How I Came to Immigrate to America

This is my personal story about the events leading to my immigration to America and what followed. The reason I am writing this is mainly to preserve this story for my two American born daughters but also to make it known to people who:

were born in the free world and don't know otherwise

came to America to join relatives, friends, or somehow had a (relatively) easy transition

thought of immigrating, didn't do it but wondered what it might have been like

What Life Was Like Back Then

In the beginning, say until I was 8-10, life was good, peaceful. Food was not too scarce, you could find nice clothes to buy, there were no lines in the stores. The bureaucrats were tame, the few hours of daily TV contained some good programming, you could see a variety of American, British, French, Italian, and all sorts of movies in town, people were friendly, in short the absence of liberty was not very acute. Parents and grandparents who remembered living before communism told wonderful stories of an abundance of everything, of trips abroad, etc. But we were fairly satisfied with what we had.

Of course, you knew that trips to the outside of the communist system, or even inside, to countries such as East Germany, was next to impossible. We were kept like in a cocoon, "protected" from the evils of the western society. We didn't know much about the outside world. Only what we could glimpse from movies, songs, books. A lot of people listened to Radio Free Europe in secret. Communist propaganda about the goodness of the system vs. the "evil" of the western world only made people idealize the capitalist society which appeared like a kind of heaven that you dreamed about but knew you could not reach.

After a trip to China and Korea, President Ceausescu had a revelation. He envisioned a Chinese style communism for Romania, with him as the Romanian Mao. This thesis spells disaster for the Romanian people. He furthermore decided that Romania needed to pay its foreign debt. Quickly and in its entirety. Any means would be employed to do that. As such, anything that was produced in Romania that could be sold to the western markets for no matter how little, was sold indeed. A long period of deprivation started. People became surly, suspicious, despondent. The main occupation became to "hunt" for necessities such as food, clothing, toiletries, etc. Sometimes, fights erupted in lines when people thought that somebody was cutting in front of another. It helped if you made friends with the shop clerks who tipped you when food was expected. There were long lines for anything. If merchandise was delivered, it was soon sold out. It was never enough. Sometimes you waited in line for hours, and whatever it was you hoped to buy would sell out just a few people in front of you. Many articles, such as sugar, flour, oil, etc. were rationed. If it was not officially rationed, people in line took it upon themselves to ration so that the merchandise could be accessible to as many as possible.

Everybody was employed, that was a good side of the system. However, probably a good percentage of people employed had nothing to do. Organizations were not at all profitable. And nobody cared. Everything was state-run. Nobody had any incentive to do better. Your salary and vacation time were dictated by labor codes. When you started, at the beginning of one's career, you got two weeks vacation and towards the end you generally got 4-5 weeks. Raises depended on seniority. There were no merit raises. Everybody knew each other's compensation. In fact, on payday, the bookkeeper and another 1-2 persons would go to the bank and come back with a bagful of cash. Then, right there at her desk, in the midst of a roomful of people, she would separate the cash into piles of money. Everybody then came to her desk and signed for his/her pay and then collected it in front of everyone else. Nobody was fired. During work hours, you could see lots and lots of employees leaving their work place to go out searching for some lines where food might soon be delivered. The interesting thing was that people were waiting in lines even before merchandise was delivered. If you saw a line, it was a good sign. There was a joke with a man with some empty bags that attaches himself to a line and a friend passing by asks him what is being sold. The first man answers that he doesn't know but if there is a line, he surely needs that. Many times the lines were so long that they spilled outside of the store and around the building. President Ceausescu hated to see those long lines so he ordered at some point that lines should form only at the back of the store so that they couldn't be seen by passerbys.

There were no supermarkets of course, and you had to go to many stores for different things. And of course, you didn't find what you needed. People became creative, improvising menus from anything they could get. For instance, chickens were not readily available. Breasts, thighs, wings were usually exported. What was sold was the back, head and feet. And even this would not be readily available. If you found it, you could make wonderful soups or stews. I remember once going to eat with my mother at a restaurant in a seaside resort and finding that the chicken soup contained a head and two feet. There was nothing edible in that. But it was still chicken soup. You couldn't take the restaurant to task.

You could not find any seafood except perhaps, once in a while, some frozen variety from China or somewhere far. This happened while Romania has both a sea (the Black Sea) and a great river (the Danube.) Sometimes you were lucky enough to find a great product that you could actually buy. Not surprisingly, it bore a strange label, written in English or other foreign language. But down below you could read "Made in Romania". What happened is that sometimes a lot of products were refused by the foreign importers as being substandard. Then it was sold to the Romanians. For us it was perfect.

More and more deli items became totally unappetizing. It became known that the producers were adding by-products and soy additives. But again, you couldn't complain because everything was state run and the state would not prosecute itself. Later on, a few special stores also state run, opened. They carried luxury food items (they would be regular in the western world) but for us, they were spectacular. Although they were extremely expensive, there would be long lines there as well. After a few years of operation, these stores ran out of things to sell and became just like the other ordinary stores that were mostly empty.

There was also the phenomenon of the hard currency store. They displayed wonderful merchandise like shearing coats, fine leather shoes and boots, luxury cosmetics, as well as various folk costumes and sundries. Only foreigners with dollars, sterling, franks, etc. could buy from these stores. Romanians were not allowed to carry foreign currency. We used to gaze at the windows and wish that we could have access to all that.

Foreign travel, like I said, was very hard to do. When I was about 11-12, my mother managed to save enough to purchase some tickets for an organized trip to Eastern Germany. This was a communist country, of course, but too close to its western counterpart. As such, my mother was allowed to go but not me. I had to be kept behind as a guarantee that my mother would not try to flee into Western Germany. Even a one-day trip to a town in Bulgaria just across the border from Romania, when I was about 10, proved to be difficult. We were going by bus and the bus was stopped for hours at the border to determine whether I should be allowed to go.

On every trip there would be a few security police infiltrators who would watch what everybody was saying and doing. There were rumors that security police were everywhere, in lines at stores, in government building, everywhere. However, people would still tell political jokes in which they would make fun of the whole situation. Romanians like to joke, even when faced with misery and deprivation.

Romanians are not too quick to act against authority. They are more laid back and expect that somehow, somewhere somebody will do something and things will miraculously improve. "Let others do it", "Don't get involved", "It might be too risky", are all mottoes of Romanians.

There were a few courageous souls that spoke their mind openly or distributed anti-Communist manifestos and they ended up in unknown jails, psychiatric hospitals or working 16-18 hour days on the Canal (a grandiose plan Ceausescu had). They were usually intellectuals, students that were idealistic and thought they could change the system.

How I Decided to Leave

The situation, both political, economic, and cultural became worse and worse. People were grumbling. You heard of more and more people that somehow had managed to flee the country. Sometimes, people would find an opportunity to be sent on business trips. People that were allowed on business trips were deemed sure not to flee, but sometimes they did. Sportspeople, artists that had to go to other countries for competitions, sometimes decided to defect. Some brave ones swam over the Danube into Yugoslavia and from then on into Greece, Italy, Austria, etc. Usually, it was one member of the family that managed to leave and after a while, the rest of the family would be brought over. Usually, the person abroad had to pay some heavy money either officially or as bribes to have his family released from Romania.

Quite early I realized that I could not change the system single-handedly or even as part of a small group. I was no martyr either. The country was not ready for change. I had heard that through sheer persistence you sometimes succeeded in obtaining a visa to leave the country. I was not afraid and was willing to take the chance.

My mother and I (my father was deceased) decided to leave in 1980. Before doing anything else, we went to the American Embassy to make it known that we wanted to leave for the U.S.A. That proved to be a very smart move because one of my co-workers, who decided to leave the country as well, did not start by going to the American Embassy first and went to the Romanian authorities first. This cost him more than a year delay in leaving Romania. Although he had started the immigration proceedings before we did (my mother and I), he only managed to leave much later (and then, maybe out of too much stress or happiness, he died in transit at the age of 39 before getting to America).

After going to the Embassy, we went to the local police department to get the "small forms". These were the preliminary forms. There were lots and lots of people there for the same thing. You had to go there early and get a number. At that time, I was teaching private lessons in the English language. I met some of my students there. We didn't know of one another's intentions to leave the country.

At that time, it seemed that a lot of the would-be female immigrants got it into their heads that it would be beneficial for them to learn the art of cosmetology (facials, massage, creams, etc.). As such, I enrolled in one such course myself. I later found out that 8 out of 10 women taking cosmetology had applied for immigration papers.

We put a lot of pressure on the authorities to let us go. That was lots of memos, meetings, interviews, even telegrams to the highest government officials, Central Committee of the Communist Party, including the President. My memos were not at all tame.

Surprisingly, I was not persecuted at all at work. Even when they found out, the reaction was wonder, bewilderment, admiration. Some colleagues told me that they wished they had my courage but that they felt too old to start anew.

At some point, we had a home search, out of the blue. Two security police came and asked to see our belongings. They were polite, but firm. Although my mother and I were surprised, we were also vaguely amused because we knew that they wouldn't find anything. We did not have anything illegal, like gold coins, foreign currency or the like. However, we did not leave them out of our sight because we had heard of people that had been framed with illegal items being planted during the search. My mother suspected that the search was due to the fact that one of her co-workers was married to a high-ranking security official. But we never knew for sure.

We knew that we needed a sponsor, somebody to send us an affidavit of support. At some point, we started thinking that we should broaden our area and try to immigrate to Australia. We visited some trade organizations that had business relations with Australia. Through a person at such a trade company, we heard of an impending convention of Australian sheep breeders. We found out when and where the Convention would take place. That day, I called the hotel and asked to talk with the chief of the delegation. And, being a tour guide, I offered to give them a free sightseeing tour of Bucharest. I didn't have a car, but I took two Australians for a walking tour. I showed them the sights but I also pleaded my case, that is, asking them to sponsor my mother and me. After the tour, I invited them for lunch at our house where they also met my mother. The Australians were flabbergasted by my initiative and persistence and said that indeed I deserved an opportunity. However, they kept saying that I should give up my idea of taking our dog with us on this adventure. They pointed out that it would be much harder with the dog, but I never relented. I said that without the dog I am not going. I don't know if this was a "deal-breaker" or not, but they never decided to sponsor us.

