On Borders

Departure

Here’s what you need to know: I’m 28 years old, and, when someone asks me where I’m from, I stammer.

I was born in Yerevan, Armenia, to a shoemaker and a woman with big hips, a woman boys from the neighborhood wrote poems for, went to the army and came back for. We moved to America three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1993. I was five when I arrived in East Hollywood, an area that, in a few years’ time, would be officially designated “Little Armenia” by the Los Angeles City Council. I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment on the corner of Kingsley and De Longpre, and, until I was 20, I slept on a convertible sofa bed with my grandmother. My older sister, by 11 months, slept on the floor beside us, on a makeshift mattress made carefully by my mother, every night, for 16 years, from our couch cushions.

My father worked for a little cash as a jeweler in a shady Armenian business, coming home with soot on his face and fingers and deep coughs that hid a deeper hunger that couldn’t be satisfied by my mother’s hands and the meals she put on the table for him. My father forbid my mother from working, taking on the same kinds of jobs Armenian women from the Old Country were taking when they moved to LA, as caretakers, as babysitters, women who cleaned up other people’s shit for a living. My mother was college-educated, the top of her class, a civil engineer in Armenia. Instead, he encouraged my mother to go to school, to learn English, and to learn it well. My father stopped working a few years ago, his health having deteriorated, so my mother became the main provider. She’s now a social worker for the County of Los Angeles. My sister does similar work, helping poor communities apply for food stamps and welfare. We own a house and have our own backyard, a little bistro set in the middle of it, where my mother and father drink their morning coffee on the weekends when the weather is nice.

For a living, I write about them. I change their names, I change the colors of their hair, their jobs, their genders, the diseases that plague them, the physical, the emotional, the age they were when they had their first kiss, but it’s them I write about: my mother, my father, sister and grandmother, my aunts and uncles, my many shipwrecked cousins, losing their way on the dangerous and winding streets of Los Angeles, finding themselves in prisons, in unhappy marriages, in motel bathrooms by the 101, shooting up. I write about the Armenian community of Los Angeles, a community I was a part of, almost, but not quite, not then. I write fiction. I write stories inspired by the city and the people in it, me included, the parts of me I could never articulate to my parents, and I describe the overwhelming desire I had, already at a young age, to leave them and the city. I never quite fit in with my family and friends, who were not as concerned with grades as I. Instead, they dyed their hair and put on fake nails; they had boyfriends or wanted boyfriends so desperately they’d date any old Armenian thug who gave them a second glance or a stolen Chanel perfume—guys who smoked and spat, squatted down in their black tracksuit pants, and whistled at them as they passed, boys who wore crosses around their necks as if to prove they were godly men. They weren’t. When I’d walk the school hallways, down the street to the corner shops, or through the mall, I hoped that, when people looked at me—Americans—they wouldn’t see an Armenian, they wouldn’t think I was one of them. I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be just another Armenian in Los Angeles, up to no good, going nowhere.

I was always looking for a reason to leave.

In college, two things happened: I discovered I could write and that my financial aid package could cover most of the expense of studying abroad. They would be my tickets out, my interest in travel and writing. When I started doing both, I was proud I’d carved my own path out of Los Angeles and Little Armenia. My travels took me throughout Europe, and my writing to a graduate school in Arizona, where, for the first time, I had my own room, a place I could call my own, where being Armenian was interesting and not ordinary, not disappointing.

But the question that arose out of my distance from my home in Little Armenia—“Where are you from?”—created a deep hurt and confusion in me. How many people have asked me this as a conversation starter, a pick-up line in a Tampa, Arizona, Costco or a Dublin bar? So many times I answered “LA” to this question, only to be asked, “No, I mean, from, from?” This question became to me an accusation of not belonging, of not looking or sounding or thinking American enough—something I’ve wanted to be my whole life. It’s something I left my home for—thinking that, in foreign countries or locales, when someone would ask me where I was from, I’d simply say America, and even I wouldn’t doubt it. It was something I wrote for. I thought, if I excelled in the arts, I’d be accepted into a world far different from the immigrant working class world I came from.

But the hyphen between “Armenian-American” is a bridge. It joins and it separates.

My tickets out would turn out to be my tickets back in.

