Autobiography All About Me Because

Autobiography

All About Me

Because I immigrated to America at the cusp of adulthood, I have found that many of the people that I encounter focus on the fact that I am different from them. I immigrated to America six years ago from Moscow, Russia, which is where I spent my childhood. I am a tremendous advocate of America and the American dream, and I know that I would not have the same variety of personal, social, and professional opportunities had I remained in Russia. Despite that, I still do not consider myself very Americanized, probably because I did not spend my childhood in the United States. In fact, there are some aspects of American culture that I find distasteful, and which I will consciously work to avoid incorporating into my own lifestyle, such as the typical American overconsumption of goods and over-emphasis of economic achievement. There are other aspects of American life that I truly embrace. On an individual level, I believe that Americans may be some of the most religiously and politically tolerant people in the world, and I believe that despite immigrating to America during a period of record political divisiveness. As a result, I feel as if it is my goal for my children to be Americanized, but doubt that I will ever be considered Americanized by natives. One reason that I think I will always be seen as the "other" by many Americans is the fact that English was not my first language. My first language was Russian, which was the primary language spoken in my home. I learned English as a child and young teenager and spoke it fluently before moving to the United States, but I continue to speak with an accent, which immediately designates me as an outsider.

While many people focus on my differences and the fact that I am not Americanized, I do not really think I am that different from the average American. In fact, I personally believe that all human beings have more similarities than differences. Every person who I have ever met has had the same set of basic emotional needs: love, security, and validation. I believe that diversity does not change basic human needs or desires, but can have a tremendously profound impact on how someone pursues those needs, and even when someone considers those needs to have been fulfilled. I have come to this conclusion through personal observation; my parents had a mixed marriage and came from extremely diverse backgrounds. Spending time with the two different sides of my family, I came to see that they were not very different, though an outside observer would probably have seen far more differences than similarities.

My family of origin was diverse for a few different reasons. First, my parents had different ethnic backgrounds. My father's family was from Lebanon and was Muslim. However, my father's immediate family moved to Russia when he was a teenager. My father's family spoke Russian, Arabic, French, Armenian, and English. Their knowledge of so many languages came from their Lebanese background, and reflected the cultural diversity in Lebanon. Despite knowing so many different languages, they spoke only Russian in public, and spoke almost always in Arabic in the home. I learned my Arabic from my father's family, and did not discover that the Arabic spoken by Lebanese people is a pidgin language that mixes Arabic, French, and Armenian words, and can be very difficult for other Arabic speakers to understand, until after I moved to the United States.

My father's family had a very stereotypically Muslim structure. My paternal grandparents had an arranged marriage, and my grandfather was the patriarch of the household. Even as an adult, I do not know whether my paternal grandmother ever had a strong opinion about anything in her household, because I never saw her give her own opinion. She was married to my grandfather at sixteen. My grandmother wore a hijab, though my father's sisters, who were raised in Russia, do not consistently wear a hijab; they only do so when attending the mosque or going into religious-based social settings. There is a strong chance that, from an American perspective, my paternal grandfather would be considered a spousal abuser, because he made all of the decisions in the family and expected my grandmother's complete and total obsequience to his will. My father hated my grandfather's treatment of my grandmother, and rebelled against his Muslim background. He rejected the notion of arranged marriage, which caused him to become estranged from his family until shortly before I was born. While I could not imagine treating my own wife the way that my grandfather treated my grandmother, I think that most people underestimated my grandmother. I remembered her as incredibly strong underneath the surface. She is the one who spoke to my grandfather and made him ask for my father's forgiveness, causing the two of them to reconcile. When my sister, who was born before me and had been born premature, died, it was my grandmother who provided comfort and wisdom to both of my parents.

My mother's family is Russian and had been in Russia for as long as the family could trace its history. They are Russian Orthodox Christians, which means that they are members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is impossible to explain my mother's family without explaining their religion, which is also my own religion. Orthodox Christians differ from other Christian denominations in that the Orthodox Church can trace its roots straight back to the church initially begun by the Apostles. For Orthodox Christians, Christ's resurrection is not an allegorical element of storytelling, but an actual historical event. My experience with churches in the United States is that, while many of them talk about the resurrection with reverence, they use the resurrection as part of storytelling, and do not always seem to believe that it occurred. This was a serious issue of contention between the two sides of my family. It is important to understand that my father's Muslim family believed in Jesus Christ. In the Muslim tradition, Jesus was a prophet. However, that belief in Christ was almost more insulting to my mother's side of the family than it would have been had my father's family entirely disavowed Jesus' existence. Despite some heated discussions, I would say that the religious differences did not have a negative influence on my upbringing, because both sides of my family tried to be respectful of the other side's feelings and views. In addition, my mother's family was far more devout than my father's family, so that my father's family did not resist when my parents decided to raise their children as Orthodox Christians.