In the meantime, my mother and I were called in for the "big forms" which was the second phase in the immigration process. We still had no sponsor. Another of my initiatives was to go to the Romanian Patriarchy (main church) and ask to see their books with Romanian churches abroad. A priest said that he wasn't sure he was allowed or supposed to show me the books. However, he took out a book and left it there for me. Then he pretended he was called elsewhere. I had just a few minutes to quickly scribble a few addresses. I took down a few addresses of Romanian Orthodox churches in large U.S. cities, including Los Angeles. Then I proceeded to write detailed letters about our situation and addressed to the Romanian priest. We were asking that our letter be read to the congregation.

Still, no sign of any sponsor. We were getting rather desperate. Then we came with the idea that maybe another country would give us a transit visa and from there we would be able to get into the U.S.A. without a sponsor. We tried the Italian Embassy (no luck) and then the Egyptian Embassy. Although it was hard to get into any Embassy, the Egyptian one was even harder to get into, being heavily guarded. No people were allowed to even come close to the building. But, being resourceful, I decided that still something could be done. Together with one of the man I was tutoring in English (another would be immigrant), I stood watch over the Embassy, from a distance. The plan was that as soon as we saw somebody looking Egyptian being admitted into the Embassy, we would shout that we wanted to be let in to talk about something really important. The plan worked. We got in and talked to the Consul. He said that we would be granted a visa, but that the destination stated in the passport had to show Egypt. We didn't want to go to Egypt to stay, but we agreed.

Looking back, I think that I did pretty courageous things. The reason they worked, I think, is because people were taken by surprise and didn't know how to react. Very few people, if any, would have dared to go inside a heavily guarded area, for instance. But I just didn't care, didn't stop to think of any possible dangers. I just followed my dream.

After my visit to the Egyptian Embassy, I went to the Central Passport Office and requested that our destination be changed from USA to Egypt. They said they were not sure whether it could be done or not.

Then I went to the seaside for a few days at the beach. While I was gone, a letter came from a Romanian family from Orange County, California. They had heard our letter read in church, were very much impressed by our resourcefulness and decided to sponsor us. So, now we had sponsors. Before we left Romania, the Romanian head of the family came to Romania to visit relatives and also asked to meet us. Because he was not from the capital but from a city in western Romania, he asked us to meet him there. Only my mother went because the ticket to go there was expensive.

I returned to Bucharest right away and ran to the Passport Office to request that our destination be changed back to the U.S.A. The officials were very cross and scolded us for making a mockery out of the immigration process. But they filed our request. We were rather afraid that out of spite, the officials would send us to Egypt. After a few months, a letter came by which we were informed: "Your request to change destinations and go to Egypt instead of the U.S.A. has been denied." Big sigh of relief!! That's what we wanted. That was a request we wanted denied.

Shortly after, we were called to pick up our passports. But, in the meantime, we had heard that the American Embassy had a long waiting list for immigrants. Months and months of waiting. And I suspect that the Romanian authorities knew of our predicament. At this point, they were acting like: See, we are good, we let you go, but the Americans are not in a hurry to accept you. At that point, we were not in such a hurry to get our passports because that meant that we had to give up our jobs, our citizenship, our ID cards. Fortunately, shelter and food were not a problem because we lived with my mother's parents. Her father was a Hungarian national who kept his Hungarian citizenship until the end of his life although he lived for more than 60 years in Romania. My grandfather had a very large house, which he had bought before communism took over. It was centrally located and attracted a lot of interest from potential tenants. He did, indeed, have tenants. Due to his foreign citizenship, he had certain advantages. And my mother and I did too because we lived rent-free.

In fact, we later found out that my grandfather had repeatedly petitioned the Romanian authorities to keep us in Romania rather than let us go. His point was that we would inherit the house and have a good income. He saw no further than that.

Anyway, we were told that we had to pick up our passports if we wanted them. We were warned that if we didn't, we might not get another chance later. So, we had to proceed. To get the passport, we had to pay a hefty sum for "renouncing the citizenship". We had to pay to be stripped of our citizenship. We also had to present signatures from dozens of places. We had to demonstrate that we didn't owe money or anything to any organization. That we didn't have any important works of art that belonged to the Romanian people. And on, and on, and on. The most important thing was that once you picked your passport, you had to give up your job. At the same time, we had to pay the Passport office every month or so for the exit visa to be extended. If you didn't pay, your visa was voided. We tried to obtain some employment by going to the Work Forces office. This was something somewhat similar to the Unemployment office. However, under communism, virtually everybody had some kind of state given job. The Work Forces office was another office that was created just to keep people employed. There were no real jobs to be assigned from this office. We were prepared to accept any kind of employment although I held a degree in English and my mother was a pharmacist. But, first of all we were asked to present our ID cards. Of course, we had given those up (had to) to get our passports. So, the answer was: "No ID's, no work.".

Finally, the American Embassy scheduled our departure for February 21, 1983. During that time, my mother's mother was in the last stage of colon cancer. We wanted to stay with her until the end, which was near. However, this time we got an ultimatum from the Americans. We either departed when we were scheduled or we might never be granted the opportunity. So we decided to go.

We had to pack. 9 huge suitcases + our dog. We had to make a list with everything we were taking, down to the smallest pair of panties. Then, everything had to be inspected and then directly shipped to Italy. The immigration was either through Italy or through Austria. We had been assigned to go through Italy. We had to be in Rome at a certain American run boarding house by February 22. Although Romanians were not supposed to have foreign currency, now we were considered non-Romanians and as such, we had to pay in dollars. We were supposed to pay a high shipping fee for our luggage to be sent to Italy. We decided to carry our entire luggage with us to save on the shipping costs. We were warned that this was against the law and that we were not supposed to carry any of our luggage with us once it had been inspected. That is for fear that we might take something valuable out of Romania. But, we decided to take the chance. We were told that all of our luggage might be confiscated at the border. We replied that if the customs people would dare to do that, we would open the windows and throw all of our possessions out to create an unforgettable scene. To save even further, we had decided to take the train to Rome rather than fly. The trip entailed changing the train and the train station in Belgrade. And that while we had 9 suitcases and a dog.

I mentioned that we didn't have any foreign currency when we had the search in our home. Now that we were stateless, and required to pay in dollars, we had to buy dollars. But there was no free market to do that safely. So, I went to the School of Architecture where I had heard that many Arab students changed dollars. Although such changes were not legal, I had to stop some foreign students and ask about changing. I found two such students. They each wanted to exchange $500. We only had $1000 worth of our currency to exchange. These students came to our house at night and we exchanged. Later on that night, they came back to our house, drunk, banged on the doors and said they wanted sexual favors. We threatened to call the police and they left.

So, one night we went to the train station and many of our friends and co-workers came to see us off. It was the beginning of an adventure more adventurous than we suspected.

The train was very cold. Luckily, our dog warmed us. He was allowed to travel, unconfined, in the main area with us. Again, we were pioneers. There were no rules for people such as we were. Nobody would take their dog when immigrating. In Belgrade we took a taxi to the other train station and left our luggage in storage. We took our dog and went to explore Belgrade on foot between trains. Compared to our country, Belgrade already seemed much freer, much more westernized. We were amazed.

Then we took another train and left for Rome. This train was too hot. Again, the dog was allowed to travel unconfined with us. When we got into Rome, it seemed like a fairytale. It was nighttime and everything was brightly lit. (We had been used to the semi-darkness in Romania. The austerity regime prohibited public funds to be spent on too much illumination.) Even at the train station, there were lots of stores that carried merchandise that we had never seen in our life. It was Wonderland. We had been told that the boarding house was not far from the train station. So, we decided to save taxi fare and walk. But we had 9 suitcases and a dog. We carried a few suitcases at a time for a few yards and then came back for the others. And thus we made our way to the boarding house. It was on the 5th or 6th floor of a high-rise building. We managed to drag everything up and then we presented ourselves at the main office. When they saw us with the dog, they were amazed and said that they never imagined that somebody could bring a pet with them and they were not supposed to take in animals. They said that during the daytime we had to be out of the boarding house with the dog. At night, we could take the dog in.

The boarding house was very sparse. My idea of an orphanage. Each family was assigned a room with a sink. Bathroom and shower facilities were elsewhere and had to be shared. There was no hot water, only tepid (it was February and very cold so we didn't take any showers while there). The beds were rather primitive, hard and the blankets were threadbare. Again, our dog snuggled between us at night to keep us warm. The menu was invariably pasta with tomato sauce every lunch and dinner. Luckily, it was tasty and we didn't have to partake of this too long. We were only there for 5 days. There were some Romanians there that had been living in that boarding house for weeks or months. Although they had left Romania, further verifications brought to light some aspects of their life that prohibited their entry into the USA. Their fate was subject of debate.

Although before getting a visa from the Americans, in Romania, we had been required to bring copies of our legal records complete with fingerprints and also health records with current vaccinations, lung x-rays, etc., they did all these over again in Rome. Probably they did not trust the Romanian doctors. We had to have other vaccinations, x-rays, fingerprints, etc.

But we had time to see Rome on foot. Everything seemed out of this world. We were in awe of everything. And we felt happy beyond belief. We went into stores one at a time. The other one was holding the dog outside. This way, we visited the Vatican too. We wanted to take a bus to the Vatican because it was raining hard. Freezing rain. Unfortunately, they did not allow dogs on buses so we had to walk for quite a long time. But it was worth it. My mother and I were joking that probably our dog was the only Romanian dog that had been at the Vatican.

Some immigrants at the boarding house suggested that we go to an X-rated movie (nothing of the kind was ever distributed in Romania.) Out of curiosity, we went, and also went to a live striptease show given in a large theatre. We were the only women at both performances and we created a sensation. Several men followed us to the boarding house trying to make our acquaintance. We had a hard time convincing them to give up.

Then it was time to leave. The flight from Rome to our destination, Los Angeles, was paid for by a sponsoring agency. We had to sign a form stating that we would pay back when we could. However, we had to pay for a crate for our dog.