North Hollywood, CA, Part One

This isn’t a eulogy. This isn’t a biography for either the dead or the dying. This isn’t a record of loss, though she’s had her share, my grandmother, my Mari Thatik. She sits in front of the television and knits a skirt for her first great-grandchild, her bespectacled eyes glancing up from the sharp golden needles to the glow of the television screen. There it is again, her city, behind the glass, shattered into gray, destroyed there completely, gray and gray and gray, though she remembers green, and plenty of it—remembers, too, the even pavement running down the stretch of her street, sunlight like a mirage radiating from the sleek surface—remembers, as well, the butcher a few houses down, the man with the telling name, Hayzavak, who owned the big Armenian store, where you could get everything. “Everything,” she says, not looking up from her needles. And the school whose name she cannot remember. She recalls the distance she and her sister, who is gone, walked to get there, hand in hand. Sister and sister walking to and from school, to and from their home for seven years.

Her second home. Power changed hands quickly in my grandmother’s old home.

She watches the news, sometimes in English, sometimes Armenian, Russian, Spanish, Korean, whatever channel she settles on in her small one-bedroom ground-floor Los Angeles apartment. She lives alone, with only the TV for company, the language interchangeable, the language meaningless. But she listens for one word, similar despite the different intonations, stresses, and syllables, and only then does the city behind the glass become familiar. Still, she doesn’t stop her knitting. Her great-grandchild is growing quickly; her hands must work fast. The needles come together and drift apart. It is the compass in her hands that gives her direction.

Galway, Ireland

He looked to be in his late 40s, early 50s, thinning hair and pudgy face, his sad, Irish eyes glancing at me through the rearview mirror as he drove down Bishop O’Donnell Road toward the nuig campus. I was 20 and studying abroad—my first time away from home.

I was already five minutes late for class when the taxi driver pulled up. I had a cheap Irish mobile, unlimited texting, but with volume so low I often ended up missing my morning alarm—and almost half of my Romanticism lectures. It usually took 30 minutes to walk to campus, 40 in the rain, so 40 most often. But I had three sets of taxi cards scattered throughout my apartment, and I called in my request as I threw on my clothes and put on my face.

By this point, I’d been wearing eyeliner for almost five years, starting small—penciling the lower-lid, then growing up, liquid over the top lid, and growing long, an exaggerated flick in the corner. In high school, all the Armenian girls sported the Cleopatra look, but I believed none looked as natural with it as me. My logic was simple: I had the biggest eyes of them all, and darkening their edges made me look the most intimidating, and therefore, the most royal.

My mother’s name, Tagui, means queen in our language.

I dropped my book bag into the backseat and climbed in, repeating my destination. The old man nodded, and I settled back into the seat. The heater was on, and I loosened the scarf around my neck. The movement must’ve caught his eye because he started talking. By then, I’d learned that most Irish taxi drivers, like most Irish men, didn’t need much to start a conversation.

“You Arab, darling?”

I, however, was not expecting that.

“Sorry?”

“Ah, don’t worry, lass. I’m not one of those who think you all are a terrorist lot. I’ve been to Cairo many times. Met the love of my life there. Gorgeous girl.”

I wanted to correct him, but I could tell a story was coming, and I knew I’d be stupid to stop him.

“Oh?” I said.

Travelers tend to make good storytellers. They steal stories from the people they meet, or their stories are those that arise from the place where their stories intersect with those they’ve met abroad . . . . They find meaning in foreign countries, God in cities with unpronounceable names, love in between dirty hostel sheets. Travelers can’t share their own stories until they’re far from the places that gave birth to them.

Joyce wrote most of his famous stories and novels about Ireland—about himself—in every place but Ireland: France, Switzerland, Italy. Ireland made Joyce a writer from a distance.

The driver looked in the mirror, and his eyes were wistful. I felt strangely embarrassed and looked down into my hands. Irish eyes have been sung about for generations, for good reason. There’s something inherently tragic about them, even when they’re smiling. I found them deeply attractive because they felt so honest, like their eyes couldn’t hide the truth of centuries-long suffering. But maybe I’m trying to wax poetic.

The taxi driver shook his head and began his tale. He’d gone on vacation with a buddy to Egypt several years ago and saw the most beautiful woman in the world there.

“Absolutely the most beautiful.”

She was sitting at a café with a friend, in a bright blue hijab.

“My eyes went straight to her head. Don’t remember what she was wearing, but that scarf was so magnificent, it right away caught my attention. And when I looked to her face. . . .”