There are elements of Orthodox Christianity that helped shape who I am in a very dramatic way. For example, when we worshipped, men sat on one side of the church, while women sat on the other. My understanding is that most orthodox religions engage in similar sex-segregation, and I blindly accepted it as part of my faith when I was younger. Men and women simply did not worship together. However, I am somewhat bothered by this distinction, especially because I do believe that many of the conventions of Islam, such as the hijab, are sexist, and my father's family has pointed out the similarities in custom and ritual between the Orthodox Church and Islam.

Another example of my religious heritage is that I have a strange love-hate relationship with art. One of my pastimes is artwork, and I am very interested in sculpture. However, I have never sculpted the Virgin Mary or any of the venerated saints, because my mother raised me to believe that statutes were a form of false idol. We did, however, have painted representations of God, Jesus, and Mary. I am also fascinated by the form and function of pieces of art, from the mundane to the complex. I believe this is because form serves function in the Orthodox Church. For example, many of our churches, including the one that I attended as a child, are shaped like an ark, to represent Noah's ark and its attendant blessedness.

My religious upbringing also gave me a passion for ritual, and I find ritual reassuring in all areas of my life, probably due to my religious background. Every single day has a different service, though some elements of the service never change. Each day is also broken into time periods, with a specific religious service linked to the time of day. The year is broken into several different periods, with some times celebrated by feasting and excess and others observed by demonstrating restraint. In addition, celebrants chant while participating in services, which is very reassuring. At the church I attend now, Orthodox members from many countries come to worship, so the chants are repeated in several different languages. The church also uses incense, and the altar is venerated by the priest who chants and waves the incense during each service. To me, these elements always added to the holiness, and actually separated worship from the everyday. That experience was different for my mother, who incorporated her religion into every aspect of her life. Fasting is a large part of the Orthodox Church, and it seemed to me that my mother was always engaged in some type of fast. As an adult, I realize that this was not merely the perception of a child; Orthodox Christians really do fast about half of the year, though the fasts are from any thing one can overindulge in for pleasure. My mother's fasts always involved food, probably because she was prone to putting on weight easily and was very concerned about that. However, when I was a child, I believed that the fasts had to involve some type of starvation.

In some ways, growing up in Moscow was similar to growing up in a big city in the United States. My parents were both very well educated and held jobs as teachers. Teachers in Russia are more highly respected, and relatively highly paid, especially in comparison to American teachers. Therefore, my family was financially stable. We had a three bedroom apartment with a living room, kitchen, and dinette area. Most of my extended family members lived in similar apartments, also in Moscow, so we were able to spend considerable time together as a family. There was not a lot of open or green space near our apartment buildings. There were parks, but my parents were concerned about crime and we did not frequently get to play in those parks. However, some members of my mother's family lived in the country on a farm, and we spent several vacations there, so I do not feel as if being raised in the city kept me from understanding nature. On the contrary, I learned skills that were very practical on the farm, such as how to tell a good egg from a bad egg in a henhouse, which I will probably never have an occasion to use again. I believe that my physical environment growing up influenced me in another way, as well. I am comfortable in large cities and in very rural environments, such as small towns and farms. However, I was very unfamiliar with a suburb-type environment before coming to the United States. I am very torn with how I feel about them. On the one hand, they seem very inefficient and wasteful to me, because people want the convenience of city life with the space and freedom of living in the country, and to provide both developers use up a lot of land for retail and parking space. On the other hand, I find them seductive for the very same reason.

Looking back at my childhood, there are many things that I learned that I doubt I will ever need to know. Because both of my parents were educators, they put a tremendous emphasis on learning. The vast majority of my childhood memories are associated with learning. My parents taught me how to read when I was very young; I do not remember a time when I was not reading, and I know that I was reading chapter books by the time I was five or six. Although we all read, my mother would read to us during family time. Given her religious inclinations, much of that reading was from the Bible, but she also had a great passion for any literature that she considered classic, and she was not hampered by age or genre in her selections. When I was about eight, she became fascinated with a mystery author, and she read them to all of the kids, though they were probably completely age-inappropriate. Now that we are in the United States, she has discovered the merits of Dr. Seuss when reading to one of my nieces, and went through the entire library that night after my niece went to sleep.