On the plane, we discussed our situation with a number of people. We met a nice family who was returning to San Francisco from a trip to Egypt. We discussed with them all the way from Rome to New York. In New York, we had to be processed as new immigrants. This took a few hours. Then we boarded a plane to Los Angeles where our sponsors were waiting for us.

We were dead tired. It was evening but the weather was nice, typical California weather. Our sponsors had a large car that seemed very impressive to us. All the way, they played music with liberty themes. It felt unreal.

We had not told them about our dog. We simply thought that it would not be any problem. When they saw us, they were amazed. They said that they rented an apartment and their landlords did not accept pets. Little did we know that this was a widespread phenomenon and we would have a hard time finding a place to live with our dog. Our sponsors were very friendly but told us right away that we were welcome to live with them for as long as necessary, but the dog wasn't. They advised us to lose him. We refused, so we were advised to find some other place to live.

In the morning, after our arrival, we had to go out to buy something to eat for our dog. Our sponsors indicated a nearby supermarket. We were curious to see an American supermarket but unfortunately a terrible flood had started. There were torrents of water flowing furiously. It was pouring. We tried to cross the boulevard but couldn't. The water was higher than our knees. We were afraid. So we bought some canned food from a convenience store on our side of the road. Even the convenience store seemed marvelous to us. We spent a long time looking at everything.

Brand New Life

I took a newspaper and started calling people who had placed ads. The great majority of them did not take pets. We visited a few apartments that accepted pets but they looked awful.

Speaking the language was definitely an asset. My mother, however, who was 53 when we arrived, couldn't speak language. She later learned it quite well because she liked to talk to people, read newspapers, watch TV. Plus, of course, I gave her lessons.

After 5 days of continuous efforts to find a place to live, we found one. When I called, I noticed that the person I was speaking to (the manager of the apartment building) had an accent, quite similar to mine. When I told him my name, he switched to Romanian. He was Romanian. He had been in the country for a few years and had found this building to manage for the Vietnamese owner. It was a 1-bedroom apartment that looked clean, well maintained had a decent kitchen and bathroom and cost $300/month. We had to pay for the first month plus security deposit.

Our sponsors gave us a headboard (for a simple bed that we bought) and an armchair (for $30). Some neighbors, also Romanian, gave us a used refrigerator and a small table for $25. We bought two chairs for $5 each from a garage sale. By the way, we thought garage sales were wonderful. For many years, they were our main source of entertainment. We took long tours on foot and visited many garage sales every weekend. Sometimes, sellers noticed that we came on foot and probably didn't look very prosperous, and gave us stuff for free. I still remember that we got a bread toaster for free. That was one of the best toasters we ever owned.

Our sponsors drove us to the agency that had paid for our transportation from Rome. There were even more formalities to be done. Plus, another battery of medical tests. Our sponsors were gracious enough to take time off from work to drive us to our appointments. They also took us to the Welfare Office. They said that as new refugees, we were eligible for benefits. We didn't know what can of worms we were opening.

The formalities to get on Welfare were extremely tedious and time-consuming. Although the clerks were polite, we felt some contempt in their demeanor. Not knowing any better, we declared that we formed a household, my mother and I. Little did we know that if we had declared that we cooked separately, our benefits would have been much better. For a whole month, our food stamps allowance was $53 (to cover food for 2 people). The cash allowance was minimal, to cover rent, utilities and just a little extra. To continue our eligibility we had to report to the Refugee Job Center that was supposed to find us some kind of employment. Both the Welfare Office and the Refugee Job Center were rather far from us. It took 2 buses to get to the former and 3 buses to get to the latter. And buses did not come too frequently. We were called there quite frequently and asked whether we had found a job or not. No help was provided. It took us about 5-6 hours to go there and back with the long waiting time there, just for a 10 second question.

And we did try to find employment. Not having a car, we applied to the businesses that we could reach of foot. All businesses, banks, post office, library, fast food restaurants, retail stores, a junkyard, anything. When they asked us about our education and experience, the answers were invariably: "You are overqualified", "You don't have the experience we are looking for." "You have no experience in this country.". The interviewer at some restaurant where I went to apply for a hostess position bluntly told me that I was too old. I was 29. I remember going to the Disneyland Hotel where I had heard many positions were available. I waited for hours to speak to an employment specialist and she said that she felt that no position would be good for me. I cried going out. I was also dazed by the superb surroundings around the Hotel Complex. I could see people strolling by, people on vacation, with no apparent worries, having a good time, the way I wanted to be, and compared myself to them. That area of the Disneyland Hotel remained one of my favorite places to go for a stroll even when my circumstances changed. When my mother and I went to the American Embassy in 1980 to make known our wish to emigrate, the consul had been very supportive and encouraging. He said that with our education and experience we would have no problem finding employment immediately. He obviously had no knowledge of the system.

I also followed the job wanted ads in the newspaper. The same thing happened. Same refusal. Although my English was quite good, some people pretended that my accent was a problem. At some point I saw a position offered in the newspaper that I decided to call for. I didn't know what it meant, "Stuntwoman" but I called anyway. On the phone, the lady realized that I had no clue what it meant and she told me. That was indeed something I had no experience for, nor did I want to try for. I also called the Army. They told me that their cut-off age was 29 and I had just crossed that mark.

The family we had met on the plane from Rome to New York sent us gift certificates to cover the installation of a phone and monthly fees for about 6 months. Another Romanian, whom we met there, presented us with a gift of a small black and white TV. We also discovered Thrift Stores. For a very modest sum, we managed to buy a sofa and loveseat. Plus, much to our amazement, we discovered that many people abandoned a lot of good stuff when they moved. Being on foot a lot (didn't have a car), walking the dog, we noticed when people were moving or having an annual spring-cleaning. That way, we found lots and lot of good things such as kitchen items, clothing, even furniture. Little by little, we managed to put together a rather comfortable, even if sparse, cheap and quite eclectic apartment. I still remember coveting a pair of purple high-heeled sandals that seemed the epitome of elegance to me at that time. They cost $3.25 at the Thrift Store. I didn't know if I could really afford them. I went there a few times trying to see if the price would go down. In the end, I did buy them. It was a great happiness.

We managed to get some extra money by collecting empty cans, bottles and cardboard and taking them, by foot, to the recycling center. The few dollars that we got that way were like a gift from Heaven. Usually, after getting our money from the recycling center, we would go to a nearby supermarket and buy something good to eat. It felt very rewarding. Carrying heavy supermarket bags in our hands all the way home was difficult and we often had to stop to rest. But we were already used to carrying our groceries like that from Romania. The difference was that in Romania you bought food that you had to wait in line for, that you had to "hunt" for. In America, it was plentiful, readily available, tasty and when it could be purchased with money obtained through recycling, it was even better.

We were called to the Welfare office quite frequently. And some times we had to go even without being called. For some reason, we often received less money or food stamps than we had been promised. Or the benefit check did not arrive and we were scared we might not be able to pay the rent on time. Oh, and we also got Medicaid, the health insurance for the poor. Unfortunately, not many providers accepted Medicaid.

One day, while waiting at the bus stop to go home from the Welfare Office, I got to talking to a senior lady who was waiting for the bus too. She told us that she was originally from England and now living all alone. She was amazed to learn of our predicament (no jobs although we were both able and willing and had some good education behind us). She offered us a job cleaning her apartment. She offered $15 to our team of 2 (mother and daughter) for a 3 hour cleaning session once a week. That was $2.50/hr each but we took it. The lady's apartment was spotless. She probably spent all her time cleaning it herself but thought that is wasn't clean enough. So, we polished it from top to bottom although we felt that there wasn't anything to do to make it cleaner. I suspect that the lady just created this job for us, when she didn't really need us. Besides, when we left, she always would give us a bag of canned food or other necessities.

One day, she had a visitor, a friend of hers, when we were there. Our employer told her about us. The visitor, who had a car, told us that her church was giving out food and other supplies (like toiletries) to the poor and if we wanted to go there with her. Of course we did. We were never too proud to accept charity. We went and they gave us so much that we were barely able to carry it home.

Some people that contemplated immigration decided against it because they were proud and said that they never could work beneath their education and expertise or out of their chosen profession. Or others immigrated but, again, were too proud to accept charity or work beneath their level. Some people back in Romania, including my grandfather who had just become a widower (my grandmother died in May 1983) said that we had been crazy to give up such a nice house in the heart of Bucharest for poverty in America. But we never regretted leaving. Not even in the midst of the worst "adventures". And we never thought of returning. For us, it was a definitive break with the past.

During that time, various Romanian men, some of which seemed quite dubious as to how they scraped an existence came visiting us with designs on either me or my mother or both. Neither my mother nor I were interested in any of them. We didn't like their looks or anything. They were usually older, poorer, uneducated, lacking in basic manners. Some came and went straight to our refrigerator to see what we had to treat them with. Some took us to their churches and there we discovered more opportunities for monthly giveouts. One of them discovered a Government center that was distributing butter and cheese for the poor. We took that too. And went there regularly. Some of the men couldn't speak English well. So they took me to fill out forms for them or translate/interpret for them. In exchange they drove my mother and me to some of our appointments. They seemed amazed how two women could live without men. They offered their services and were dismayed that we turned them down.

A teacher from a nearby school came out to talk to me when I was walking my dog. We started talking regularly when I took the dog out. One day he invited me to a movie. It was the Return of the Jedi. It was playing in a very posh area near Fashion Island in Newport Beach, CA. It was an area I had never seen before. It seemed like another world to me. Anyway, it so happened that I had a horrible cold sore on my lip. But I was very matter of fact and said that in summer I was prone to herpes. (That is what cold sores are: a form of herpes). The guy seemed scared and repulsed. After the movie, he drove me home and I said he could come up to meet my mother and have a tea with us. He said he was going to pass and I never saw him again.

A few months after our arrival, with no success in finding employment, I saw an ad in the paper for 6 months classed at the Institute for Medical and Dental Careers. The ad said that placement was provided and guaranteed at the end of the course. You needed a high school education. I decided to take this opportunity. And suspecting that my education beyond high school might be a liability, I decided to omit it. Both my mother and I had paid to have our diplomas translated and notarized before leaving Romania.