“Beautiful,” I encouraged.

“Beautiful,” he nodded. “Eyes just like yours.”

They saw each other a few times in the three weeks he was there, and by the end of his visit, he thought he was in love. He told her to come with him to Ireland.

“But her family, they didn’t want anything to do with an Irish. I told her we’d get married, we’d get married right there in Cairo, right away, and make it official, but she said she couldn’t disobey her parents’ wishes. She wasn’t a young girl, you know. She could’ve come. She loved me. I know she did.”

Perhaps she loved her family more, I wanted to say. Perhaps she didn’t want to leave the desert for the green. Instead I said, “That’s a shame.”

“I went back again last year. She’s still not married, so I know she’s waiting for me, in her own way, she’s waiting. I’ve started the paperwork to get her here, hell of a lot of money.”

“So she changed her mind?” I asked.

Not yet, he clarified. “She will once she sees all the work I put into this. She’d have no choice; she’d see how much I love her.” He would take care of her, he said, for the rest of her life. “We email and Skype for now. She tells me she loves me every day. She’ll come. She’ll come. I know she will. She must.”

“It’s difficult,” I said, glancing at him and retying the scarf around my neck. We were almost at the school. “It’s a difficult thing, you know, to leave our homes. Our families are very dear to us.”

Though I wasn’t feeling homesick in Galway, I found reminders of home everywhere. Irish crosses that decorated the cemeteries I passed on my way in and out of city center resembled the Orthodox Armenian crosses my grandmother carried with her wherever she went. Ireland’s impressive and hard-fought nationalism was imbued with religion so closely I sometimes felt as if I was in Armenia, a country that prides itself on its religious history, as being the first state-sanctioned Christian nation in the world.

The cabdriver sighed and pulled up to the curb, stopping the meter. He turned in his seat, and I looked away, reaching into my pocket for the euros. “But so are ours, lass. The Arabs and the Irish, we’ve got the same values. We like to keep what we have and take what we know is ours.”

I looked back at him and caught his wink. “Even if we got to blow up a few cars and post offices to get it.”

“Keep the change,” I said, my eyes on the bright red numbers of the meter. He took the money, pocketing it with one hand, and holding onto my fingers, very gently, with the other. He held on for seconds probably, though then it didn’t feel as short a time.

“Good to see you,” he said, letting go. “Hope to see you again,” he said, smiling. I knew he would not.

Columbia, MO

All my life, I believed my maternal grandmother was born in Syria, in that city now famous for being bombed, and it wasn’t until it was being bombed that I learned how wrong I was. Or almost wrong. It’s a curious state of wrong, almost right even.

I am 28 years old, and I’m tired of the people in this country who pretend to care about Aleppo, whose care means nothing to the dead or defeated, whose commiserating shaking heads and prayers mean even less. I’m tired of all the people who don’t know where Aleppo even is. Still. But I hate the most, the people who don’t even care where Aleppo is and will never care. For some people, forever is heaven or hell, but it’s not for the living, so these people live freely, and by that I mean without care. Their sense of borders is fixed, a thick, hard line around this free country, this free and forever country, without beginning or end, because in this country beginnings are easily forgotten, and ends cannot be possibly imagined. For others, for people who come from multiple places, people who move again and again and again, forever is the time it takes for their dead mothers to remove all the sand from their hair.

Just like you, my American friends, I hate what I fear. Just like you, despite my name, the bottomless tone to my voice, my thick dark hair, my thick dark thighs, my eyes bigger than your neighbor’s heart. What I fear is this: that I’ll become more and more and even more like you if I stay. If I stay here, in this country, that I never once called home.

Barcelona, Spain

I didn’t do things like this. Meet a man in a bar and then days later hop on a plane with him to another country. But there I was, walking down Las Ramblas, hand-in-hand with a redhead from South Carolina, kissing him at every stop light and in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. In a few days, after our return to Ireland—where we were both studying—he’d tell me he was falling in love with me. He’d be leaving that very night for the United States.

It was a whirlwind romance, taking place in foreign countries. He was from the South, practically its own nation, and I was an immigrant, with roots in a country far from his birthplace. I told him I was probably the first Armenian any boy from Aiken had ever seen, let alone touched. He said if they knew how wonderful it was, that number would change, and fast.

