San Antonio
Arriving at their apartment in San Antonio, Texas, Katya was confused, “This was not America.” In her eyes, America was defined by cities such as New York and Boston. She herself was raised in a city, but since housing in New York and Boston was too expensive, her family settled in a Texan suburb. It was hard for her to step outside and see the strips of highways and identical houses, rather than the crowded streets she was accustomed to.
Katya missed her old life in Ukraine dearly. There was no technology to communicate with other than home telephones and mail. She would call her boyfriend for ten minutes once a week because of how expensive international calling was. Katya and her friends would write letters, but each one took three months to arrive. Each day she would run to the mailbox: “usually there would be nothing there and I would go home and cry, but on the rare occasions I got a letter, it would make my week.”
My mother has always been very shy. In Ukraine she was a perfect student with one flaw: the inability to publicly speak. This issue only worsened in Texas. After my father joined them in San Antonio, my parents signed up for community college. None of my family members could speak any English, but Katya and Olex needed the language to get an education. They joined night English classes with my grandparents and juggled the classes with odd jobs. At one point they were all delivering mail in the middle of the night. After a year, my parents knew a bit more of the language and transferred to a public school. My father took a job at the college library, and my grandparents became owners of a Baskin Robbins. They quickly realized that being self-employed was not their preference, yet it was all they could get. My parents spent the rest of college balancing working at the ice cream shop, multiple part time jobs, and getting the top grades of their class. They graduated with high grades and enough money saved to get out of Texas.