Belongings reading (from ny times related to immigration)

Nancy Khan, 32 | Came from: Dhaka, Bangladesh | Came in: 1999

When Ms. Khan won the visa lottery and prepared to move to the United

States, her brother gave her a traditional kitchen knife, called a boti, to remind

her of home. But it was a souvenir boti, meant for displaying on the shelf, not

for cutting vegetables. She regretted that she had not thought to pack a real

one. “I didn’t think about working in the kitchen,” she said. “After I came I saw

that I have to do everything by hand. In Bangladesh, we always had a maid to

help us.”

She finally did buy a boti when she went back to visit, and she uses it in her

kitchen to cut vegetables. It’s meant to be used while squatting low to the floor

(a foot holds down the plank, leaving the hands free to peel and cut), but she

doesn’t really have the space in her home, in the Throgs Neck section of the

Bronx. Still, she keeps her souvenir boti, though she often has to hide if from

her two young children. “It makes me think of my family, and my culture and

my Bangladesh.”

Zongluan Ouyang, 27 | Came from: Fujian Province, China | Came in:

February 2005

Mr. Ouyang is a Methodist now, not a Buddhist. He goes by the first name

Roy. And he no longer wears the prayer bracelet his parents gave him, when

he left his fishing village, “to keep him safe,” as Mr. Ouyang put it.

Instead, the bracelet sits in a cluttered desk drawer in the single room he

rents in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It is one of the only things he still has from

home. He has long since traded in the plain clothes he carried in a single

suitcase for a wardrobe of skinny ties and narrow suits.

One recent afternoon, Mr. Ouyang look at the bracelet for the first time in

ages. “It reminds me of my parents,” he said. They were not educated, he

said, and would recognize little of his life in Brooklyn, where Mr. Ouyang

works as a wedding photographer and in a restaurant. But, he said, “They

understand me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/nyregion/27belongings.html Adapted by Sandy Millin: http://sandymillin.wordpress.com

http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/nyregion/27belongings.html

Abdul Rafiq, 73 | Came from: Karachi, Pakistan | Came in: 1992

Everyone knows Mr. Rafiq as Babuji, and everyone knows Babuji for his

paan. he makes the snack at his sidewalk stall in Midwood, a Brooklyn

neighbourhood popular with Pakistanis. He wraps a betel-nut leaf around a

signature mix of slaked lime, cardamom, fennel seeds, shredded coconut and

rose-petal preserves. He sells paan for $1 each, no extra charge for tobacco

sprinkled on top. Mr. Rafiq has been making the same concoction since he

was a teenager working a busy street in Karachi. And he has been using the

same stainless-steel jugs, called lotas, to make it for nearly as long. Besides

two bags of clothes, the jugs were just about the only things he took with him

when he left Pakistan. “It’s what I know,” he said, as he dribbled circles of

rose-petal syrup across the leaf on a recent afternoon. He said he had never

worked another job, a distinction that set him apart from his rival paan sellers

farther along Coney Island Avenue. He pointed at the jugs and said, “These

two are very dear to me.”

Gendaris Tavera, 18 | Came from: Dominican Republic | Came on: March

14, 2008

When Ms. Tavera was 5, her grandmother gave her a pink teddy bear to add

to her growing collection of stuffed animals, which filled two shelves.

When she left home, it was the only one she brought. She has repaired the

bear’s torn paws, and watched his colour fade. Her brothers know not to come

near the bear, which she calls Peluchin, a derivative of the Spanish word for

cuddly toy.

Sitting in her too-small basement apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Ms.

Tavera wonders if she is still her grandmother’s favorite. She wondered why

her grandmother’s chicken tastes better than anything in New York. She

wonders if the New York winter will ever end. She takes solace in her bear. “I

talk to him like he’s a real person,” she said. “When I feel sad, I cry into him.”




Huan Zheng, 28 | Came from: Fujian Province, China | Came in: 2000

The metronome was as exotic as anything Ms. Zheng and her friends in

southeastern China had ever seen. It was the color of a bright apricot, and it

was marked with Italian words – allegro, lento, vivace – that “we didn’t even

know how to pronounce,” she said. “It was a fascinating glimpse of this other

world.” As a girl, she took piano lessons without enthusiasm. But she liked the

metronome, mostly because none of her friends had one. As a teenager, she

began pushing her parents to let her move to America. When Ms. Zheng was

17, her mother brought her here but soon moved back 3to China, leaving her

with relatives in New York. In her new home, Ms. Zheng found comfort in the

metronome and the piano, which she detested back home. “For months, I

couldn’t speak much. I’d play to fill the silent days,” she said. Today, she

works a high-powered job at an international bank. At night, she plays the

keyboard in her small Manhattan apartment. She rarely uses the metronome

anymore, but she keeps it just the same. “It’s one of the very, very few things

that didn’t change, that has stayed with me all those years,” she said.

Jessica Lane, 29 | Came from: Perth, Australia | Came in: 2010

Ms. Lane, a dancer, outgrew her first pair of pointe shoes after three months.

Instead of saving them, as many dancers do, she sold them to buy a bigger

pair. She soon grew too tall to find ballet partners in Australia, and she moved

toward contemporary dance. But ballet remained her passion. She bought this

pair on a trip to New York in 2008, when she decided to return to ballet. She

took them back to Perth, where they “were left in a box.” But now, after

moving to New York for good, “I know they will be getting used again very

soon,” she said. “They represent the turning point of my new life in New York,

where so many more opportunities lay ahead of this tall dancer,” she wrote in

an e-mail. She is working at a Midtown bar and auditioning as much as she

can. “Perhaps when they bite the dust, I will hold onto this pair,” she said.




