in love

1996. so this part is difficult to write. i fell in love with a guy. i called him A in an earlier installment of this story. he was an international student from India, a sophomore, who helped to organize all the welcoming activities for the 1996 incoming freshmen.
A. had that rare spark of organizational brilliance that made everyone want to follow his lead. he, for example, was the guy, who, as we were all standing out on the athletic fields during the bucket brigade challenge, said, why don't we dance The Macarena? and we did. a computer science student, he could dance and sing and loved theatricals of any kind. when he saw that I had a guitar in my dorm room, he instantly wanted me to play it.
"I'm not very good," I said, by which I meant that I played the guitar as a hobby and was not to be judged on the professional scale. I could play well enough a few Russian songs, and I wanted to play for him the Russian songs that meant the world to me, but first I wanted to establish the premises under which I would play the guitar for him: he had to get ready to be charmed.
"There's a good English expression, practice makes perfect," he said, handing me the guitar. From anyone else, I would have found that kind of response insufferable. Not only was he feeding me a platitude, but he was also refusing to understand me on my terms. He was refusing to say, "I'm sure I will enjoy whatever you play because it's you who's playing it."
I probably banged out a three-chord Vyssotsky song and passed the guitar to him. It turned out that not only did he play beautifully, he could also tune the guitar (which I struggled with). He was a little rusty, and nevertheless picked his way into a moving rendition of Stairway to Heaven. That sealed the deal. I wanted him. "Why don't you borrow the guitar?" I offered.
"Don't you want it? If you want to get better at it, you should really play every day."
"Take it," I said. "You're so good, and I love to hear you play it."
it turned out that he could really use it. there was some kind of party he was invited to or that he was organizing, and he couldn't invite me, because it was mostly for Indian kids, and anyway he invited me to a cricket match later, but warned me that I wouldn't understand anything, and i didn't. what i did understand was that he was brilliant at sports, too.
as a seventeen-year old I fell in love easily and constantly, but i fell in love particularly strongly with people who sent me mixed signals. A. seemed to enjoy my admiration, and he would on occasion invite me to parties and cricket matches and rub my shoulders and pat me on the knee. and then he would try to have a conversation with me about how he wasn't ready for a serious relationship and how in America there was such thing as casual dating and have I heard about it?
i knew the word from the English class and translated it to myself as roughly "seeing somebody you're in love with for a good long while with the purpose of finding out whether you two truly love each other and should get married." my heart overflowed with love and I said, yes, I've heard of dating.

Indian-Soviet friendship

in 1996, the vast majority of the international students at RIT came from the Indian subcontinent. there were some kids from China, Malaysia, Brazil, Turkey, but most people I met right away were from India. Also, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka.
the heyday of the Indian-Soviet friendship had long passed, and I had not met a single Indian person in St. Petersburg growing up, but I did inherit the slogan of that era. "Hindi Russi bhai-bhai," I said to the Hindi speakers, without actually knowing what this means. to my Sri Lankan friend, I must've surely mentioned Prosper Mérimée's novella Colomba that, despite the similarity of its title to the capital city of Sri Lanka, Colombo, is actually set in Corsica. I had been a voracious but not an attentive reader.
luckily, my Indian brothers saw that I was even more confused than they were about finding myself in Rochester, and so for a while took me under their wing. I was invited to join them for meals at the student cafeteria, where Indian kids sat around a long table and discussed the inedible American food, the upcoming winter and how to survive it, the importance of separating lights from darks when doing the laundry, sneaking into Canada without a Canadian visa, etc. for my sake, and for the sake of the other international students who occasionally joined, the Indians stuck to English for a while. eventually, the conversation switched to Hindi, and I was left to ponder all I'd heard so far.
most of my new friends described themselves as being "homesick," and asked me if I were, too. they could not eat, they had trouble sleeping, they missed their mothers, they struggled in their classes where their instructors frequently refused to understand their brand of English. I, on the other hand, couldn't stop eating. having spent much of my childhood growing food, standing in lines for food, cooking food, i was beyond thrilled at finding myself at an all-you-can-eat buffet three times a day. before Rochester, I couldn't have imagined such thing existed. I couldn't get enough of whatever was being served. people didn't understand my English either, but i wasn't complaining. it was a foreign language to me that I had to learn from scratch. my friends had grown up speaking English and now had to conform to the slight but significant differences in usage.
soon enough my friends started to figure out life in America. they found places to buy spices and learned to cook. they treated me to vegetarian dishes that turned each pore of my body into a tear duct (i'd had no experience whatsoever with hot spices). they found the one movie theatre near RIT that once every couple of weeks had showings of Bollywood movies. they joined the Indian student groups and started playing cricket. I went to a couple of Bollywood movies and cricket matches, and then stopped -- but that's another story.
one of my best friends from that era was a kid from Sri Lanka. N. was a few years older, and his thoughtful questions about my parents and friends at home helped to guide me through what I didn't know how to recognize as homesickness and a form of depression. though eventually I figured out that Sri Lanka wasn't Corsica, and that it wasn't India either, I refused to listen when N. tried to describe his background to me. his family was Buddhist, and, armed with the vague second-hand knowledge of scientific Marxism, I insisted that all religion was a complete and total superstition, and so he should stop believing anything and start eating meat. we maintained an uneasy friendship by going out to watch sci fi movies and talking only about hypothetical faraway worlds and planets.

