“Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.”
Most of history is lost to time; that which endures is mythology—epics of titans long past, champions of time immemorial, echoes of legends sung across the ages. Such is evident with the above popular quote on American manifest destiny. In actuality it’s both misquoted and misattributed to the wrong person. Despite these details, the quote nevertheless continues the tradition of a theme that resonates powerfully in the American cultural identity. In this respect, it’s perhaps one of the truest ideas we have. My family’s story, as is the story of so many other Americans, is one of the call westward.
I was born in Monterey, California in the closing twilight of the 20th century. My family’s story in the New World starts with an orphan boy fleeing ethnic persecution in the back of an ox cart at the century’s early dawn.
On the phone with my grandparents in Walnut Creek, California, the story of this orphan boy began with his crisp and faded death certificate held gently in my grandmother’s hands. On the certificate was not the name the boy was born with, but rather the name my grandmother’s father came to be known by. The official date of birth on his death certificate was most certainly falsified—he lied about his age, my grandmother tells me, in order to enlist in the US military.
From what we can piece together, Maloy Lazarus Maloyan was born in Erzurum, Turkey on September 18, 1894. The youngest of 13 children, his mother gave him up to a British orphanage in Ordu, Turkey, early in his life owing to the region’s ethnic conflict against the Armenian people by the Ottoman government. Officially, he was not considered a citizen of Turkey, but rather one of its subjects. This conflict led to the scattering of his entire family, and prompted his flight from Turkey upon being released from the care of the orphanage around age 13. From Ordu, he traveled in the back of an ox cart to Istanbul. From there he traveled to the French port city Le Havre, where he booked passage to Ellis Island, New York.
Maloy officially entered the United States on October 31, 1908. In doing so he escaped the Armenian Genocide, which began on April 24, 1915. Interned at Ellis Island for a short period of time, he moved to Fresno, California upon his brother’s sending for him. In Fresno, Maloy attended and completed education at Madera High School. Unsure of his future endeavors upon graduation, my grandmother tells me that he falsified his birth date in order to enlist in the US Army. He was stationed in the Pacific, notably including the Philippines where my mother hails. After America’s entry into WWI, Maloy returned to Europe for the first time since childhood when his battalion, the 319th Engineers, was shipped to France. He never saw combat on the Western Front—armistice was declared just before his battalion’s arrival. My grandmother says that he met a woman in France during his time stationed in the country. In her possession are the letters of correspondence he maintained with the woman, letters he kept even after his marriage to my grandmother’s mother.
Maloy married a woman who was German-American. His wife’s family came from Germany through New York in the pre-Ellis Island years, and settled into a German community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Maloy met his would-be bride in Oakland, California where she worked as a schoolteacher. My grandmother describes her mother as “a very proper German woman,” in contrast to her father who could be described as “[knowing] somebody in every state” owing to his affable and gregarious personality. Maloy was officially discharged from the military on June 4, 1920. After his military career, in addition to starting a family he embarked on a long and prosperous life as a grocer who operated several grocery stores (which in this era were the ‘hometown classic unincorporated kind’).
According to my grandfather, Maloy was very, very happy to be in America. In his home country he was a non-person. Here he was a citizen. What I found very interesting was that in the effort to escape their cultural legacies of persecution, Maloy and his wife raised my grandmother and her siblings without much exposure to German or Armenian culture (with the exception, of course, for the food). Rather, they raised their children as the first generation of Americans. Maloy didn’t want his children to be raised in any way evocative of his people’s troubled and persecuted past. And with both World Wars offering the demonization of the German people, neither did his wife for her own culture. My grandmother says very earnestly that her parents’ marriage representing the union across cultural lines was quite the iconoclastic force in this era, an iconoclasm quite unique to, and as history has witnessed, quite common in the American experience. Notably, my grandmother reflects that her father was very disillusioned upon traveling to the Soviet Union in 1970 in order to seek out his remaining family. It wasn’t just the lack of economic prosperity for his relatives— a set of circumstances during his trip, most certainly involving a ‘run-in with the state,’ almost made it impossible for him to get out!
The story of my great-grandfather resonates with me deeply, providing for my family an intimate view into the American experience. For Maloy and his family, America offered the opportunity to forge new paths despite the legacy of hardship behind them. America is the land where peoples of all cultures, colors and creeds began anew to create a civilization that is not only a product of the world, but that also dominates world affairs. As a child of many, many cultures, I have to say it’s a wonderful privilege to belong to such an experience—one that represents the adventure of the human race itself. And speaking of adventure: perhaps at some point I should investigate into the life of my grandfather’s grandfather, a logger and a railroad man by the name of George Waite (that’s a Welsh name), who lived in Portland, Oregon. At some point in his early 20s, he was unwittingly slipped a knockout drop while at a bar. Upon coming to, he found that he had been kidnapped, smuggled through a trap door and placed on a boat that was sailing down the Columbia River. He spent two years at sea before finally jumping ship at Cairo, Egypt to get back to the United States, back home, back to the west, to grow up with the country.
