On Borders Naira Kuzmich (bio) 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, [End Page 36] 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...
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Sep 20, 2024
Emily Diamond + 2
Open Access