Quality Concepts

In the story of my RIT career, a special place will have to be dedicated to my nemesis, one of my business professors, let's call him Mr. P.J. He taught several of the Quality Concepts classes, a series all incoming business students were required to take.

Mr P.J. professed an informal approach to teaching, but decidedly didn't get it when I, trying to learn, reflected back to him the informality that he projected. Note the use of fonts in his assignment and the particular request at the end "to explore hitherto unexplored attributes and traits of your own self." I got in trouble with him (in another paper) for using funny fonts, and I daresay my reference to Voltaire here, in the futile attempt to describe my personality, didn't gain me any points with him.
He gave me a C for this draft, which was not acceptable. If I remember correctly, I got the whole dorm helping me revise this draft. It worked so well that then Mr. P.J. accused me of plagiarism. I was angry. In a personal meeting, I tried to explain to him how much work I put into it. I guess he believed me, though I don't remember him outright saying so. He let me pass the class with a B. This was one of only two Bs in my college career. The rest were As, and I graduated with the highest honors at the top of my class.
Mr. P.J.'s biggest offense though was that he decidedly did not get my sense of humor. I found myself pretty hilarious and made sure to spice each paragraph with a joke or two.

bucket brigade

the international student organization at RIT provided its own orientation and organized events to help us connect with one another. as one of the first activities, we were given team t-shirts and directed to the athletic fields. there, on the green, hundreds of locals already gathered and stood in loose rows, waiting for something to happen.
our "peer advisor leaders" (international sophomores who volunteered to help the freshmen) explained that RIT was trying to break a Guinness world record. the words "bucket brigade" meant nothing to me. I may have conflated the words "bucket" and "basket" and imagined a rounded wicker thing for gathering mushrooms and berries. "brigade" I pictured as a military unit, a small group of horsed riders with sabres.
but nothing at all was happening. we were standing, out in the field, in the full heat of the day, waiting. perhaps we were trying to form the world's longest line. to keep kids from getting bored, somebody turned on a boombox and we all danced the Macarena.
RIT archives explain, "In 1996, as part of the freshman Orientation program, a group interactive activity was held on the athletic fields. RIT students, faculty, staff and alumni attempted to break a Guinness world record for the longest fire bucket brigade. Teaming up with the Henrietta Volunteer Fire Company and Mumford Fire Department along a 2.5 mile course from a fire hydrant on campus, firefighters filled 50 two-gallon buckets from their hoses."
if I saw a fire hydrant, I wouldn't have known what it was. being in the middle of the line, I don't remember seeing either that or the fire department vehicles. at some point somebody handed me a white plastic bucket, very clean, half filled with clean water. I passed it on to the kid next to me. a few more buckets came my way. I remember thinking how bad it was for the grass, all of us trampling on it, spilling water on it in the full heat of the day. the grass was bound to get burned.
(fire hydrants, sprinklers: file as technology new to me)
there's a Russian saying, "to pour from an empty cup into another empty cup," used to describe a repetitive action that adds nothing to nothing (idle talk, for instance). I was so eager to do something! I wanted some action I could write home about.