I decided to become a Medical Assistant. The course cost in excess of $3,000, which I promised to pay gradually, after I started work. There would have been some grants available, had I been in America for at least 1 year. But this was less than 4 months after our arrival.

In June '83 I started classes. They were 5-6 hours/day. We wore uniforms and practiced taking blood, giving injections, x-rays, on one another. We developed camaraderie. Although a foreigner, the others were asking me how to spell various medical words because spelling came easy to me. Medical terminology or most of it anyway, comes from Latin and Romanian is a Latin origin language.

After a few months, I also started a very P/T job in the evening (some 9-10 hours a week, at $4/h at a tiny T-shirt store in the Disneyland area of Anaheim. I was there by myself, usually 3 times a week, between 6 and 9 p.m. I used the bus to go to school and to the job. The school was fun and the job was too. I was a little more confident in the future. The only problem was transportation. Sometimes I would miss the bus to go to school, or the bus was late. And sometimes, people offered to give me a ride to school. Not knowing any better I accepted. Some men propositioned me but soon gave up. I was very lucky. A few times I missed the bus to come home at night from my job. I chose to walk because after I accepted a ride from a stranger at one time, I had a hard time convincing the man that I was not a hooker. At one time, I felt I was being followed when I walked. Luckily, a police car stopped and I asked the policeman to give me a ride. He did.

In the meantime, the Refugee Job Center and Welfare office were still periodically calling me to report to them. I filled out forms all the time and I remember informing them that I was enrolled in a 6 months course and having a very P/T job.

6 weeks away from the end of my course, I received notification that I had broken the law by going to the Medical Assistants school. The Refugee Job Center said that I was not supposed to enroll in any course but work effectively. By taking a course, I limited the time I could have spent looking for a job. Because of this violation, I rendered myself ineligible to receive public assistance. Moreover, I would have to repay all the funds received since I had started school.

It was a nightmare. It seemed totally nonsensical. There I was, doing my best to get off public assistance by enrolling in a course that I would have to pay out of my own pocket later on. The Refugee Job Center did not offer me any job, refer me to any other placement office, or offered to pay for some state or federally funded program that would make me more employable. Moreover, they had not mentioned at any time that I was not allowed to take any courses. It was a lose-lose situation for me. It seemed as bad or worse than something I might have encountered in Romania.

Being a very belligerent person when my rights were threatened, with an acute sense of justice and fairness and the ability to plead my cause, I started a string of memos, interviews, and later on, court appearances to overthrow that decision. In the meantime, they continued my benefits but these were reduced by the amount I was getting working at the T-shirt place. All the money that I earned there was subtracted from my public assistance check. How is that for incentive to work?

My fight with the Refugee Job Center was extremely long and stressful. There were numerous hearings, appeals, other hearings, appeals. Memos, telephoning, pleading, furious and angry outbursts, etc., etc. I went to court and lost. I appealed. And lost again. The judges told me that they thought very highly of me, that what I was doing was exactly what every immigrant should do, but unfortunately, the law (which they found on their books and which I never knew) said that I couldn't take courses while being on Public Assistance. I cried a lot and deplored the wrongs (and stupidities) existing in this society which I had striven so hard to join. In the end, the Refugee Job Center followed my every move after I became employed, unemployed, employed, over and over again, through my move from the West to the East Coast. They never relented until I paid back everything. By the way, I also paid back the airfare to the organization that had paid it for us when we arrived in the States. But I considered that fair.

Not being a quitter, I finished my course and got my degree. During that time, we had managed to save (great accomplishment) $800 towards the purchase of a used car. I was not driving. I had never had a car before and didn't know how to drive. Our sponsors took us to see various cars but we never found something that would cost so little and run well, look decent and so on. I liked the looks of AMC Pacers because they looked so different. I later found out that they were not good cars. When I saw an ad in the paper that somebody was selling a '74 Pacer for $800 I took a colleague of mine from the Medical Careers School to see that car. She was driving, I wasn't. The person selling it was selling it for somebody and the transaction took place in a large supermarket parking lot. All of these ought to have raised red flags but for an inexperienced person such as myself, it was fine. My friend was rather naive too. I asked her to test drive the car and she said it was fine. We didn't even lift the hood. It was like I was buying a cheap toy car. I paid the money and my friend drove the car home for me. It became apparent right away that the car had some major problem but the money was given and the seller was nowhere to be found. Even the information on the bill of sale was not correct. I supposed I could have done something to find this person but somehow I didn't think I would be able to.

Indeed, the car needed a new transmission. A neighborhood autoshop run by an elderly Oriental man fixed it for us. He took pity on us and charged a reduced fee (auto part taken from the junkyard) and allowed us to pay in installments. This car always had problems even afterwards. We kept the car for a few years and put a lot of money into it. We were always at some repair shop until we were well known by every mechanic. I was always trying to make them fix it for free as being under warranty from the previous visits but unfortunately, they explained that other parts were failing every time.

Before being placed, the Medical and Dental Careers Institute sent you on a one-month free Internship (you were not paid). I was sent to do my internship in the office of an Indian ob-gyn doctor. The doctor was rather pleasant. I remember that he took us all in the office to a very elegant Indian Restaurant in Newport Beach when it was his birthday or some other occasion. Unfortunately, the other staff was highly unpleasant to me. They didn't let me do anything that I thought I would be doing. They didn't even let me observe. All they wanted me to do was sterilize instruments and clean up counters, floors, even dust plants. I had no contact with any patients. I protested a few times and I even tried to speak to the doctor. To no avail. At the end of the month, I had to hand carry the envelope with my evaluation to the Medical and Dental Institute. The evaluation was very negative. They deemed me incompetent. I was incensed and went back to tell them but they didn't even blink. The Medical and Dental Careers Institute took pity and sent me on a second unpaid month of Internship. This was rather far and again, I was using several buses. This team was mostly minorities. Doctors and assistants were either Mexican or Oriental. Nobody was picking on me for my accent. I was taken to observe and I was even let to do a few procedures. Most of the time however, we chatted. I became friends with a Mexican lady who even invited me to her house for a Mexican party. At some other time, the Mexicans in the staff took me to a restaurant where they played Mariachi. Not surprisingly, I got a glowing recommendation from this place.

My First Jobs

When I started my first job, as a Medical Assistant in a Family Practice office, I knew how to drive. My sponsors had taught me. I had also passed the written test but not the road test. Still, I was driving because the job was offered to me and I couldn't say I couldn't take it because I had no transportation. It was rather far to use the bus.

I was assigned in the front office to make appointments. It was a solo practice and the doctor's wife was the Office Manager. She was constantly after me that I was not speaking loud or clearly enough, that I was not using the correct words to greet the patients on the phone. She was constantly on my back, complaining that I didn't work fast enough, hard enough or good enough. In about 2 months, she let me go.

During that time, I wanted to take a trip to Romania to see my grandfather. We had written to him and asked him to come visit us or come to stay for good. He refused. The Romanian government denied my application for a visa to go to Romania.

One day, when I was at the Immigration Office applying for a re-entry permit (I had hoped I would be allowed to go to Romania), my car was damaged in the back while being parked. One of the taillights was broken. I was afraid to call the police because they would discover that I was driving without a proper license. Shortly after I took the road test and took my license (second attempt). My first examiner was Oriental and I didn't understand what he was saying to me. He also scared me by grabbing the wheel during the test.

I applied for another medical assisting job. The doctor interviewed me himself. I knew that something was fishy when he commented on my figure and asked me to turn slowly around. I complied though. The position involved processing the insurance billing. Quite rapidly however, they piled more and more responsibilities on me and when I asked for more money or at least a helper, I was let go. I was also perceived as not being a fun person, too serious and all that. This position didn't last more than a few months either.

Then I found a position at a larger practice, with several doctors. Actually, there were 4 doctors and I was hired as a 4th medical assistant. Still another doctor, not practicing much, was the owner. The other doctors were his employees. The owner's wife, a young, pretty Mexican lady was very friendly to me. The position had certain advantages. It was 5 minutes sway from home. I could come home for lunch. Sometimes, I would take one or two of my co-workers home for lunch with me.

Soon, it became apparent that the other 3 medical assistants did not like me. The office was incredibly busy and each medical assistant would work for one doctor. We would be rotated every week. The problem was that the other 3 were all 19 or 20. At 29 I appeared ancient to them. Also, my accent irked them. Although one of the other girls was Mexican, she had arrived in the States very young and considered herself a true American. They constantly told me that I didn't belong and that I should have stayed in Romania. When I confronted them and told them to stop, they said I was not a good sport, took things personally, etc., etc. When I approached the Office Manager about it, they ganged up against me and said nothing was true.

Still, it became apparent that we didn't get along. I got transferred to another clinic owned by the same doctor. This location was much farther from home. However, the co-workers were friendly. I met the same Mexican lady I had worked with during my second free Internship.

After a few months there, the owner opened another location, much closer to home than the one I was working at that time. I said I wanted to move there. Again, the co-workers there were nice and friendly. Unfortunately, I had problems with the doctor there. He was an old man, brought out of retirement and he was oblivious to anything around him. He took long lunches to go play tennis and then when he came back, he saw patients in his tennis shorts (and left his jock strap hanging in plain sight). He was gruff and made mistakes. I had to work with him all the time. He could notice that I wasn't too happy. Therefore, he proceeded to discredit me. But, the owner soon realized that something was wrong with him too. He was let go and I was transferred back to the first office. After a full circle, I was back where I had started. Back with the 3 young assistants who didn't like me in the least.

I pretended that everything was fine, although it wasn't. The girls were in their own clique from which I was excluded. They kept teasing me, bad-mouthing me to doctors and patients alike. Although they were supposed to stay available at all times to go to the patient's room immediately after their doctor left the room, there were many times when they disappeared to have a chat. So, one day, when they were nowhere to be found and one patient had been waiting for quite a while, I offered to go in and do the procedures myself although it wasn't a patient for whom I was responsible. I needed to take blood. The woman warned me that she didn't have good veins and usually it took several tries. I tried once and failed. I tried the other arm and failed again. I was somewhat at a loss as to what to do. Then the medical assistant who should have been there in the first place appeared and with a contemptuous look on her face, she told the patient that I didn't have any idea as to how to do things. Then, she confidently managed to draw blood in her first attempt. After that, between this patient and the medical assistants, I was made into a bumbling idiot who didn't know a thing. I was called to management and told that I was dismissed. I argued my case and the manager conceded that I had some valid points. The conclusion however was that there was bad chemistry between the other girls and myself and it was much easier to get rid of one rather than to dismiss three. I had been with the company for over a year and had worked very hard and was appreciated by doctors and patients, with very few exceptions.