When I met Alex, it took me almost 15 minutes before I realized he wasn’t Irish.

“Where’s your accent?” I asked him. We were in Roisin Dubh, a bar in Galway, on the second floor, standing close.

“What accent?”

“Your Irish accent!”

He laughed and told me he was an American, from South Carolina.

I was still suspicious, as he had a respectable ginger beard and wore a scarf. “Well, where’s your Southern accent, then?”

He shrugged. “Don’t have one.”

By the end of the night, we decided we’d travel to Spain together.

In Spain, we had long conversations about his past, and more about mine. He asked many questions, and I answered. He wanted to hear what my language was like, and I was flattered. I said many things, things I hadn’t said in a while, nursery rhymes, proverbs, interesting turns-of-phrase spoken at funerals. “Tell me more,” he’d say. I mentioned our cultural traditions and rituals. I told him sad stories, funny immigrant stories—my father confusing the middle finger for a wave, a hello, his first week in Los Angeles. I reenacted the way I danced as a child in our living room in Armenia, knuckles together, arms raised before me, swinging my hips left-to-right.

“What else?” he’d say.

I told him how one grandmother made my clothes, how I wore the pink shawl she knitted to my prom even though it didn’t go with my black mermaid dress. One night, I wrote his name in Armenian on the back of a receipt, and I wrote mine next to it. He’d end up keeping it, taping it on the wall over his bed, next to the flag of his father’s birthplace, putting it into his shirt pocket as he was packing, getting ready for the airport. I told him about my parents’ expectations of me, my traditional upbringing, liberal beliefs, and conservative behavior. I told him about my desire to write as an escape, as a reason to leave them, the powerful love I have for my mother, and the guilt this love had become. I said more than I should’ve said, but not as much as he wanted to know. I think he wanted to know everything. I think this knowledge for him was exciting.

But I can’t begin to know for sure. What I do know with certainty is how I responded to his interest. How, at first, I answered his questions as if he was just asking me my favorite color, my favorite band. I didn’t think twice. But, somewhere along the way, I saw how he reacted to my tiny parcels of foreignness, and I liked it. I made the conscious decision to play up my ethnicity, to become even more exotic to him.

I remember telling him about butchering lambs at weddings, an Armenian tradition that my family didn’t follow. Most of my married relatives had hired expensive caterers for their receptions. Leaving Spain for Ireland, he asked me to promise that, at our wedding, we’d slaughter a cow. I didn’t bother to correct him.

When I came back to America a few weeks later, I began writing more seriously. I’d learned I could use what I have, what I know, to get what I want. I stopped feeling guilty for writing ethnonarratives. If people wanted Armenian stories, I’d give them to them, but I’d do this on my own terms. I’d write what was real for me, what I needed to write, and I didn’t care about how others would see me or my work because of it. If they wanted to reward me not based on the skill of my writing, but for its exotic content, so be it. I’d fulfilled my obligation to myself, to write what I know is true. If people criticized me for relying on the exotic to create tension within a story, if they accused me of treason, of Machiavellian mining of my own culture to find success, then fine. My success, I’d quickly discover, wouldn’t take me away from my culture but bring me closer to it. The more I wrote about Armenians, the more in love with my people I became, the more sympathetic, the more proud.

Alex found my Armenian background sexy and mysterious, yes, but I wanted him to. I wanted to be different, more different from him that I might’ve been. I wanted him to want more of me, even if all he wanted was just a mere portion of who I was.

I was never more Armenian than I was with Alex.

Until, of course, I started writing about what this means.

North Hollywood, CA, Part Two

We’re seated at her small dining table. My grandmother has her knitting needles in her hands, is working her pretty pink strands into something beautiful for my niece to wear. I’ve put my sister’s child to sleep in my grandmother’s bedroom, in the narrow space between bed and wall, where my grandmother stands alone in the evenings and changes into her nightgown. We’re visiting her for New Year’s Day, my sister and I, with our respective partners. But my sister is a new mother, with errands to run, and happy and willing babysitters are all around her this holiday season. She and her husband leave for the mall, a brief honeymoon. Vedran, my fiancé, who doesn’t speak Armenian, sits on my grandmother’s couch and scrolls through soccer scores on my iPhone. I rip a piece of paper from the notebook in which my grandmother monitors her blood glucose, and I ask her finally what has been itching at my skin for the past three years, ever since the bombings began. It’s 2017.