Effective Communications

This composition is from winter or spring freshman year. When I write "occasionally" I mean "accidentally," and when I say "set off" I mean "turned off," etc etc.
(This assignment clearly didn't count for very much because I didn't have anyone proofread it.)
Later on, I got a third alarm clock.

calling my father

The reason I moved into the dorms so late, arriving there a full month after classes had started in August 1996, was that, according to the arrangement my father had made with the international student office, I was supposed to stay with a local Rochester family for the first year of my college career.
We had corresponded with the family ahead of time. They picked me up from the airport and drove me around town before showing me to their daughter's room, available after their daughter went off to Cornell in Ithaca just a few days earlier. They introduced me to their son, a high school senior, the grandmother who lived in her own apartment in the same house, and two cats. Two days later, they gently asked me whether I was planning to buy a car. A car? I laughed. My father had just bought his first car a couple of years earlier; buying a car was a major life event that surely came after graduation, marriage, apartment, and children.
How was I going to get to RIT then? The family lived in Penfield; RIT was in Henrietta; to get from one to the other I would need to take a bus to downtown Rochester, and from there to the suburban mall, where RIT's shuttle made a stop every hour. In the best case scenario, the route would take me two and a half hours one way. By car, it would take twenty five minutes, but they were not prepared to drive me, back and forth, for the whole year.
What to do? I was raised on my grandparents' stories of overcoming difficulties. My grandmother who survived the Leningrad blockade told a story about how during the war, when the trams had stopped, she had to walk for over an hour in the snow to get to work and an hour back. That narrative was prescient in my mind, and yet I could not quite fathom spending five hours in the bus each day. With a sinking heart, I asked my host parents if they had the bus schedules.
Why don't you call your father and ask if he would agree for you to move into the dorms? my host father suggested. (My host parents had hosted international high school students before, and they knew to speak slowly and in full clauses.)
The idea of calling my father terrified me. I had only been away from home for three days and placing this international call so soon after my departure felt like a major failure. I knew that the call would instantly alarm my entire household. My grandparents were likely to pick up the receiver and wouldn't let me talk to my father directly until I told them first what was wrong. Once I did, their confusion and fear for me would know no bounds. The whole arrangement of staying with the host family had been made just so I wouldn't have to stay in the dorms. Staying with a family and out of the dorms had been the key point, how my parents could convince themselves and my grandparents to let me go away in the first place. My grandparents had had enough of communal living in their lives, and they were forever marred by the experience. In the American dorms, I would surely be exposed to drugs, sex, AIDs. No dorms for the precious child, never. Clearly, they had been justified in thinking it a mistake to let the girl go to the United States. What a wild place it was turning out to be!How was it possible that a major university in a major city had not a better bus service? Surely, the girl had misunderstood something. Surely she was too young and too clueless to fend for herself. My grandparents would prevail and that would be the end of my American adventure. Next thing I knew, I would be on the plane back to Petersburg. Would they let me stay for at least two full weeks?
My host father gently pushed the telephone receiver into my hand and dialed the international connection. The telephone rang. I don't remember who picked up first. My father got to the phone. As coherently as I could, I explained the situation. I remember hearing my grandparents voices in the background, asking, "How is she? How is she?"
"I don't know what to tell you," my father said. "I'm here, and you're there. Do what you think is best."
The conversation didn't go on much longer after that. International telephony was expensive, and the connections scratchy with static. I hung up the phone and turned to my host parents. The decision was mine to make. "Ok. I'm moving into the dorms."
"We'll help you buy everything you'll need," they said.
The actual move, however, took a month to execute. By the time I showed up in the residential facility office, it turned out that no rooms were immediately available. RIT didn't keep a very good track of the dorm spaces they'd assigned. They had rooms, they just didn't know which ones. At the time, something like 60% of incoming freshman class dropped out in the first quarter. I would have to wait until the administration figured out who was still there and who'd already left.
Freshmen who needed housing were temporarily placed in a hotel just off the property. I spent full two weeks with my host family; then, for the next two weeks, I moved into the hotel, sharing a room with a girl from Jamaica.