When I went to collect unemployment compensation, I was told that since I had been fired for willful disobedience and gross incompetence, I was not entitled to anything. This got me extremely upset. First I went to the doctors and asked them for written evaluations that I could use at the unemployment office. Two of the doctors refused to talk with me. A third one explained to me that he couldn't oppose the management's decision because he was only an employee and needed the job. I went back to the company and asked to talk to the Administrator. I was left waiting for a long time. This made me extremely mad. I got up and threatened to come every day and picket their offices with a board stating that I wanted justice. That got their attention. They said that they would change their stance and I would get a revised decision in the mail. I said that I wasn't leaving without a written statement that would correctly describe the circumstances of my dismissal. I got that and got my unemployment compensation.

Shortly before my dismissal, I had had some unpleasant occurrences with my car. While being parked at home (outside parking), somebody had smashed one of my rear lights. I suspected our Romanian apartment building manager because the relationship with him had started to deteriorate. Actually, from the beginning we had heard that he was bragging that he had saved my mother and I from the "gutter" and gave us a place to live. It sounded as if we had been homeless and he had provided free shelter for us. The truth was that we paid our rent right on the first of the month and did not create any trouble. But probably because of our status as two women alone, he thought he could take liberties. He was an obnoxious man, who often cursed and yelled, even at his own family. When our car was damaged, we suspected that he did that to force us to move out. I called the police but without witnesses, nothing could be done. I didn't have the money to fix the car and I was extremely despondent over my job. I arrived at work that day but couldn't work for about a half-hour because I had a crying fit. I just couldn't stop.

Right after that, the man we had met on the plane coming from Rome, wrote to us and when I wrote back with my sad tales, he sent me a plane ticket to come visit him in Napa, in Northern California. It was unbelievably kind. He took me to see the famous vineyards, the redwood forests nearby, and all of San Francisco, with the famous cable cars, Chinatown, Museum of Art, etc. Everything was so far removed from my dreary existence back home. It all culminated with the last night before my departure, when we went to a rotating restaurant from where you could see the whole of the city. I broke down and cried uncontrollably. Again, I couldn't stop. I stayed in the bathroom for a long time. I felt that I would cry my heart out. Literally.

During that time, I had continued to work a few evenings a week at the T-shirt store. In addition to going to clean up the elderly lady's house on Saturdays. Next to the T-shirt store, there was a little restaurant that had happy hour. It was not very clear to me what that meant at the time. Anyway, some nights when I went to work at the T-shirt place, I would stop to fill up my plate with shrimps and take it to have something to nibble at the store. They didn't charge me anything. One night, right before closing time at 9, I had a customer who couldn't decide what he wanted. I was rather impatient to leave. So, when the man finally decided what design he wanted imprinted, I took the shirt, put it on the imprinting machine but didn't lock it completely on top of the shirt. When I let the handle go, it snapped back and hit me in the eye. A flood of blood started to pour and I didn't know whether I had lost an eye or what. I was too afraid to feel anything. The customer left in a hurry. I called my mother at home to tell her that I had been in an accident. I was not very precise what had happened and my mother thought it was a car accident. I then called my employer and he told me to call 911. All that time, I was holding tissues to my eye and they were quickly drenched in blood. The ambulance came at the same time with my sponsor and his son. My mother had dispatched them. The son drove my car to the hospital. There they had to sew my eyebrow. I had been lucky. My eyebrow had been split open, not my eye. But the force of the impact gave me a huge bruise and swelling that closed my eye. It stayed like that for almost a month.

After that I drove myself home. And I called my then boyfriend in Romania (presently my husband) to tell him the news. It was the night for me to call. I always called the last Saturday of the month.

I continued working at the T-shirt place through a change of ownership. The new owner was a Korean woman who introduced me to sushi, which I came to love. I worked for her until she dismissed me. She said she would work there herself. It was a one-person store.

After my dismissal from the clinic, a few months passed and I didn't find another job. I was getting rather anxious. So, when the unemployment office mentioned a state-run and state-paid program for the unemployed that wanted to learn new skills, I jumped at the opportunity. I was screened and found eligible. Fifty or sixty people who were unemployed, former drug addicts, former convicts or otherwise hard to place individuals, including myself were taken to a kind of retreat where we had inspirational music, tearful confessions of past mistakes, greatest accomplishments, etc. All of this seemed highly fake to me but I went along because I really wanted the training.

I was enrolled in a program that would prepare you to become a word processing operator. We would start and end every day of training with a chorus of "I feel happy, I feel healthy, I feel terrific!" yelled at the top of our voices. Then we would split into groups and study office procedures, typing and then computer word processing. There were frequent tests. As usual, I did well, with the exception of typing. I couldn't use all my fingers and my speed was terrible. Being very competitive, I felt bad. The more so, because there was a young girl in the program who was born with extremely short hands and with just 2-3 fingers. She was typing better than I was. It got me so upset that I would start to cry and had to leave the room to calm down. I was very good in the computer work.

Just before losing my job at the clinic, I had started to take some pre-requisite courses (Calculus and Basic Computer Programming) because I had hopes to enroll in a Master's Program in Business Administration. Although the girls put me down and laughed and said that I was crazy to think that I would manage to pass calculus and go on to get an advanced degree, I continued. Their words did not discourage me. On the contrary.

The Romanian man who had given us a small black and white TV when we arrived encouraged me to go for an MBA. He bought me books that would prepare you for the GMAT exam. I studied them religiously, and when I finished one book, I started again. When I took the exam, I was rather good at it. I passed with a good score. I was quite used to taking exams. During my job searches I had taken exams for federal or state jobs. I always scored well but wasn't hired, but placed on waiting lists.

I realized quite early that my Bachelor's degree in English from Romania would not serve me in any way in the States. It was good because I knew the language but it seemed ridiculous to even think that I could teach English to native speakers. On the other hand, my mother's pharmacy degree would have been quite useful, had it not been for numerous exams that she had to pass before being able to practice again. On my mother's feats, a little later.

The people in the Word Processing School were very friendly. We kept in touch even after graduation and even went out to eat together. But just before graduation, one of my colleagues told me that she saw an ad in the paper for a word processor in a medical facility. She thought that I would be good for that given my prior involvement with the medical world. I applied and was offered the job. That was a great accomplishment.

I was hired with $8/hr. That was great. My direct boss was a bubbly young girl. We went along fine. Her boss was the Medical Director. He was a difficult man. Sometimes extremely helpful and friendly, other times extremely mad and making life miserable for everyone. The young girl, his assistant couldn't cope with this. She quit. To take her place, a very handsome young man was hired. He was extremely full of himself and constantly put me down. After a little while, he, too, left the company. During that time, my workload had increased a lot. I had many bosses. Everybody wanted something and all wanted it NOW. I asked for a raise. I was told that I would be given a little bit more money but that I would be on a salary not hourly wages any more. I accepted because I had no choice. Soon I discovered that I was expected to work very long hours and my income per hour had actually been decreased.

I was offered the position of Administrative Assistant to the Medical Director. But no increase in salary. This was the position that the two other people before me had abandoned. And I soon discovered that the position was extremely stressful. The director would scream and yell and threaten that he would fire me. I couldn't afford to be unemployed so I took everything. Then, his wife, who was the President of the company, said she wanted me to be her assistant too. I ended up working for both of them.

They had a very interesting relationship. They seem to genuinely like and love each other but quite frequently they had violent temper tantrums, in front of all the employees. They would slam doors so hard that pictures on the wall would fall down. They liked to dictate long memos and I had to transcribe them. They also dictated long memos to each other. They were about their home life, their difficulties with their children, etc., etc. At one time, the medical director dictated a long memo, which he instructed me to distribute. One of his plans was to fire an old friend who worked for him. I distributed this memo and when he realized that I did it, he got extremely mad saying that I was not supposed to distribute it.

One Thanksgiving Day, he asked a few of us to come to work and I did. He served us Turkey at the office. He and his wife frequently went on trips. They were both extremely disorganized and said that they needed somebody to help them pack. So, one day, the wife gave me the keys to her Mercedes and instructions to go to her house and start their packing. I felt very hesitant about both taking her car and going to their house. But she insisted. So I went. And I did indeed fold and put things in suitcases. At a later date, he had hired another Administrative Assistant for himself since I was then his wife's official Administrative Assistant. He called us both to his house to pack. We both went although the other girl was amazed that she could actually be called to do such a thing. She asked me whether that had happened before and whether I thought it would happen again. I answered "Yes" to both questions. Then she promptly quit. And the Medical Director cursed me and yelled at me and said that I would get a kick in the butt and I would be fired for making those remarks that made the girl quit. I didn't react too much because I knew his tempers by then. In a few days he forgot about it. He also had temper tantrums when he asked me to do something and I did it too promptly. He was in the habit of frequently changing his mind and being sorry for his decisions. And when he changed his mind, he found out that the job had already been completed.

Contrary to a general tendency of American employees, especially young ones, to quit at the smallest provocation, I stoically endured most anything my employers would dish out. It was extremely stressful and I often came home depressed and crying but I stuck to the job. I couldn't afford not to. Money was very tight. It was especially hard for me because I have a very quick temper myself and have a tendency to answer back and furiously argue my point of view. I had to keep a very close check on my temper because I needed the job. No matter what happened, I made a point of never quitting a job.

Marriage

A few months after I arrived in America, in one of my letters to my boyfriend in Romania, I asked him whether he wanted to marry me and come live in America. He said, "Yes". At that time, I was no longer a Romanian citizen and marriages between Romanians and non-Romanians had to be approved by the Council of State. I sent him the necessary papers; he collected his papers and applied. It took a while but, BIG SURPRISE, it was approved. We were overjoyed. Soon we realized there was a catch. He couldn't leave Romania unless he was married. I needed to go there to marry there. But... I was not given a visa to enter Romania. I started memos again. I even contacted my local Congressman and asked him to intervene. My visa was constantly denied. It was my boyfriend's turn to look for other options. He went to the Italian Embassy to see whether he would be allowed to travel to Italy to get married there. Nothing worked.

