Inseption

Not so long ago, I moved from Rus­sia to the Unit­ed States as a per­ma­nent res­i­dent. I am already over six­ty and I moved in with my chil­dren (these are my daugh­ter Valenti­na, her hus­band Levy, and their son (my grand­son) Mark).
I vis­it­ed them sev­er­al times before I moved. I described my trav­el impres­sions in let­ters to my friends at home. My kids have been push­ing me for a long time to start post­ing these blog posts. I vis­it­ed them the first time in 2014.

A lot has changed since then in the world — time, peo­ple, views, but I have always tried to write about every­day life, about trav­el, about life as it is, with­out dis­cussing the polit­i­cal situation.

Briefly about my children. How did they get to America.

Moving.

The chil­dren left for Amer­i­ca in Jan­u­ary 2012 and live in Ari­zona. Before that, my daugh­ter, when she was still study­ing at the uni­ver­si­ty, and then, hav­ing got mar­ried, togeth­er with her hus­band par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Green Card lot­tery for sev­er­al years.

This lot­tery is run by the US State Depart­ment. True, I do not know if it is being held now, since it was peri­od­i­cal­ly closed for some coun­tries, from which there was already a large flow of win­ners. I also don’t know how it works now in con­nec­tion with the cur­rent polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. And before, both spous­es could par­tic­i­pate, but win­ning one of them allowed the whole fam­i­ly to leave.

In par­al­lel with par­tic­i­pat­ing in the lot­tery, they also applied for emi­gra­tion to Cana­da. There, the selec­tion was car­ried out accord­ing to the list of pro­fes­sions need­ed by the coun­try (which changed annu­al­ly), accord­ing to the num­ber of points that are gained depend­ing on the degree of edu­ca­tion, and a cer­tain num­ber of IELTS points is also required. This is an inter­na­tion­al lan­guage exam admin­is­tered by the British Coun­cil. My daugh­ter suc­cess­ful­ly passed this exam, and they also applied to Canada.

In May 2011, they won the Amer­i­can Green Card, which allows them to become a res­i­dent of the coun­try and gives them the right to work. They col­lect­ed cer­tifi­cates, made the nec­es­sary vac­ci­na­tions, and the whole fam­i­ly had to go through a med­ical com­mis­sion in Moscow and obtain visas at the embassy.

But as they say: “Do not con­fuse tourism with emigration.”

First time

Now I had to deal with the arrange­ment of my fam­i­ly from scratch, look for a job, buy the basic neces­si­ties. Here, the first neces­si­ty is a car, since city trans­port does not go every­where and does not go to every job, and in 47 ° heat one does not like walking.

For the first two months they lived with rel­a­tives, who by this time had been in Ari­zona for about 12 years and had made a lot of friends from the for­mer USSR. Almost all of them are relat­ed to IT tech­nolo­gies. The end of the 90s, it was a peri­od when a lot of pro­gram­mers left.

One of their friends said they need­ed a graph­ic design­er for a job. The son-in-law had a large port­fo­lio and rec­om­men­da­tions from Amer­i­can employ­ers, for whom he per­formed work in Rus­sia via the Inter­net. So he pret­ty quick­ly, by local stan­dards, got a job in his spe­cial­ty, which does not hap­pen often here (not count­ing pro­gram­mers))). But even this “quick­ly” is obtained not ear­li­er than a month, since doc­u­ments on a res­i­dence per­mit and a tax num­ber must arrive, with­out which it is impos­si­ble to work.

At first, Levy worked from home. One of their friends helped with buy­ing a car. They had to buy it with cash, because banks did­n’t give them a loan because the chil­dren did­n’t have a cred­it his­to­ry. To got a license to dri­ve a car in Amer­i­ca, if you don’t know how to dri­ve, you must first pass the the­o­ry and get a tem­po­rary dri­ving license with a teach­ing per­son. My chil­dren in Rus­sia didn’t have a car and didn’t know how to dri­ve, so anoth­er friend of our rel­a­tives taught them how to dri­ve and nav­i­gate the new city.

As soon as the son-in-law got a job, the chil­dren rent­ed an apart­ment. What does it mean to start a “life from scratch” — no spoons, no forks, no plates, no fur­ni­ture, only clothes, but com­put­ers. You can’t take every­thing on an air­plane, where there are 10 kg of hand lug­gage and 23 kg of lug­gage per person.

Arrangement

And again, rel­a­tives and their friends helped. Some­one gave dish­es, a table, chairs, a crib, a mat­tress on which they slept, and which at first lay right on the floor, some­one gave a shelf, some­one gave a sofa. For­tu­nate­ly, apart­ments here are rent­ed with a built-in kitchen, microwave, dish­wash­er, wash­ing machine, dry­er and refrig­er­a­tor. Ini­tial­ly, from the world by thread, they acquired some belong­ings, and then they began to “ham­ster” so that when they moved to a rent­ed house, they were tor­tured to car­ry things.

My daugh­ter got a job right away, but not in her spe­cial­ty, in a large chain cloth­ing store part-time, her three-year-old son was sent to a kinder­garten, for which there is a very large pay. The first time they had one car. The son-in-law worked dur­ing the day, and in the evening he drove his wife to work, and he sat with his son, and then loaded his son into the car and went to pick up his wife from work. A year lat­er, they had a cred­it his­to­ry in the bank, which allowed them to buy a sec­ond car. My daugh­ter start­ed work­ing full-time as a ware­house man­ag­er in a store, but she did not want to asso­ciate her whole life with the store, and A mas­ter’s degree in philol­o­gy also does lit­tle here. There­fore, she decid­ed to retrain as an accoun­tant and for this she went to college.

Well, here is some­where such a back­sto­ry of their move. Now I asked my daugh­ter: “Do you regret that you came here? There are so many efforts and dif­fi­cul­ties”. To which she replied that they only regret that they could not come ear­li­er and, prob­a­bly, these forces would not be enough now. Of course, those who came here at the age of 21 – 25, and even with a big wal­let, and even with­out chil­dren, and got chil­dren here, they were and are in a bet­ter posi­tion. And one more obser­va­tion: if you leave, then you need to “cut the ends” com­plete­ly in order to real­ize that the point of no return has been passed, and those who leave part of the busi­ness in Rus­sia, and try to cre­ate part here, do not suc­ceed either here or there. There are some friends here too.

Yes, I for­got to write about the lan­guage bar­ri­er. Despite the fact that my daugh­ter knew Eng­lish well at the uni­ver­si­ty, and she and her hus­band stud­ied a lot with a native speak­er, it was still not easy at first to get used to com­mu­ni­cat­ing in anoth­er lan­guage on any top­ic. And it was espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult to talk on the phone. But this is their story.