In those three years, I’d watched my Mari Thatik engage with Aleppo like someone listening to another talk about Aleppo, at a great distance. She’d nod her head faintly when dinner conversation lightly touched upon politics, or when the newscasters on the Armenian channel updated the number of Syrian men and women Armenia was absorbing from the refugee crisis. My Mari Thatik didn’t cry. She was able to finish her sentences as she spoke. Her voice didn’t tremble, nor did it carry far to reach the hearts of bystanders. I was astonished by her reticence, and when I admitted to myself that the astonishment was, in fact, a perverse desire for this city to have meant so much to her then, that she couldn’t stand its destruction now, I knew I didn’t understand anything about what it meant to survive.

New Year’s Day, and I knew I had to ask her. Some of us, more than others, have to ask, you see, to learn what one needs to do to survive. We have to ask old women to dig through all they have buried to learn not how to empathize, but how to prepare.

I begin simply, stupidly. Tell me about your life. “I was born in the sanjak.” What part of Aleppo is that? “No part.” I ask her to clarify, and “Sanjak Sanjak Sanjak” she repeats to my confused face. She repeats because she thinks the word sounds too foreign to my ear, and she’s right. A quick Google search, and I learn sanjaks were Ottoman administrative districts, one of many that existed at the turn of the 20th century in the parts of the world now being bombed. “Turkey,” I say, dumbfounded. “You were born in Turkey?”

“To some people,” she says.

“Which Sanjak?” I press, somehow convinced her answer will bring me, her, us, closer to Aleppo. She finally arrives at a name I don’t know how to transcribe, to transliterate it into English sounds for you, my American readers, as I was unable to parse the word myself that day: Gerkin. Guregin. Guerkin. Kurkin?

When I returned to my parents’ house where I was staying, I spent hours typing the letters to the word I heard in the search engine. But it seemed my ears had failed me, or her memory had failed both of us, or the city failed to exist in America’s consciousness. That night, that early morning, I began to look at old archival maps online. I zoomed in and in until the small foreign words felt familiar, as if they could be my own, harsh consonants slamming against each other, lilting vowels stretching. But those words weren’t mine. Hours later, the sun rising, I found it. The name of the place where my grandmother was born. The name of the first home she left. Kirikhan.

Ammersee, Germany

In Germany, I cry as my fiancé fumes, as my friend watches and her boyfriend asks, again and again, “So what should we have done? What would you do?” It’s 2014. We’re young people, gathered for a wedding at a seaside town. I’m an immigrant, Vedran, my fiancé, was once a refugee, and then became an immigrant. My friend is an American-born Indian, and her boyfriend is white. The boyfriend asks and asks about Iraq, about Afghanistan—this is before Syria, before Libya, before Egypt—and Vedran responds that his questions are stupid, are pointless, are dangerous.

My Indian-American friend understands what her white boyfriend is asking my Bosnian fiancé and tries to rephrase his question, “Okay, but imagine you had the power; what would you have done? You would’ve let those people suffer?” The look on Vedran’s face when he turns to me, I will not forget. He’s asking me, “These are your people?” In that moment, I’m torn between the earnestness of my old friend’s question and the significance of my partner’s rage. I think I understand what my friend is trying to say (I don’t), so I try: It’s a hypothetical, honey; of course this conversation is futile. But let’s just pretend it’s not. Vedran rubs and rubs his face in stunned silence. Then he speaks, “How dare you ask me? How dare you all sit and ask if I would invade a country, if I would bomb a people, if I would force a mother to throw her body over her young son’s?” This last thing he doesn’t say, but I hear it, I hear it, and I run to the bathroom, ashamed and devastated. I cry. My friend knocks on my door, enters. She hugs me and says, “It’s okay, I understand.” And I realize she thinks I’m embarrassed by my partner’s behavior. After all, we’re all just good people concerned about the affairs of the world. I realize her partner is still in the room, trying to understand my partner. I realize no one understands the ugliness of these conversations until the dead or the dying is one of them, their mother, their son.