Finally, in May 1986, I was granted permission to go there. My quick-tempered boss surprised me with the customary bridal shower. Between her and my co-workers, they arranged it at a nice restaurant. I got a lot of delightful gifts, among which something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue...

When I arrived at the airport in Romania, I was detained at customs. They said that my passport was not in order and the visa was not real. They said that according to their records, I was never to be allowed into Romania. I protested violently although I was sick with fatigue. After a few hours, they relented. I managed to pass through customs and meet my boyfriend.

Because I only had a few days of vacation, and we couldn't arrange a religious ceremony without sufficient advance notice, we only had a civil ceremony. I was quite elegant with a very affordable Montgomery Ward white dress and hat. I felt like a princess. Most of my friends, my new husband's friends, my former co-workers came to the ceremony.

The next day, we had a small gathering (some 25 people) at a restaurant. My grandfather had a grand time too, singing old Hungarian songs. After the ceremony, we left for a few days for a mini-honeymoon in the mountains. My stepsister with her boyfriend went with us because they lived in that area. We had a great time.

Our friends had given me some nice glassware, crystalware, some kitchen utensils, odds and ends. I had also bought some Romanian folk costumes that I intended to take back to the States. I had packed everything neatly. At the customs, when leaving Romania, a very tough female customs officer took everything out of my suitcases and told me that in order to take them with me I had to pay some stiff fees. In dollars. I got extremely upset. So, I left everything behind. My husband, who had to stay behind and wait his turn on the waiting list for a visa from the American Embassy, took everything home from the airport. It took him 17 months until he finally joined me in the United States. So, I returned home to Orange County, CA, married, but still alone. When he did join me, my mother moved to the couch in the living room to make room for my husband in the bed that the two of us had shared until then. We couldn't really afford to move into a 2-bedroom apartment.

Back to the Daily Grind

Shortly after my return to the States, my dog, Ciculetz, the one that we had brought from Romania died. He was very fat and had a lung congestion when I hosed him down to cool him off during a particularly hot summer. Although he was hospitalized and we paid quite a bit, he died. I was heartbroken. We took him to the vet and left him there to be incinerated. We also had acquired some cats. Originally it was just a cat that my mother had found as an abandoned kitty. This cat grew up into a wonderful tomcat. We didn't know about neutering so after mating season, he disappeared. After that we got a female cat, also not fixed. She had a litter and we managed to place all of the kitties, except the prettiest one. This kitty grew up and had her own litter. At one time, we had two litters going at the same time, with both mother and daughter having kitties. We had to find room for them in some drawers.

My car, the Pacer, died completely. This time the engine was totally gone and it would have cost more to rebuild it than what the car cost in the first place. Our sponsors always said that we had been stupid to buy that car. I needed a car badly because I couldn't go to work without one. My mother was working too at that time but she was on a bus line.

I was desperate for a "new" car. I walked to all the dealerships in my area but I couldn't find anything affordable. Plus I had no credit. Finally, some dealership I called offered to send someone to give me a ride so that I could look at their cars. I was enchanted by a brown Pontiac station wagon. It had cruise control, tilting wheel, A/C, etc. The interest rate they quoted me was close to 22%. I still decided to take it. So, I signed on the dotted line. Our sponsors were kind enough to co-sign.

My mother, however, was furious. She said that I had been duped. That I was stupid, naive. That I had fallen for the gadgets the car had. And on, and on and on. Indeed the car was dubious because the odometer was stuck and there was a pinging noise as well. My mother decided to get me out of the deal. She made a board and she wrote that the dealership has lemons. She picketed the dealer. In the meantime, I had a meeting with my former colleagues from the word processing schools. I was supposed to pick my mother up at a certain time, but because of a traffic jam, I was late. When I arrived at the dealership, she was not there. I called home and she wasn't there either. I went into the dealership and asked about my mother. They said they had her arrested. So, I went to the local police station. She was not there and they knew nothing about her. They advised me to call the county jail. I did. She wasn't there either. I was frantic. I called home again and there she was, mad as a hornet, hissing and cursing me that I had been late.

Finally, we went to Small Claims Court to obtain the deposit money back. We had left the car at the dealership although they said they wouldn't be responsible if it got stolen. The judge ruled in our favor. Still, the dealership did not return the money. We had to hire a Marshall to go there to get money from their register.

After that, my mother decided that I was too stupid to be left to my own devices and she went with me to buy another car. I was completely passive. I let her pick up the car she wanted. And she bought it in her name although she never learned to drive a car. I tried to teach her but she was too afraid and was pressing on the accelerator instead of the brake pedal. This car was an older model Dodge Colt. It was OK. Still, there were a few things wrong with it that needed to be fixed. The dealership promised to fix it and deliver it to our home.

I was at work when they delivered it. When I got home, I didn't see it in the parking lot. I went up and asked my mother and she said it was there. But it wasn't. What happened is that the dealers delivered it and left it parked in front of the big outdoor trashcan. Then they left without letting anyone know. My mother discovered it was there some time later. She went to our building manager to tell him whether he could move the car for her because she didn't drive. But the key couldn't be found. So my mother decided to wait for me to come home from work. In the meantime, our darling apartment manager had the car towed. When I asked him if he knew anything about our car, he told me. I felt I was on the verge on a heart attack. I was choking with fury. I remember calling him the worst names I could think off. He made a fist and raised it to hit me. I told him to go ahead because I would be happy to report him for assault too. I reported him to the police and I also requested that my car be released to me without cost. But they said they couldn't do anything and they charged me some $70 to release the car. It was very late at night when we went to get the car. I cried all the way. I felt like I could kill the building manager. For this, I took him to Small Claims Court and won a judgement against him. Our relationship with this man, already strained, did not improve. Still, we did not want to leave the building because it was cheap and comfortable. The rent had been increased a few times but it was still affordable. It was in the vein of my approach to jobs. Do not quit until you are pushed out.

After my return from Romania, my employers, the husband and wife team gave me more and more to do. They seemed impressed that I was going to graduate school at night. I had started my MBA courses. However, they seemed to do everything in their power to prevent me from attending the classes. They asked me to go work for one of the clinics that had evening hours and generally asked me to stay later and later, especially when they knew it was a class night. My relationship with them deteriorated very much. There were bad words that they used and this time they were starting to hurt. One morning, after a particularly nasty episode, I asked the lady to fire me if she had a problem because I wouldn't be pushed to quit. I knew that if I quit, I would have no chance to get unemployment. But, if I got fired I would get to explain why. So, the lady uttered the words: "You are fired." So I took all my things and left right then and there.

I already mentioned that I had been to Court a few times: with the Refugee Job Center a few times, with the dealership that sold me the Pontiac, with the apartment building manager. But that was not all. I mentioned that my mother and I liked to take day trips to distant malls. One day, in a mall parking lot, we had an incident with another car. I was driving slowly, looking for a way out of the parking lot. I saw an aisle that seemed to be leading outside. I made a right turn into that aisle. Suddenly, we heard a horrible screech of tires. Another car, coming at great speed had to brake violently in order to avoid hitting us. They hit the curb quite hard. Tire marks could be seen on the pavement. In the car, there were 4 young men. They were extremely furious and my mother and I were afraid of their reaction. We called the police. The policeman asked everybody what happened. He looked underneath the men's car because they said they thought something underneath was broken. Still, the car worked fine. The police could not determine any damage at the time. The hard moment came when the police asked us about the insurance. We didn't carry any insurance. We didn't have enough money for that.

The driver of the other car told me that I would have to suffer the consequences of the law. He made remarks about "stupid immigrants that don't carry insurance." He called me a few times on the phone and told me that a mechanic had assessed the damage to his car at $1400. I thought this was rigged. It couldn't have been. He asked me to pay him $800 and he would "forget about it". I refused. So, he took me to Small Claims Court. The judge was extremely unfavorably impressed that I didn't have insurance. He didn't even want to listen to my explanations that I wasn't at fault, that it was the great speed of the other vehicle that was to blame. I lost the case. I appealed and another judge thought the same. So, I ended having to pay him the full $1400. I thought it was extremely unfair but I couldn't do anything.

Meeting the Two Sisters

Shortly after we purchased our first car, the Pacer started acting up. One day, my mother and I went to the supermarket and when we were ready to leave, the car wouldn't start. I tried and tried, to no avail. While we were there, not knowing what to do, two elderly (American) women, sisters stopped to see what the matter was. We got to talk and they stayed with us while we went into a nearby store to purchase jumper cables. Then they gave us a jump with their car. After that, they followed us home to make sure we were OK.

After that, we stayed in touch. We invited them to our small apartment and they seemed fascinated by our story. Much to our surprise, when Christmas was coming near, they called and invited us to spend Christmas Eve with their large, extended family. There was nobody else there except their family and we were treated like honored members of their family. We felt like we were the guests of honor. Everybody fussed about us, everybody wanted to meet and talk with us. They were very curious about life in Romania and life of a new immigrant. The Christmas feast was impressive. Then it was time for the presents. We had bought just small, token presents for the two sisters. We, however, received lavish gifts from each and every one in their family. We didn't even know what to say, how to thank them. We seemed to be tongue-tied. In the end, they helped load up our car with all the presents.

After that, it became a yearly Christmas tradition. Every year we would be invited and every year, all seemed to be genuinely happy to see us and hear what had happened to us since the previous Christmas. And we always had stories. Lots of things were happening, generally not very happy ones. And they always had so many presents for us that it was embarrassing. Every year, while we lived in the area, even after my husband arrived, we would be invited to spend this most-family-oriented holiday with them. But, as our situation slowly improved, we did not seem as interesting as before, when we had one "horror" story after the next.