Pager

in Dave's portrait circa 1996 one detail that soon fascinated me was the pager. I don't think I noticed it right away -- to notice, one must be aware as I had not been -- but eventually the pager attracted attention to itself. it would beep, Dave would tinker with the device attached to the belt of his jeans, and then reach for the nearest phone.
a junior, Dave was juggling three jobs. his main gig was off campus: he managed computers for a Rochester realtor who worked with low income and veterans housing projects. Dave didn't have a car, and took a bus to work, and, on occasion, his boss would drive him home. Dave's second job was on campus. Ethernet had just been laid to the residential halls, and students who had computers could connect to it. Dave took shifts to answer all the tech support questions that came up. His third job took up most of the floor space in his and Jason's room. He would custom-build computers for people, ordering all the boards and the cases separately and then assembling them all at once. The end result was a lot cheaper than a ready-made computer, and there was a decent profit margin in it for Dave.
(when I visited Dave in that room, the only place to sit was the bed, and to get to the bed, one had to kind of jump over the computer carcasses. I came over, climbed onto Dave's bed, Jason would put on a movie from his side of the room, and we would watch something while Dave half-watched, half-worked.)
"wouldn't your time be better spent studying?" i would ask him, meaning that if he studied hard, did well in school, and got a great job, he would have a greater earning potential down the road.
"i learn more at work that I do at school," Dave said.
i doubted that answer, but the fact was that most of the students at RIT worked, men and women. the food services, the library, the academic and admissions offices, pretty much every office relied on student labor--and kids with cars delighted that they could hold off-campus jobs that paid more.
one of my mentors in the international student program, a sophomore from India -- let's call him A for the purposes of this narrative (I'm working up to writing more about him) -- suggested that I was a spoiled privileged brat because not only had I never worked a day in my life, but I also claimed that none of my classmates in Russia worked. (there had been sordid rumors about a couple of kids who'd started working at the end of high school. nobody talked about this directly, not in 1996. tutoring was one thing, but serving food and even selling computer parts was another. service jobs seemed somehow embarrassing for future mathematicians and engineers.) seventeen, without a job? according to A, it turned out that I and all of my friends must've been not only incredibly rich, but also very lazy. don't even rich kids sometimes want to have their own income?
when I tried to convince A that in the Soviet Union people didn't commonly work until after the university, or at least, until after third or fourth year in the university, he laughed in my face. "You're such a daddy's girl."
that I couldn't deny. And yet, I didn't think his description of me as privileged fit, but in our many, many conversations about this, in person and in email, I could not convince him otherwise. at least I could prove to him that I wasn't lazy. i started thinking about getting a job.

hangers

later that night in September 1996, on the day when I moved into the dorms, having helped me to find my way to my room, Dave came up to visit and brought his roommate, Jason.
my roommate hadn't moved in yet, so they sat on her empty mattress and stared at me. I sat on my bed across the room. I had a horrible suspicion that once we'd learned each others' names and where we were from, we had nothing else to say to each other. though this was my first night in the dorms, i'd been at RIT for a month, and had learned to explain right away that I was from "St. Petersburg, formerly known as Leningrad," and no, there were no white bears there. silence lingered.
I tried to study Dave and Jason without looking at them directly. at that time I didn't know how to look people in the eyes, and didn't think that I should. looking somebody in the eyes felt like such an intimate gesture, nearly a caress. so i looked either at the window or somewhere above their shoulders. at some point, the guitar must've come out as an aid through this awkwardness. (I studied business at RIT, and later on, the need to look people directly in the eyes came up in my classes: a revelation.)
did I see in Dave then what so many people have pointed out to me since, that he looks very much like my brother and several members of my mother's family? I don't think so. but I do remember being comforted by the name "David." I struggled with learning the names of my new friends at RIT, the names that represented so many ethnicities and histories. in Petersburg, i grew up among people named Masha, Misha, Alexei--names that repeated endlessly. I was always one of three or four Olgas at school. In comparison, English-speakers seemed to have endless imagination for names. But with David, I struck on something familiar: my grandfather's patronymic was Davidovich, son of David.
meantime, silence lingered.
this was awful, because I really did like these kids. they seemed cute. it was so sweet of them to visit. i was lonely and afraid to close the door and to remain completely alone in the strange room, when my thoughts would naturally turn to all the Mashas and Mishas whom I was missing.
but awful too was this lingering silence. if they stayed, and if conversation seemed unlikely, we needed to do something. did they feel this too?
at some point, I got up from the bed and continued to unpack my clothes. "what are you doing?" Jason stopped me.
"what?"
"how come you're putting all of your clothes on one hanger?"
"I only have five."
"why don't you get more?"
"i don't need more, look." I showed him the way it made sense to hang a skirt on a rod then a t-shirt on the shoulders of the same hanger, then a couple of button-downs on top, and cover all with a sweater.
"but don't you want to see all of your clothes?"
"why would i?"
the conversation is not verbatim--this all happened twenty years ago, and i had stopped keeping a diary when I arrived to Rochester. the fact is, aware now that I had a problem, I eventually accepted the guys's offer to fix it. they led me down to the corner store in the tunnels under the dorms, where Jason surprised me with a gift of a dozen hangers. I still have them, too.