And sometimes I’m no different. It’s my lover there as a little boy, cowering under his mother’s weight. It’s my grandmother who ran down those desolate Aleppo streets, who ran all the way from Kirikhan, who was forced to run. When I say I’m afraid of becoming more and more like you, this is what I mean, that I need to be touched directly by the events unfolding in the world around me in order to be touched. If it doesn’t touch me, then it’s not as real. It’s a segment on the news, a blog post on the internet, a conversation around a dining table in a seaside town. Often this is what it means to be a liberal American: to care, to talk, to watch, to listen, and still not understand a word being said. It’s like someone speaking in a foreign language. I’m sorry I’m such a poor translator, but let me try one last time: your empathy has a limit, but your guilt has none, so you march, you protest, you “resist,” and some of you—like me—sometimes you write and pretend it makes a difference. It doesn’t. I don’t. I cannot reach with my words those who don’t want to be reached, and you, you’re afraid to knock on your racist neighbor’s door.

Kirikhan

There’s not much else she can share with me about her birthplace. My grandmother’s family leaves Kirikhan when she’s just three, and together they move to the new city, Aleppo, this old city being bombed on everyone’s television screens. Yours, too. You must have seen it. When I ask her why her family left, she says they were forced to. By whom, I press again with my shovel. “The people with the power,” and then she puts down her knitting needles on her lap, takes off her glasses, and says to me, “I thought you wanted to hear about Aleppo.” I did, I tell her. I do. But do you remember anything else about this strange new place you were born? “It’s good I cannot remember. Children shouldn’t remember such things.”

Don’t worry, reader: I will tell you more about Kirikhan. I will fill in the gaps. I will, even though there was a time when I didn’t have to, when you would’ve understood not the significance of Kirikhan but the need to want to understand the significance—when you, too, would’ve done your homework, tried typing words you cannot pronounce into the search engine, looked at a map or two, asked questions about shifting borders, curiosity deepening your compassion (or maybe it’s the other way around?). Sometimes men and women leave their homes, and sometimes others make them. Sometimes great powers play with people, millions of people, as if they’re anything but human. Kirikhan, at the time when my grandmother was born, was an autonomous zone caught in a tense colonialist dance between the powers of Turkey and France. It was a diverse city filled with mostly Arabs, but also Turks, the French, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, and more. Then, in 1938, the Turkish military brought in thousands of its people across the strained border to vote in an election that would determine the fate of this autonomous zone. In this election, a referendum was passed. The “people” voted. Democracy, you understand. They chose to become a part of Turkey. Some people, of course. The others left. Or were forced to. History books prefer the word “expelled.” A certain romanticism to that term, dramatic and regal.

But call it what you want, you always do, America. You love your distinctions. By you, of course, I mean your neighbor. Because you see no color, and you see no class, and you see no difference between the cities currently being bombed, toyed with, and controlled by hands whose fists are bigger than your neighbor’s heart. Because, for you, all lives matter, and you’ll fight for everyone equally. You’ll use your voice in anger and shout your concerns in your one tongue. You’ll resist by saying you’ll resist. You’ll read scripts you find online to your congressperson’s poor intern on the phone. You’ll walk a mile, a mall, or a 5K, in your own new shoes. All the while your neighbor’s in your driveway, writing with children’s chalk: Immigrant. Refugee. Migrant. Them, not us. Whatever they are, they’re not us.

And you’re watching from the window, hating conflict.

Prague, Czech Republic

I was in the Spanish Synagogue, in the famed Jewish Quarter of Prague, staring at a box of tefillin from Jews killed during the Holocaust titled, “Witnesses to the Prayers of the Murdered,” when Vedran, my boyfriend then, now my fiancé, called me over. We were in the Czech Republic as part of a summer fellowship funded by our graduate writing department. Vedran was standing in front of a glass case, showing postcards, poems, and letters written by young children in different concentration camps, from Auschwitz to Osvetim. The letters were not translated, and most were in German.

“Listen,” he said, and started reading.

I don’t remember what he said, what those children wrote, but what I remember is looking at Vedran and seeing a seven-year-old boy standing in front of a classroom in Bad Wimpfen, Germany, being introduced by his teacher as the new kid. I saw his blonde hair covering his face, his blue eyes overwhelmed by his chubby cheeks, hands in his pockets, and I imagined the children thinking, hey, he looks like one of us. But Vedran is a refugee. His teacher would’ve told them, from a far-away country called Yugoslavia. Pulling down a map, she’d show them. “Here,” she’d say. This is where your classmate is from.