My Mother

As I mentioned, my mother was 53 when we arrived in the States. She had worked as a Pharmacist in Romania for 31 years. In Romania, she was extremely appreciated. The function of a pharmacist in Romania was much different. She was compounding recipes, most of the time using the mortar and pestle. A lot of medicines had to be made from scratch. She particularly like to make creams, lotions, ointments. She developed her own "recipes" and had quite a following for her creams. Too bad she was in a communist system. She could have made a fortune with her preparations. As such, she couldn't reap the benefits because she was an employee in a state pharmacy.

She was full of life, which she enjoyed to the max. She always liked to be involved in anything. She was very outgoing. She had hoped to be a pharmacist again. But soon, she realized that it would take a gigantic effort on her part. Her English was non-existent when we arrived but developed very nicely in a short period of time.

She had found out that she needed hundreds of hours of internship as one of the requirements to becoming a pharmacist again. She offered her services to lots of pharmacies. She even offered to do anything there for free. But she was refused, over and over again. At one point, through a social services program, she was offered a one-month internship in a pharmacy run by an Oriental couple. My mother was very active, tried to do as much as she could but they wouldn't teach or show her anything. One day, my mother started checking expiration dates and noticed that many pills were out of warranty. She had just started to toss them out. She was severely criticized for her initiative. The pharmacist told her that the pills were fine.

The pharmacist there made a lot of mistakes that could have been fatal. Quite a few people returned and said they had been given something else. The pharmacist had a knack of laughing it off. He laughed a lot. My mother wasn't laughing when she saw that. In the end, the pharmacist had to give my mother a written evaluation. Not surprisingly, it was bad. My mother was not given another chance, like I had been given with my medical assisting internship. Being older, speaking with a very noticeable accent did not work out for her.

My mother tried a lot of jobs. At some point, she even tried to work on the assembly line. The first day, she was tired but managed. The second day, however, they made the line move much faster and my mother couldn't cope. She got behind; things were falling off around her. Also, from too much repetitive bending, her back started to ache. The third day she did not go. They called her to work again, saying that they appreciated her effort but she had to lay in bed with horrible backaches.

Another of her jobs was at a Burger King. She was cooking the hamburgers in the back. She was very fast and they liked that. She used the bus to go to her job. When she came home she smelled of smoke. However, she didn't have enough hours. Some days they called her for just an hour or two. She asked for more hours but they didn't give her more.

She decided that she liked cooking so much (and not just hamburgers, but elaborate meals) that she could have worked as a professional cook. She applied for a cook position at a nursing home. She was hired. She had told them that she had been a cook in Romania. She did very well and she always managed to feed a lot of people on time. Still, she wondered why the menus involved high-salt, high-fat ingredients. She would have liked to change that but she didn't have the authority. Also, she had to clean up heavy pots and pans. That was the most terrible thing.

Later on, she found another cook position at a different nursing home. She didn't have to do so much cleaning here because there were other helpers too. But with more people working together, there came internal bickering and my mother was dismissed after a while.

There was one position that she had that I particularly disliked. After somebody had taken us to their church (I don't remember who), the congregation decided to lend us a hand. I had a job of my own but my mother didn't. There was somebody there who had an elderly mother who needed permanent help. My mother was hired as a live-in helper. My mother was supposed to help her bathe and dress, then cook and help her with her meal. The old lady didn't eat anything or so it seemed. My mother was cooking her nutritious meals but the lady turned up her nose. All she liked was to crunch ice cubes. And eat a few bites of junk food. I disliked this position because I had lost my only companion. I came home from work to an empty apartment. There was nobody to talk with. I kept pestering my mother to give it up but she wouldn't. Luckily, she was dismissed.

One of my mother's positions was seasonal. It was during Christmas at Knott's Berry Farm, an Amusement Park. She worked in one of the gift stores. My mother was a very bright person, very articulate, and her English was pretty good by then. Still, they didn't let her interact with customers. She was asked, day in day out, to just walk around and dust the many potted plants. My mother kept insisting that she could do other things as well but she didn't convince them. Luckily, it was just a temporary job.

Another position had her selling crystals in a fancy store near Knott's Berry Farm. She did well for a while. I remember her working over the holidays there and both of us being invited to their Christmas Party at a very fancy restaurant. Later on however, the relationships with co-workers soured and she was laid off.

At the time when my husband arrived from Romania, my mother was working at the take out deli operating in a fancy restaurant. She had a lot of interaction with customers there. She was selling a lot of pastries, fancy cakes, wedding cakes, and the like. Occasionally, management let them take home one of the unsold cakes. Customers had taken a liking to her. Most of the staff was pleasant. There was one woman however that was making life miserable for my mother. She was constantly criticizing my mother for everything. In front of co-workers and customers. It was very petty stuff but my mother was being driven insane by all that. We didn't know how severely she was affected.

One day, my husband jokingly told my mother that if that woman continued to bother her, my mother could just stick one of the cream cakes to the offender's face. And that's exactly what she did. The woman was extremely surprised. My mother was so stressed out that she had to undergo psychiatric evaluation. They found her very depressed. She was put on worker's compensation. The woman at the deli pressed charges at the police but when the police heard the story, they dismissed it. There was a hearing and my mother won. She got a $10,000 award.

When they sent her for psychiatric evaluation, they also gave her a physical exam. The exam was perfunctory. The doctor did not notice that she had a quite sizeable lump in her breast. She discovered it herself a few months later. When she went to have it checked, a young intern told my mother point blank that it was cancer. My mother was devastated. She said that she would rather die than have a disfiguring operation (mastectomy). Finally, we convinced her to go for it. At that time, I was working, and so was my husband. The day before the surgery, I called her from work to see what she was doing. She was crying in frenzy and said she was ready to kill herself. I dropped everything that I was doing, told my boss that I had to leave right away over my mother's threats to kill herself and "flew" home. I stayed with her the rest of the time until her surgery.

Her surgery went well but she later developed complications. She had agreed to have reconstructive surgery. They had created a flap, like a pocket where her breast had been. That had to be enlarged by being packed with sterile gauze every day. In the beginning, the hospital staff did it. After she was discharged, I drove her to the hospital every day to have this procedure done. Later on, they showed me how to do it myself. It was terrifying because she was screaming in pain every time. Later, the wound got infected and she had to be operated on again.

She didn't get any radiation or chemotherapy at that time. She lived, with us, for the rest of her life, another 9 years. For the first 5 years after surgery, she took a medicine, Tamoxifen. Then she abandoned it saying she was cured. She also stopped going for check-ups. The disease returned with a vengeance. She had aggressive radiation and chemotherapy sessions but it became clear that the disease was stronger. She died at home after horrible suffering. She refused any medication and was extremely hostile to everybody. She had lost her mind, was only screaming nasty things, particularly directed at me. She became half-paralyzed, had convulsions, seizures. It was an utterly horrible ending to a most vibrant woman. She couldn't accept death and resented that I would still go on. For her, I had been her sister, her friend, more than a daughter. We had always been together.

More of My Jobs

After I got fired (or urged my employers to fire me), I continued with my MBA studies while looking for other work. And I did find an Administrative Assistant's position for the headquarters of a head injury medical facility. My boss had a MBA degree himself and he was very proud of it. He enjoyed the role of my mentor. He seemed to like me very much when he hired me. He told me that my responsibilities would be very challenging and described what indeed seemed like a desirable job. But, just a few days into my new job, I was asked to be the company's phone operator, to route calls to everybody, to make copies and collate for everybody, to be in charge of maintaining the copy machine. Everybody was giving me orders. I had been hired to work strictly for the person who had interviewed me but now it appeared that the position had been grossly misrepresented. Moreover, I was taunted, made fun of. They made it seem that I did not comprehend how many copies should be made, etc. I complained to my boss and he didn't take any measures. He told me to keep my nose to the grind. Then I went to his boss. His boss told me that he had heard rumors that I was incompetent but that was still not the main reason why I would be fired. He uttered a most enlightening phrase: "We may tolerate incompetent people, but we cannot tolerate unhappy ones.". And I was duly fired.

After a few months, I found another job, working for a battery manufacturer. I had three bosses, the General Manager, the VP Engineering and the VP Finance and Administration. I had to answer phones for all three of them, and do all kinds of projects for them. The General Manager had a short temper and sometimes he would erupt. The VP of Finance and Administration, a Mexican, was by far, the most "humane" boss. He would also give me projects that were more at my level. The others seem to like keeping me at a low, clerical level.

There was a Romanian woman working at that company. She really knew how to sweet-talk everybody. She was a very "Smooth Operator". I never had this talent. It seemed that I was well liked by employers and coworkers when I started a new job but then, I would somehow manage to bring out the worst in people. I decided that I needed to socialize more with coworkers. That had seemed to be a major defect in my behavior. I always thought that by consciously applying myself to the job and doing it well and fast would suffice. Not true. You have to make others like you. So, I started inviting co-workers out to lunch. It was pleasant enough. Sometimes, I would go to the Romanian lady's home to eat for lunch. She lived nearby and her mother was cooking lunch. Once I invited her and her husband for dinner at our apartment. They seemed less than impressed by our small, sparsely furnished apartment.

One of the women I had socialized with most, turned out to be one of my worst enemies. She resented the fact that I had started to assume higher responsibilities. She tried to put me down by stating that I was "merely a secretary" while she was an Import/Export technician. We started to clash fiercely. Miraculously, or maybe not so miraculously, I was not dismissed. The company relocated some 100 miles to the south and all of us, except higher management were laid off.

My Husband's Arrival on the Scene

He came on the scene while I was working for this battery manufacturer and taking night classes for my MBA. He had always been very supportive. The day he arrived, I was extremely excited to see him again. We felt like 2 kids in Paradise. I took him to see one of the largest supermarkets in the area. I thought that every person who arrived from Romania ought to be taken to see a supermarket and a mall. I did that for a couple of other Romanians when they arrived. That was, for me, like a rite of passage.

Other stressors came into play with his arrival though. One of them was attributable to our Apartment Manager. While it was legal for 3 people to live in a 1-bedroom apartment, he felt that we should move into one of the higher cost 2-bedroom apartments. With my husband not working and me constantly under the threat of losing my job, we just couldn't afford it. My mother was working at the delicatessen (her last job) but wasn't very sure how long she would endure in that position.

