apartment until we found lodgings of our own. My aunt’s family lived in a tiny, two-bedroom apartment, and for approximately a month, it had to accommodate six adults and one baby, leading to a very crowded situation. The feeling of claustrophobia was further aggravated by the fact that my parents had spent their entire lives in rural villages, where they had grown accustomed to vast, open spaces. Once we had the means to move out and rent a place of our own, we settled in a one-bedroom studio located on the border of Borough Park and Sunset Park in Brooklyn. I spent the next sixteen years of my life in that neighborhood and I attended elementary school four blocks away from our first apartment.
When I first started kindergarten, I did not speak English, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time. On the very first day of school, I recall that a faculty member entered my classroom and began to call the names of some of the students. I had no idea why these students were being selected, but I remember badly wanting to be chosen myself. When my name was called, I was elated, and I dutifully followed the teacher and the other “chosen ones” to a separate, smaller classroom. I was unaware that I was being taken out of my regular class because of my severe lack of proficiency in English. Because we played games and had fun in this ESL program, I did not notice how quickly I picked up the language. Within a few months, I stopped attending the program because I had caught up to my native-speaking classmates. My age allowed me to learn English more or less osmotically while at school, even though I was exposed only to Turkish, Russian, and Bulgarian at home. In contrast, my mother, who was in her mid-thirties at the time, actively and consciously struggled over many years to learn the language after enrolling in an undergraduate program.
While my English got better, I gradually spoke Turkish less and less and I forgot Russian and Bulgarian altogether. This concerned my mother. To combat the loss of my Turkishness, she enrolled me in Turkish school, which I attended on Saturdays during my last three years of elementary school. Although I did learn to read in Turkish while attending this school, my oral skills did not improve, mostly because I was a stubborn and rebellious child who enjoyed doing the exact opposite of what my mother wanted me to. Upset that I had to relinquish my beloved Saturdays, I resolved that even though my mother could force me to attend Turkish classes, she couldn’t make me speak the language. I made an active effort not to speak Turkish, even during Turkish class. Today, I possess basic reading and conversational skills and I speak Turkish with a heavy American accent.