My father took a different approach to education. Rather than teaching us from books, he involved his children in a variety of activities. For example, to teach us about electricity, he had helped us create circuits and a saltwater battery. To teach us about history, he would take us to museums and tell us about the items that we observed. He loved to play a game with us; we would be challenged to find something in the museum that we had never learned about before. We would find out as much about it as we could at the museum, and then research information about it for the next few weeks. Given Russia's rich political history, he used famous landmarks and occasions to teach us about Russian history. Although my father is Muslim, he is not anti-Jewish, and has always found Holocaust deniers to be among the most disturbing people in the world. He would take any opportunity that he could to teach us about Stalin's reign and its attendant impact on Russia's population, and then challenge us to come up with ways that we would, as individuals, challenge someone like that if they were to ever come in power. In this way, my father used real life examples to teach us facts and to encourage us to think about what we were learning.

While my parents played a tremendously influential role in my life, I have discovered that one of the more interesting aspects of immigrating when I was almost an adult is that I have had to develop an extensive network and community base within the United States. Therefore, I think that my friends here have played a very important part in my cultural development. After all, I may not be Americanized, but moving here has profoundly changed who I am, which has separated me from my native culture. I did not realize how profound that separation was until I had an occasion to visit Russia a few years after immigrating to the United States. I was no longer fully a Russian, but had come to embrace certain ideals, which are thoroughly American ideals. I find this even more remarkable in today's political environment, which does not necessarily encourage patriotism and, to an outsider, even sometimes seems anti-American. However, I have thoroughly embraced some of the loftier American ideals, perhaps even more so than many native-born Americans.

One of the first people I met when I came to the United States was my neighbor, Elizabeth. Elizabeth and I were unusually matched as friends. I was a seventeen-year-old recent immigrant from Russia. Elizabeth was a thirty-six-year-old housewife and mother-of-two. On the surface, we had nothing in common, and I initially found her somewhat offensive. The oldest of her children found my accent fascinating, but it seemed to me that he was making fun of me. As a result, I believed that Elizabeth was a racist, and tried to avoid her. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was known as the neighborhood social butterfly, and her feelings were hurt by the fact that I tried so hard to avoid her friendly overtures. However, one day, I watched as a speeding car ran over Elizabeth's dog, which had somehow gotten loose from her yard. I knew the dog was hers, because they always had a dog on the leash, and it led the type of pampered life that most people would like to have. I ran to her home and knocked on the door, explaining that her dog was bleeding in the street, and then helped her get the dog into the car, and sat in the back of her SUV, with the dog in my lap, cradling it as she drove to the vet. The emergency surgery took a few hours, and she offered to drive me home, but I found myself surprised to find that I was so invested in the welfare of this spoiled little dog. I did not like Bear the Chihuahua or at least I thought that I had not, but I had seen Elizabeth's children dote upon the dog and knew how much they valued him. Talking to Elizabeth, I came to understand a concept that, to me, is very American and Western European: being passionate about animal rights. In Russia, animals are animals. People have pets, and some people grow much attached to them, but I never experienced people treating their pets like human beings. In America, pets are treated like people. As a Russian, I found media portrayals of this type of treatment of animals to be absurd. However, Elizabeth spent much time explaining her opinion about animals, which is that respect for life starts by respecting the lives of small things. She is not vegan or even a vegetarian; she simply thinks that animals deserve to be treated with honor. Leaving a dog to die on the street, rather than looking at the tag on his collar and coming to her door so that he could get treatment was something that she viewed as dishonorable. I was intrigued by her opinion, and came to realize that it was something I felt as well. I have even volunteered with an animal shelter, which is dedicated to the humane treatment of animals, even when it cannot preserve life. I also make the choice to eat organic or free-range meat, when given the option, because I know that those animals have better living conditions than other animals. Interestingly enough, Elizabeth's point-of-view made me understand some aspects of my father's family and its position on pets and meat. One of my paternal uncles is a halal butcher, and fully believes that killing and butchering meat in a certain manner is necessary to honor the gift that Allah has given people by providing them with animals for their meals.