More great questions from twicerandomly:
You said once that immigrating was hard, both first to Canada and then to U.S. I can see that Ukraine to Canada would be a big adjustment, but I’m surprised Canada to U.S. was hard. What was difficult about each experience? How did you cope?
I had absolutely no cultural shock when I emigrated from Ukraine to Canada. What was shocking was how easily I got into the flow of life in the new society. There was no adjustment to make. Of course, the fact of emigrating is still an enormous trauma, but when I moved to Canada, it was the trauma of leaving, not of arriving. The new country was completely clear, easy to handle, and unquestioningly beautiful to me. Emigration was hard, but immigration was a breeze.
When I moved to the US, though, both emigration and immigration were extremely painful. I knew leaving Canada would be bad, but at least I was prepared for that. I didn’t anticipate the encounter with a new country to be so intolerable. I figured that if moving between such enormously different countries as Ukraine and Canada was easy, then going from Canada to US, countries that are supposed to be almost exactly the same, would be easier still. What I wasn’t taking into account was that I’d never lived in Canada. I was moving from Quebec to the US.
Arriving in the US
The very first thing I noticed when I crossed the Quebec / US border (we were traveling by car) was poverty. The more we progressed into the US, the scarier the landscape was getting. All I knew about America came from movies, TV shows, magazine, and books. I kept hearing that this was the richest country in the world. The possibility of driving for hours and hours and not seeing anything but devastation, abandoned houses, boarded up windows, dying industrial buildings, dusty small towns where every public building looked on the verge of collapsing simply never occurred to me. I knew this was a country of contrasts, but there were no contrasts to be found, just unrelieved poverty.
After I finally arrived in New Haven, CT, I started noticing more things that were scary and disturbing. The sky-high crime rates, the need to move in a very circumscribed area to avoid being assaulted, the danger of going out after 8 pm, the racial segregation, the general ugliness of everything, especially houses, and the way everything was organized so that to make daily tasks of life as inconvenient and problematic as possible – all of this was all the more traumatic for being so unanticipated.
British Council
Back in Ukraine, I remember the time when the British Council came to our university. I loved going to the rooms it occupied and just sitting there. Everything in that small space was beautiful, clean, and arranged so as to be as convenient and comfortable as possible. Even the sun shone differently through the windows of the British Council than it did anywhere else in that huge building. That British Council was, to me, an embodiment of the principles that should organize human existence. I could go there and spend some time among beautiful things, feeling beautiful, and enjoying the environment where everybody read or wrote quietly among the neat rows of books in plastic jackets.
Those plastic jackets placed on every paperback were a revelation. In Ukraine we also had protective plastic covers for books. Our book covers, however, had one important difference: they were not transparent. You could never know what book they concealed simply by looking at the cover. It always took forever to find among my textbooks the one I needed because they all looked the same in these impenetrable covers. I know this might seem like a tiny insignificant thing, but of such small things our reality consists. Everything, and I mean absolutely everything in the USSR and later the FSU (buildings, book covers, pens, trains, cars, stores, human interactions, family relations, etc.) was based on hatred of people. You could pick up any object, like a potato or a toy, and immediately see that this potato and this toy had been grown or manufactured by individuals who detested human beings with a fiery passion. The possibility that there were people somewhere who wanted to make things nice and comfortable for themselves and others was very shocking.
I emigrated in search of that British Council with its plastic book covers and of what it represented to me. In Quebec I found it immediately, so the sacrifice of emigration was justified by the rewards of immigration. In the US, however, it took me many years to locate the plastic book covers. (And if at this point you think I was looking for actual plastic covers, you need to stop reading this blog immediately and go away because we are too complex for you here.)
Plastic Book Covers in the US
Years later I finally figured it out: the areas of beauty, elegance, intellect, kindness, comfort, good food, beautiful clothes, quiet voices and rustling book leaves did exist in the US. It was very hard to locate them because, unlike in Quebec, they were:
1. Hidden from view;
2. Expensive;
3. Very segregated on the basis of class, race, profession, and level of education.
As a result, you need to hunt for these plastic book covers, maybe even dedicate your entire life to seeking them out. In Quebec, they are just thrown at you in massive amounts, but in the US you have to go on a quest to encounter them. Moreover, these quests are the whole point. People do everything in their power to ensure that ugliness (meaning, poverty, segregation, hopelessness, etc.) continues to exist because that makes the quests more difficult and their results more valuable.
Of course, as always happens, once you figure out the right strategy, the quests become easier and the rewards are much greater than anywhere else.
At Peace with Immigration
It was only after I figured all this out that immigration stopped being painful. Emigration will remain a trauma I will carry with me for life. It’s not a bad thing because traumatic experiences have an unrivaled potential to spur personal growth. But I’m finally at peace with my immigration and know where to look for plastic book covers. One of them is located right here, on my blog.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment