A Love Letter to America on Her 250th Birthday

An Immigrant Kid's Journey to the American Dream

Loving America has become something of a faux pas.

Across all aisles of the political spectrum, America hatred is now a rite of passage. On the left, America is a nation built on racism, oppression, and inequality—and should therefore be burned to the ground. On the right, America has lost its former glory at the hands of evil immigrants (especially the Jews) who wish to wipe out Christian values—and burn the country to the ground.

But those of us who aren’t preoccupied with America burning in its various iterations have more than a handful of nice things to say about a country that has always represented hope, dreams, equality, and freedom to millions of people across our globe. And as one of those deplorable Jewish immigrant kids, I wanted to do something special for my favorite country on her 250th birthday—so I wrote her this letter.

I hope you’ll read it, too.

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Dear America,

I don’t remember the first time I heard your name, but it must have been sometime in my stroller days when, carted off to preschool with my brown kosichki (braids) and my turquoise varezhki (mittens), I was forced to learn a bunch of words that we didn’t have at home. See, the walls of my small two-bedroom apartment were plastered with Cyrillic letters, and I ran around singing the Russian alphabet at two before memorizing my first Pushkin poem at the age of three. I grew up on funny cartoons that the other playground kids had never heard of, and my favorite song—the one about a set of swings that hurled you up towards the sky—was in a language that my classmates didn’t understand.

Maybe my trouble relating to the other preschoolers sprouted from the fact that I didn’t speak their language very well—and they certainly didn’t speak mine. I could introduce myself and count to ten, but I didn’t know what my teachers meant by “birdhouse” or “windowsill,” and the only reason I knew the days of the week was because I’d learned them from my grandmother’s stockpile of common English phrases. She might laugh today at the seemingly far-fetched notion that there was ever a time that she taught me English—she barely speaks it herself—but back then, she was the only one in my family patient enough to teach a Russian girl how to talk to the Amerikantsi.

Yet it wasn’t until I was five years old that it dawned on me that I wasn’t properly a Russian girl.

See, by the time I hit Kindergarten, reading those Cyrillic letters began to annoy me—they were different from the letters that we had in school, and there were so many more of them to piece together. Overwhelmed, I’d stomp around that old apartment proclaiming that I didn’t want to read those letters anymore (too bad no one had told me about my future best friend Fyodor back then), and my dad was quick to take my side.

Nestled on our brown faux leather couch between a Russian picture book and a mug of chamomile tea, my dad crossed his arms. “Why do you keep bothering her with those Russian books?” he insisted, scowling at my mom. “She doesn’t need Russian. Our daughter is an American.”

An American? Was I really one of those?

It didn’t seem nice to be an American—whatever that was. Whenever the word was brought up in my family, it was always used as an insult—like “uncultured” or “stupid” or one of those other words that grownups don’t say around children. If my friend Megan’s parents didn’t bring their daughter to the symphony with me, for one, it was because they were Amerikantsi. If Annie’s dad packed her potato chips for lunch, it was because he was Amerikanets. If Josh’s mom signed him up for softball after school, it was because she was Amerikanka.

Those Amerikantsi did some pretty weird things, too. Where I grew up in Chicago, they were always having arguments about some cubs and some socks, and over winter break, they always got presents a week before I did, which didn’t seem very fair. They went outside without their shapkas and scharfs (hats and scarves) and sat in front of the air conditioner all day, which was going to give them pneumonia. They didn’t save their plastic bags and mason jars, and they liked to prance around the house without their tapochki (slippers). They didn’t even congratulate you after you got out of the shower.¹

The worst one was when you were in the airport and some teenager with a hoodie and a plastic suitcase would be sitting na polu—on the floor.

You weren’t ever supposed to sit on the floor.

My grandmother would shake her head and sigh. “Amerikantsi!”

Suffice it to say that I didn’t want to be one of those Amerikantsi. They were lazy, uncultured, rash, and, apparently, comically unprepared for reality.

So growing up, I liked to say that I was Russkaya—and that didn’t seem to bother anyone. The kids at school never seemed to like me anyway—because I didn’t understand their sports, their holidays, their food, their music, their TV shows—and I didn’t really like them back. I had my Ukrainian best friend outside of school, and she understood better than anyone that you had to wear your tapochki inside. Her dad was doktor, and her mom was doktor, and together, we watched our favorite Soviet cartoon about the wolf who always chased the rabbit—and I felt understood.

Maybe that’s also why I started reading Russian literature from an early age—there were people in those pages who understood my habits and my psyche better than I did myself. In fact, it might have been my status as a perpetual outsider that fostered my broader love of literature, where someone was always being misunderstood.

It was also through literature that I soon learned to speak English the proper way—where I’d picked up not only “birdhouse” and “windowsill” but also “dilapidated” and “alacrity”—and I couldn’t wait to wow those Amerikantsi with my new vocabulary.

Maybe that was what it would take to finally be understood.

So imagine my surprise when I realized that none of the other eight-year-olds had ever heard of “pariah” and “sagacity”—words I’d picked up from my friend Tom Sawyer—and I remained just as unintelligible as ever. Besides, no one wanted to hear about my travels around the world in 80 days with Phileas Fogg; they only wanted to talk about touchdowns and Nintendos and the Krusty Krab.

Frustrated, I sulked back home to orange fish soups and my stuffed Cheburashka—a character from my favorite Russian cartoon.

So, no offense, America, but I didn’t really get why you were special. Your kids didn’t stand a chance against me in fourth grade multiplication tables (I learned the Soviet way), and your grownups liked Wrigley Field way more than the Lyric Opera. In fact, you seemed kind of crummy to me—especially after I left you for the first time to visit my cousins in Britain and made some European friends.

God, it was just like in the Harry Potter books! And best of all, they didn’t do Amerikanskiye things.

Our friends across the pond liked reading novels and going to the ballet and eating strawberries and broccoli instead of hamburgers and learning new languages and visiting art museums and dressing like princesses rather than like the homeless guy next door. Instead of learning about slavery in thirteen different grade levels, they learned about kings and queens and Shakespeare, and instead of watching hillbillies on horses while munching on some chicken legs, they sat at proper tables eating crumpets with their Earl Grey teas.

Flying back from Heathrow, I couldn’t believe just how much I’d fallen in love with Trafalgar Square and the Globe Theater and those quaint little shops on Oxford Street.

In the last row of the economy cabin, I turned to my mom and asked her why I had to be American when my cousins could be British. After all, England was so much more culturally similar to the European mentality I’d grown up with.

Besides, I didn’t understand why my parents—who perpetually looked down on those Amerikantsi—had ever left the Motherland in the first place. It’s not like our lives were that great, anyway.

By then I was a teenager, and I’d learned in school from James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates that the American Dream was a lie, and that no one really got ahead in a country that was prejudiced against anyone who wasn’t Bill Gates (this was before Elon’s time). No one seemed to like us or to understand why we celebrated Christmas on December 31st—or why a bunch of Jews put up Christmas trees on New Year’s to begin with—and if it was really so great in America, then why did it take us sixteen years to afford one of those European vacations that my classmates had been on about since practically the second grade, and why did so many of the other kids have houses with four stories and gardens in their backyards when we were confined to our teeny two-bedroom apartment all our lives, and why did we have to fly in the very last row of the entire plane, and why did all my teachers say that America was mean and racist, and why did Hemingway and T.S. Eliot and all my favorite writers leave if it was so great back in America, where the plane would dump us off in several hours, and we’d go back to our lame sports and fake food and failing education system once again?

I could always move to Europe later on in life, my mom suggested. If I really wanted to.²

That was it! No more of these Amerikantsi! I could be a proper European—just like all the authors of my favorite books! I could walk up and down The Strand just like my favorite Dickens characters and maybe take afternoon tea at the Savoy. I could live a proper cultured life where people could pronounce my parents’ home country (Azerbaijan) or, at least, had heard of it. I could revisit my European roots and live my adult life in a world that understood good food and great literature and all the oddities of growing up very un-American.