Albert Bararwandika, 30 | Came from: Rwanda, via Burundi | Came in:

2006

The wooden map of Burundi is heavy – about two pounds [1kg]. It was a

strange thing to pack for the long journey to New York from Bujumbura,

Burundi, but Mr. Bararwandika liked it. He was born in Rwanda, but during the

genocide, his family fled to Burundi, where his father came from. Months later,

his mother and brother were killed in the violence that tore the region apart.

Mr. Bararwandika and his family moved to a refugee camp in Tanzania and

then to Nairobi, Kenya. But despite all the horrors, he still loved Burundi,

which he considers his homeland. He bought the map when he visited the

country in 2006, shortly before coming to New York.

The map hangs on the wall of his dorm room in the Bronx, where he is

studying medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. American

friends ask him about it, and he tells stories about Africa, though he said

conversation more often centers on life in New York.

For him, the map represents hope. “It’s durable; it will last forever,” he said. “I

still have hope that someday things will change there.”

Ruth Heiman, 87 | Came from: Nuremberg Germany, via England | Came

in: 1947

Mrs. Heiman keeps the small ring with her other jewelry, but it means

something very different from the other pieces. It is her mother’s wedding ring,

saved, somehow, from the concentration camp where her parents were killed.

Mrs. Heiman said: “All my life until now I tried to push the past out of my mind.

I live in the present; I don’t like in the past. But there are certain things you

don’t give up.”

It is just about all she has from her mother, who stayed in Germany when Mrs.

Heiman, then 15, went to stay with relatives in England to escape the Nazis.

She had no idea she would never see her parents again. Mrs. Heiman fell in

love with an American soldier in England, and she followed him to New York.

They were married for 50 years, until he died in 1997.




Mrs. Heiman, who lives in Fresh Meadows, Queens, plans to give the ring to

her granddaughter, or to her daughter-in-law. She fingered her ring while she

spoke. Without it, she said, “some of my past would be lost.”

Milton Ming, 33 | Came from: Kingston, Jamaica | Came in: 1995

The diary first belonged to Mr. Ming’s sister Maxine, but, like little brothers the

world over, he couldn’t resist stealing it. “She would leave it careless and we

would read it,” he said. When Maxine caught him, she tore out pages and let

him keep the book. He started writing short entries next to “names and

addresses of females I used to mess with.” Decades later, Mr. Ming said, “It’s

a memory lane.” He still flips through it, connecting again with his teenage self

back in Jamaica. “I wish it was more detailed,” he said. “There are a lot more

words that could have been written and I never did.” Today, he works as an

electrician and lives in East Harlem. He still writes in the diary, but he said,

“I’m a boy, so basically I don’t write every day.” Five of Mr. Ming’s siblings are

in New York, including Maxine, and they have dinner together every

Thursday. Maxine still remembers all about the stolen diary. “She’s still

teasing me!” he said.

Thein Myint, 50 | Came from: Yangon, Myanmar | Came in: September

2010

Back home, Mr. Myint was a doctor. He kept a photograph from his

graduation ceremony on the wall as a testament to his years of hard work in

school and his dedication to treating the sick. Today, he keeps his diploma in

a manila folder inside a briefcase. He gave the photograph to his sister, who

stayed behind.

He is unable to work as a doctor in New York – the credentials do not transfer,

and he speaks little English. Instead, he is applying to work at a catering

company at Kennedy International Airport. “Rent is expensive,” Mr. Myint said.

“I must do the job, any job.”




But he misses medicine. He recently completed a course in phlebotomy so

that he can draw blood from patients. “I want to treat people,” he said.

He lives in Elmhurst, Queens, with his wife, Hla Hla Win, and their four

children. They don’t plan to ever return to Myanmar, formerly Burma, for fear

of political persecution. He looks at the small photograph affixed to his

diploma, the image of a much younger man. He puts it aside. “I hope one day

it will be useful,” he said.

Istvan Makky, 74 | Came from: Tejfalusziget, Hungary | Came in: October

1959

The tool is smaller than a teaspoon. It’s used for making delicate lines and

scooping ridges in the molds that are used to cast metal sculptures. An

administrator handed it to Mr. Makky on his first day of metalworking school in

1953 in Communist Hungary, along with work boots, six pairs of socks and

underwear.

He carried if when he slipped past the border guards with machine guns and

through the barbed-wire fence. He carried it as he looked for work in Austria.

He carried it to Flushing, Queen, where he raised a family, and to Greenpoint,

Brooklyn, where he built a foundry of his own. He does not let anyone else

use it, not even his youngest son, Bill, who runs the business with him.

“It’s like your favorite pen,” Mr. Makky said. “I used it in Hungary, I used it in

Vienna. From there, I come here. I am fond of it.”

Luz Andriana Villegas, 34 | Came from: Medellin, Colombia | Came in:

May 2001

When Ms. Villegas graduated from college with dreams of becoming a

journalist, her parents gave her a Spanish-English dictionary. She and her

brother used to compete to find esoteric Spanish words, and the dictionary

was a treasure-trove. Ms. Villegas brought it with her to New York on what

was supposed to be a summer visit for an English class.




She married an American and stayed. They now have three sons, and she

teaches adult literacy. Though she rarely uses the dictionary now, she has

carried it from apartment to apartment.

Today, it sits on the bottom shelf in the basement of her home in Ridgewood,

Queens, near her sons’ toys.




Belongings reading (from ny times related to immigration)

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