But that country no longer exists. It was already disappearing when Vedran’s father was sent to a concentration camp for nine months for being Muslim. He didn’t even practice Islam—but what did that matter? He was Muslim by name, by heritage. It didn’t matter that his wife was Catholic, his son mixed and needing a father. It was already disappearing when, through connections, Vedran’s father got out and was smuggled, along with his family, by a Catholic friend across the border to Croatia, where it was safer, and then, finally, to Germany, where it was safest.

Isn’t it strange, I asked him after stepping outside of the synagogue, that so many Bosnians called Germany home? Found refuge in a country with a history of genocide?

Armenia doesn’t have many claims to fame; the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks at the beginning of the 20th century is, arguably, its biggest one.

A few Armenian-American writers, mostly third-generation Americans—men and women born and raised here, with parents who didn’t have accents—have written about this genocide. I never wanted to, not after my first strange attempt to do so. The first short story I ever wrote, about a Turkish man and an Armenian woman finding love, but the woman refusing to bear the Turk’s child, won me a thousand dollars at a usc writing competition. My happiness lasted about a day or two. The third day, guilt settled in, a deep, deep discomfort and shame. Before I even had the words for it—the academic terms of exoticism and tokenism—I felt I was being rewarded for my difference, and that I had satisfied this weird, Western desire for the other, that I had played into the hands of those in power. The story was not that good. I hated myself for using my Armenian background to get recognition. I hadn’t done this intentionally or with a sense of awareness, a cynicism; I wrote what I knew, what I felt close to—what all burgeoning writers are encouraged to do. I didn’t write again for six months. The second story I attempted was about Mexican-American sisters. When I showed it to my mentor, Josie, she asked me about my choice for the ethnicity of my characters. She said these girls “feel Armenian,” and I knew exactly what she meant. They did. They were. They were based on my own relationship with my sister. This idea of an ethnic sensibility in writing is something I think about very often. I like to think that, if I get rid of all the explicit markers of foreignness from my stories—the names of characters, the foods they eat, their appearance—any Armenian reading it would somehow recognize their culture represented on the page. Others, of course, would just as easily connect to the “truths” captured in the story, not caring about the secret or ambiguous ethnicity of the characters.

James Joyce said in the particular was the universal, that if you could get to the heart of any community, any place, you could get to the heart of everyone, everywhere. It’s how fiction works, and it’s a damned good reason for writing about one’s own culture or city. But I always felt this was a little bit of an excuse. His explanation struck me as a fancy packaging, an academic mask, of what I think Dublin was like for Joyce, and what Little Armenia is for me.

A truth: sometimes we cannot escape where we come from. That we can try to take some distance from what haunts us—move to faraway places or try to write about it with a new, detached eye—but we can never quite let it go. We can never quite leave it behind.

Aleppo

In Aleppo my grandmother lived in the neighborhood of Nor Gyugh, which was mostly composed of Armenian immigrants from other sanjaks. I can tell you now, in case you don’t see where this is going, that Nor Gyugh no longer exists. It did about a year ago, when my niece was born in a hospital in Los Angeles. In Nor Gyugh, my grandmother’s family rented a house, settling into their new lives, but, only two months later, her father died, leaving a widow with her two daughters in a foreign land. Common story (once you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all), but common, too, in a different way, as in frequent for a certain people, specific groups. Her mother began to work long hours as a domestic. Her brother, only 12, went to work at a mechanic’s shop. My grandmother and her sister went to school, walked to and from home, hand in hand, with keys around their necks. “No one,” my grandmother says, “in the neighborhood played on the streets because everyone had front yards. It was a real city.” There was a butcher nearby, and a man who made furnaces. “All sorts of types in the neighborhood,” she says. The school was a real school, she adds, with class from eight to three.

Almost everyone she interacted with daily in Syria was Armenian by ethnicity. We would now call Nor Gyugh an ethnic enclave. But my grandmother remembers one exchange with a non-Armenian. At some point, her mother became ill and needed surgery, a possible tumor in her stomach, but they had no funds for such an operation. The hospital in Aleppo was filled with Frenchmen and Arabs—and one doctor who was kind. “Don’t worry,” this doctor said to my grandmother’s mother. “Sooner or later, a rich man will fall ill, and we’ll overcharge him and then we’ll have the funds to cover your surgery.”

“French or Arab?” I ask my grandmother.