Our building manager continued to be hostile. One evening he came to our apartment drunk and a scuffle seemed in the making. He was extremely threatening and my husband didn't know how to react. My husband had to put a heavy chair between the two of them and he seemed ready to smash it. Finally, the manager left without incident.

My mother, who hadn't discovered her cancer yet, was starting to be somewhat hostile toward my husband because she felt that he wasn't trying hard enough to find a job. He was staying at home studying for his exams to be able to become a physician again, like he had been in Romania. He applied for various positions but he was turned down. He took the exam but failed. He had passed the first component of the exam in his first attempt (while he was still in Romania.) The second component was much more difficult. At night, after my mother's proddings, my husband and my mother would go out in the neighborhood to raid the dumpsters of any cardboard and other recyclables. We were happy for any money we could get. The cardboard in the dumpsters was not just cardboard. It was money waiting to be picked.

My husband applied for a wide range of positions from junkyard attendant to physician assistant at prisons. He wasn't hired. When he arrived, I gave him the car that I had been driving (the Dodge Colt) and bought another used Dodge Colt for myself. Like me, my husband couldn't drive when he arrived. I gave him a few lessons and then he passed his written exam. He took the road test and like me, failed the first time. The second time around it went like a charm. He got his first job as a golf card attendant at a golf course. The job was easy. The other attendants were young boys who seemed amazed that my husband was there with them. My husband enjoyed working outside, in the nice California weather. He wore an orange uniform. The hours however were rather few. There, his boss always said: "Never appear idle. Always find something to do. Clean the toilets if you have nothing else to do. There is always something to do."

He later found a full-time position that was quite close to home. He used his bicycle to go to work. The hours were from 6:30 to 3:30. It was a methadone clinic and he had to draw blood from addicts. It is no wonder that this job wasn't in demand. Most of the co-workers were recovered alcohol and drug addicts. My husband was well liked. After a while the manager was dismissed and a new one, a colored man, was appointed. For some reason, he wasn't very friendly to my husband. During that time, my husband found out that he had passed his remaining exam and after we did a tremendous national search and my husband went to interviews, it was decided that he would start a residency program in Connecticut in June of 1990. When he announced the methadone clinic that he would leave at the end of May, he was fired. And they didn't pay him what was due him. So, taking my example, he took them to Small Claims Court. And he won. After that, he worked for a few months at the Census operation.

My Last Jobs on the East Coast

After my lay-off from the battery manufacturer, I was again looking for a job. It usually took 1-3 months to find another job. I found a job that was rather far from home. It was a manufacturer of power supplies. I was hired to be the President's Assistant. Everybody seemed to be quite impressed that I was almost done with my MBA. Nobody except the VP of Finance had one. The President of the company as well as 3/4 of the staff was Indian. Patel was a name heard very frequently in that company. A pizza deliveryman who said he was delivering one for a Patel was laughed off.

Although I was so close to getting an MBA, my responsibilities were still not up to the level they should have been. Also, what bothered me was that I had no office of my own. I was working in the big hallway, where all the corridors and the staircase met. I was in everybody's view. And my desk was so oriented that everybody passing would see my computer. My back had to be towards the passerbys. It was a very weak Feng Shui position. I felt very uncomfortable. One day I moved my desk around so that I could face the people coming and going. My boss had a fit of fury. He told me that I had no right to move it and that I had to work the way he wanted me or else. After that, we were not so friendly as before. He asked me to do projects in Marketing (which I liked), in Finance, even Purchasing. There some interesting projects but the majority were boring, low level jobs. After a year, I went to my boss and told him that given the fact that I was doing so much for so many departments, I thought I deserved a raise. He laughed me in the face. The other employees, including the Indians whom he was hiring off the airplane at the minimum wage, were leaving in an exodus. He was known as extremely tight with the purse strings. He never wanted to give any raises to anybody.

So, I started looking for other options. And the opportunity soon presented itself. It was a Marketing and Administrative Coordinator position for the headquarters of a retail chain of gas stations. My boss was a young Filipina. She had been the secretary before she managed to convince her boss, the owner of the company, to leave his wife and marry her. She was tough as nails. Her husband never came there. Probably he wasn't allowed. The majority of the staff was from Central and South American. We were all minorities with very few exceptions. My boss was very appreciative of me. She seemed quite intent in getting me to work there. She met all my conditions. I had a nice office all for myself. I had a lot of freedom and my initiatives were appreciated. Although involved in some marketing projects, my boss mostly liked my efforts in collections. There were lots of cases in which drivers would knock down or damage gas pumps or otherwise damage gas station property. These people had to be convinced to pay back. Most of the time they didn't, so after letters and phones, I had to take them to Small Claims. Every month there were at least 3-4 such cases. But I already had lots of experience with Small Claims Courts. Invariably I won the cases. And I managed to collect lots of money for her. To show me how pleased she was, my boss gave me a raise even before I thought about one. She also gave me liberal time off. The days when I filed a case at the court or the days when I went to court for a case were off (that is after I went to court, I was free.)

The position was rather stressful though because in addition to people, whom we had to take to court, there were numerous others that were suing us. A lot of people sued because they had slipped (or pretended to) near the pumps. Others sued because they said their car had been damaged due to inferior gas sold by the company. I was always on the phone with their numerous lawyers handling their business and private lawsuits. There were private investigators that I had to speak with. There were irate customers that wanted to talk to my boss. Gradually, she came to work less and less and when I needed to clear something with her, she was not there. I didn't know what to tell lawyers or customers. Some customers came there personally and they thought I was shielding my boss. They fumed and used foul language.

This company was hiring lots of illegal immigrants who couldn't read or write English. Or read/write period. These people had fake IDs and when I checked employee records I discovered a mess. The company had lots and lots of Mexican employees (hundreds) and I estimate that up to 50% were illegal. I discovered social security numbers shared by 2-3 individuals, or individuals with 2-3 SSN's. Or individuals with 2-3 names. Also, individuals who had been fired for gross negligence were re-hired at some other gas station.

While I was working there and making good money, my husband left for Connecticut to start his residency. He had tried to obtain a residency in California, with no success. So he left but we were still hoping that an opportunity to arise in California very soon after. When he left, we decided to have the Dodge I was driving shipped to him so that he could have a car there. Before the car arrived, he used the bus but that was very inconvenient. In the beginning he lived in a tiny room in a building owned by the Hartford hospital. I continued to work where I was and I used the older Dodge Colt, which by then looked terrible. My husband had been in a car accident. Nothing happened to him but the car was severely disfigured. We decided to use it like that because it was too old to be worth pouring money into.

The people I worked with knew that my husband had left for CT and were assuming that he had left me and taken the better car with him. I didn't want to give too many details. I knew by then that I would have to leave my job and relocate to CT too. I didn't want to tell them too soon. And a good idea it was. My husband was trying to find an apartment to rent where we would live, the two of us and my mother. One day I decided to let my boss know that I would leave in a couple of months. She reacted terribly. She took it as high treason. And she promptly fired me. That was before I was ready to leave. So, to appease her, I told her that I changed my mind and wouldn't leave too soon. I managed to convince her. Then, when the time came for me to leave, I only gave her 3-day notice.

One day, before I had mentioned that I would eventually leave, we had a visit by the Marshals. Everybody had to go outside and leave everything in. The whole office was searched. The owner and his wife were taken in for investigation. Because I had worked closely with her, I was called in for a lengthy deposition. The truth of the matter was that I didn't know much. I told the authorities what I did for her but I suppose that I didn't say anything they didn't know already.

Later on, when I was in Connecticut and pregnant with my first daughter, I was sent a subpoena to appear in court. I told them that I was unemployed, pregnant and I couldn't come unless they paid all my expenses. They said I didn't have to appear in court after all. I found out from friends in California that the case had been sensational, all over papers and that the owner and his wife, my former boss were in jail for a few years.

That concluded my employment days. In Connecticut I tried very hard to find jobs and I even went to interviews when I was pregnant. I really wanted to work. But nobody hired me. I was busy with my mother's assorted medical and dental visits to which I had to drive. Later on, I was taking my infant daughter with us when we went to the medical appointments.

My husband finished his residency and after a few interviews in states such as Texas, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, we settled in Massachusetts, where daughter number two came along. In fact, we moved into our new home a few weeks before she appeared. When we had moved from CT to MA into a rented house, I was pregnant. A few months after, we had to move out because the house we rented was sold. Another move had to take place and this time, I couldn't help much with loading and unloading because I was 9 month pregnant.

The following year I went to Romania to bring my in-laws to live with us. It was very difficult to bring them over because they were old and my mother was disabled and couldn't walk. My mother who had always lived with us was quite opposed to having my in-laws living with us as well. A very difficult 6 months followed. My mother was angry with me and we didn't talk for the whole time. My in-laws, especially my father-in-law, were not happy either. I retreated into a far off job doing collections. I did not resist there for more than 2 months. After 6 months my in-laws left.

In 1996 my father in law passed away and another 6 months later my mother in law came to live with us. My husband and I had both of our mothers living with us. Living with one's parents well into adulthood is the norm in Romania. And it is unconceivable in Romania to put one's parents into a nursing home. Actually, at least while I lived there, I had no knowledge of the existence of any nursing homes. It is still quite uncommon, if not unique to have both mothers living with a couple. My mother and mother-in-law did not make a happy "couple". In fact, there was bickering all the time. Then my mother's cancer re-appeared and although we did everything possible (daily radiation, chemo, again radiation, to which I was driving her, usually taking my girls along), she deteriorated more and more and after horrible suffering to herself and the family, she passed away in 1997. In 1998 a much-loved dog, Mookie, that we had taken from the Animal Shelter in Orange County, CA, died of heart failure. In 1999, my husband's mother passed away after a 10-day coma.

My two daughters are now without any grandparents. My husband and I do not have siblings. We live a comfortable life, but without too much social interaction. In addition to our two daughters, we have two dogs and two cats. Our girls are thoroughly integrated into the American society, speak only English with each other (although we are trying to speak Romanian to them). They like American food (they would take MacDonald's hamburgers any day instead of mom's home cooked meals).

We hope they will have a good life, will be good citizens, will marry and have children of their own one day. And we also hope they will not forget their heritage.