America—I really thought that I was going to leave you!

In fact, if I hadn’t missed that application deadline to Oxford—my lifelong dream college where I was going to be just like Hermione Grainger—maybe I wouldn’t be here with you anymore.

Maybe I would have been irrevocably immersed in that strange European propaganda that somehow found its way into my childhood and convinced me—as it’s convinced so many other people—that America is the land of racism and uncultured boors.

Maybe you would have never had the chance to prove to me just how wonderful you are.

Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, longing to leave the Midwest and its baseball and its Irish pub obsession, I submitted an application to Columbia University. According to my homeroom teacher, my chances were slim at best. I hadn’t been immersed in endless community service projects like all the other American kids, and you really didn’t get into the Ivy League without connections, he explained. Most of those Columbia kids were either Chinese nationals who paid the full tuition or billionaires’ daughters who played weird sports like squash. You didn’t get into the Ivy League as some no-name immigrant kid with no extracurriculars (except reading books and writing novels, which hardly counted), and you certainly didn’t live out the American Dream because the American Dream did not exist.

America had been rigged against me, I was told at school, from the very start.

So when I got my acceptance letter to Columbia that week in March, I couldn’t believe it.

Could my teachers have all been wrong?

After all, this no-name immigrant kid with no money and no connections and no extracurriculars was going to the mystical Ivy League.

I won’t tell you, America, about how Columbia University kind of sucked (you can read about that here), but I know it’s not your fault that a bunch of clowns took a really great idea and flushed it down the toilet. (You might not be surprised to learn, America, that those same people tend to hate you most.) But despite Columbia’s many flaws, the fact is that you, America, helped create a system where a no-name kid like me who wrote corny novels in her tiny bedroom could receive one of the best educations in the world—and could one day see her words in bookstores. You helped me perceive a universe of possibilities where, suddenly, dreams weren’t “exclusionary,” like that schmuck Ta-Nehisi Coates had written, but where the American Dream was playing out right before my eyes.

All around me, my classmates were interning at the White House and starting companies and applying to medical school and working in banks and writing screenplays and becoming models—and, suddenly, I felt like I could do something life-changing, too.

I could be a writer—just like I’d always wanted to be! I could occupy a universe where no one was going to laugh at me for my vocabulary and where I could talk about all the times I’d ever felt alone. Somewhere along the way, maybe some other little girl—with her long braids and woollen mittens—would feel like she belonged amongst my stories just like I’d once felt that I’d belonged among Pierre and Andrei and Natasha. I could be just like the writers who had gotten me through years of alienation, and no one was going to stop me because this was America, and you could do anything you wanted.

These Amerikantsi—many of whom, contrary to what I’d always been told, also came from no-name immigrant families—were off changing the world!³

And I could change the world, too. I could move people with the same words that had once burdened me as a kid—the English words that were the lifeblood of my stories and formed the language of my people—the Americans.

America, maybe you were kind of cool.

But it wasn’t until my twenty-first birthday that I really fell in love with you—that I learned how much you’d done for my poor family when they’d needed help the most. It wasn’t until my twenty-first birthday that I learned why my parents moved here in the first place—and how passionately you had saved them.

It was over brunch not too long after my graduation—or maybe several weeks before it. Either way, I was back in Chicago for a few weeks, and it was time to catch up with my mom.

It was on that same morning that I learned that in 1991, my dad had gone to prison for being different.

An engineering job at Azerbaijan’s first “tech firm,” he scored a senior position at the company early on in his career. Around the same time, as the Soviet Union collapsed and Azerbaijan became an independent state, a few corrupt officials, jealous of his success, decided to frame him for money laundering because, as a Jew, he wasn’t like everyone else.

With no set legal process in a brand new country, my dad was carted off to prison in a place that didn’t like you for being different.⁴

I wish I could tell that genius Ta-Nehisi Coates that my family knows a thing or two about oppression.