“The doctor or the rich man?” she responds wryly.

But I don’t tell her that details are needed to convince others of even the most obvious facts, that it’s fair to steal from the rich to give to the poor; it’s right. Poverty is man-made, yes, but it’s not the poor man’s doing, America. I don’t tell her because I remember it’s all different now. Other stupid questions I ask, Were you happy in Aleppo?

“I was a child,” she answers. “Of course I was happy.”

“Did you have friends,” I ask her, “in Aleppo?”

“I had one good friend. Her name was Mari, too. I don’t know what happened to her.”

“Why did you leave Aleppo?”

Here, my grandmother laughs. “My sister, 14 at the time, signed us up to go to Armenia. There was a form being passed around in school. Everyone was signing up, and my sister didn’t want to be left behind, so she signed all of us up to go, too.”

“Like that?” I ask her, stunned. “Just like that you left home? Your second home?”

“When everyone begins to leave, it’s only the fools who stay.”

My grandmother knits, and it’s not a compass but a weapon in her hands. She fights time. She will not forget, and she will not remember; she will simply always know, that there’s no place like home, not for someone like her. Once a refugee, always the immigrant, never the American, not for as long as she lives.

What you can do is try to fix the hatred in your neighbor’s heart. And you can’t even do that.

Arrival

When I used to live in Little Armenia, my mother, sister, and I would march every April 24th through East Hollywood, along with thousands of other Armenians, in an effort to bring light to the crimes committed against our people almost a century ago. These are crimes the Turkish government denies ever occurred, crimes the US government won’t acknowledge, not wanting to alienate the nation who borders the key countries in America’s struggles with the Middle East. We wore black, held signs, chanted for hours, then rushed home to check the news broadcasts, see how many of them mentioned us. I’d walk in a trance, the crowd taking over, pushing us forward and along. There were so many of us, packed onto the streets, walking and walking, in circles, it seemed. I’d imagine the thousands of Armenian men, women, and children on death marches through the desert, rounded up during the night, the knocks on their doors seemingly innocent, forced to go on a journey that would end up taking most of their lives. All those miles they traveled, all those days, nowhere near salvation, no closer to answers.

I stopped going to the demonstration marches when I got older, when I grew angry at the young Armenian men driving around the periphery of our walk in their flashy cars, honking loudly and blasting rap music, flags draped over their hoods, whistling at pretty girls walking with their parents—young, pretty girls who, increasingly throughout the years, began using the march as a dating ground, a hook-up spot, wearing the tightest clothes and excessive makeup.

Why would I want to be identified with these people?

But the farther I went from Little Armenia, the more signs there were that I could never escape it. Everywhere, a reminder of my desertion.

I don’t travel, you see. I flee. Even in foreign countries, in the middle of dance floors, in cabs, the universe finds me, looks me straight in the face, and reminds me just exactly who I am.

Sometimes, I look at all the miles I’ve traveled, all the places I’ve been, and I can’t help but wonder. Like my great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers before me, I’m forced on a path I cannot walk away from. I can spend my whole life walking the streets of strange and beautiful cities, my steps light and carefree, but I’ll always arrive back to where I started. I wander through foreign neighborhoods, turn all of their corners, and I’m somehow on the corner of Kingsley and De Longpre, helping my mother make my sister’s bed from what’s left of mine.

So I write now. I write as much as I can. I write to capture the beauty of Little Armenia, and its ugliness too. I write so I don’t forget where I came from and where I’ll always return. I write to remind myself of what my parents have accomplished, of what I have achieved because of them. I write to add to the library of ethnic Americans giving voice to their communities. My fiction doesn’t represent the Armenian community of LA—only my experience of it, my knowledge, frustrations, and hopes within it. I write to convince other Armenians to write, to lend their narratives to the fabric of American literature and society.

I write because it’s a privilege, and it’s mine.

Growing up, I wanted to be an American, without any hyphens, clarifiers, or qualifiers. I wanted everything that came with it, the ability to answer the question, “Where are you from?” flippantly. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to be able to say it doesn’t matter where you come from, but where you’re going. I wanted the cliché.

I’ve learned, however, that, for me, for many of us, there’s no such thing. The road for us is long and winding. But if we trust our sense of direction, if we have faith, we’ll hear the powerful heartbeat of the world, and it will remind us of home.