ESL

people frequently want to know how well i knew english when I came to the US in 1996.
here's an email conversation with Dave from October 25, 1996, two months after my arrival.
Dave> i woke up late today and only when my friend ted came in and told me he found a girl becky in the hallway at 4:30 in the morning, puking and bleeding out her nose, and covered in mud, and convulsing (shaking), and not speaking english, and he took her in his room . . . and she is almost conscious!

Olga> The story Ted told you was really nice, exept one moment which i didn't understand well: what was she doing in the corridor at 4:30? I mean, what had happened with her, that she was in so bad condition?
(AKA: Dave thought I wouldn't understand the word "convulsing" and so explained it as "shaking." In fact, "convulsing" may have been the only word of his email I understood quite well: its Latin root has spawned a Russian word with similar meaning. I must've understood "bleeding" and so knew he was describing somebody who was in "bad condition," but I was so confused about the emotional charge of this narrative that the most appropriate words I found in response were "the story was really nice." Nice!)
Dave> haha okay the girl was PISS DRUNK and she had alcohol poisoning :) i met her this morning. She is very cute and very FUCKED UP (please excuse my language). she is probably still asleep on our floor :)
i interpret Dave's "haha" and the smiley face as sheer incredulity at how much i didn't understand.
alcoholism was a major problem at RIT. people drank cheap beer in astonishing quantities. my roommate drank so much in the fall that by the spring she developed cirrhosis of the liver. but that's a different story.

anniversary

coming up this August is the 20th anniversary of my arrival to the United States. i'm giving myself a gift and a challenge of posting some about 1996, in Russian and English.

here's one image I'm working with. Rochester, New York. a dorm hallway. September, a month after classes started. it's late afternoon, lots of kids are at home, doors thrown open, music pouring from each room and clashing. most of the kids in this dorm are men and most of the men are programmers. in each room there's a computer or two. some computers are without their cases, wires exposed, boards flashing. many kids have TVs. the microwave is in the hallway, and from it emanates the smell of popcorn. many kids are on the telephone. many are simply hanging out in the hallway, talking to each other in their brand of English that might as well be Martian for how little I understand it. nobody appears to be studying. in any case, there are lots of people to ask for help. I'm moving in, and I'm lost. the longer I'm walking back and forth, the more attention I attract to myself. 

I'm looking for a staircase to the second floor. the building clearly has a second floor, my instructions clearly state that my room is on the second floor. where is the staircase?

in one end of the hallway, a tall man with long purple hair and wearing a gown of a 19th century grande dame is going on about something to his entourage. I've never seen cross dressers before; I'm not familiar with the idea of gender-fluidity, and so I interpret each of his gestures is a miniature drama. he is a beacon--I recognize this guy, which means I've gone the wrong way again.

(though I'm only now moving into the dorm, I've been at the school since August and have already had the traumatic experience of walking through a closed door marked "Exit" and setting off a terribly shrieking siren. for the moment being, I've decided to assume, incorrectly, that all doors marked "Exit" are armed. generally I prefer to walk only through doors that somebody else has already opened.)

I try not to attract too much attention, but I've got a lot of stuff and I'm making plenty of noise. i'm conscious that the guys are staring at me. I'm 17 years old, hair down below my waist, dressed in a polyester summer dress, black with bright paisley print. (the dress also has shoulder pads--it's 1996.) I'm carrying a large duffel bag over one shoulder, a guitar over the other, and I'm dragging a suitcase (it does NOT have wheels).

one of the kids approaches: hey, I'm Wesley. Do you need help? and then, after I try to explain, what's your accent? where are you from?

he then leads me down the hall and around the corner, where another guy asks if I need help. his name is Dave. apparently my room is just above his.