But my dad didn’t let any of that get to him. He survived his sentence by gaining the respect of a group of high-profile criminals, who helped him secure a parole-like reprieve. By the time he got home nine months later, my grandparents had already been in contact with you, America. You promised us a new home where none of us would be persecuted for being different—because you said that being different was all right.

It doesn’t matter that, in coming to America, my dad was forced to abandon both his career and his possessions. It doesn’t matter that he arrived at O’Hare Airport in Chicago with just $100 in his pocket after several years of professional success back home. It doesn’t matter that he lived in a Jewish ghetto and fried potatoes at Burger King while holding a master’s degree in engineering. It doesn’t matter that he learned English from his answering machine and got his bike stolen during his first year in his new home. It doesn’t matter that it took him years to save up to propose to my mom and to bring her to America with him.

None of that mattered because in America, my dad was free.

And no one was ever going to come after him just because he was different.

After several years, my dad, a no-name immigrant who had spent nine months in prison in his late twenties, had saved up enough money to buy that dumpy two-bedroom apartment I always compared to the mansions of my peers. After several years, he had put his entire savings into my education and sent me, a no-name immigrant kid, to the same grade school that was good enough for our own president. After another decade, he could afford to buy his kid an international plane ticket to go on a vacation, and after another several months, he saw his favorite daughter off to another school that had been good enough not just for that current president but for many more throughout our history.

All of the things that had seemed pretty lame to me growing up suddenly became amazing.

Miraculous, even.

It was a miracle what you could do as a random immigrant to America.

And suddenly, I understood why my parents had sacrificed everything they had back at home so that I could have my life here—in America.

It truly is a miracle that, today, I’m sitting here at 1:19am on Tuesday morning because I don’t have to get up early for work tomorrow because, as an American entrepreneur, I set my own schedule and earn my own money. It’s a miracle that I got one of the best educations in the world and found a way to make a great living for myself with my two English degrees. It’s a miracle that I’m lucky enough to hold a passport that allows me to visit almost any other country in the world, and it’s a miracle that, following every international vacation that I can now afford with my own earnings, I come back to a home that encourages freedom and innovation. And it’s a miracle that I live in a country where I can support myself financially while chasing my dreams of one day becoming a famous writer.

And the crazy thing is, America, I know I’m going to realize those dreams because I have you.

Jeez, America, I owe you an apology. You’re not just pretty cool. You’re wonderful.

I’ve never believed in God, but I do believe in miracles. And I know that it’s a miracle that, out of all of the places I could have been born on our lonely planet, I have the honor and the privilege to be the first person in my family to have been born in the greatest country in the world. Today, I wake up every morning (or afternoon, when I’m up late writing these essays) with an inordinate amount of gratitude that I’m lucky enough to call myself an American.

Maybe I won’t ever understand, America, why your people like watching guys with funny sticks hit balls and run around a field, and maybe I’ll have to talk to you one of these days about why none of them have ever seen a ballet, but I’ll take air conditioners and removable water bottle caps and 24-hour supermarkets and slop bowls and even those oblivious tourists in Times Square over Russian militancy and British totalitarianism any day.

America, I hope you know that your haters are wrong. The American Dream is real, and I can prove it!

I am the American Dream.

America, I’m glad we became best friends. I’ll always have your back when all the bullies come your way—just like you’ve always had mine.

Here’s to 250 years of freedom, innovation, diversity, and the power to be anyone you want to be.

And even though your hamburgers are really crappy, I love you dearly—and will love you forever.

Happy 250th birthday to the greatest country on planet Earth.

Your biggest fan,

Liza

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1. Russians are weird, guys.

2. At this point, I would like to remind the reader that we were still in the early 2010s, and London was a relatively cultured city. If I had been born a decade later, I would have doubtlessly grown out of my Anglophilia much sooner—or never have developed it to begin with.

3. The ones who weren’t majoring in gender studies, at least.

4. My dad alleges that his prison cell was bigger than my first New York apartment, but I’ll take my New York closet over a post-Soviet prison any day.