Coming to America

Neil Diamond sang about it in 1980.
Eddie Murphy made a movie about it in 1988.
In 2010, Talgat Abuov is living it. He’s Coming to America.

I first met Talgat during a 1995 church trip to his native Kazakhstan. Myself and two comrades stayed in a flat with he and his mother in Aktau, a former Soviet industrial town on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Aktau in August was as hot as the engine of a Russian Mig. I haven’t sweated as much in the 15 years since that trip as I did that month in Kazakhstan. Talgat’s second-floor apartment was often without running water, let alone air conditioning. We “flushed” the toilet by pouring a bucket of water into the bowl. On days when the pipes were flowing like a rock hit by Moses, water couldn’t be wasted with showers. I remember Talgat’s mother helping me wash my hair by dowsing me with water from a sauce pan. She was a generous host and treated us like kings, making sure our tea cups were filled with chai and our plates full of arbuz, the Russian word for ‘watermelon’.

Thanks to the internet and Facebook, I reconnected with my Kazakh friend before he arrived in America. Since our first meeting, Talgat, now 34, completed his education and earned a MBA at the Kazakh American Free University. He also relocated to Ust-Kamenogorsk in 2000, a beautiful but factory-filled city in eastern Kazakhstan. There he became a skilled translator and started his own Russian-English translation business.

Talgat arrived in America in June, after winning a green card in a lottery. Here we try to win concert tickets in radio-station giveaways. In Kazakhstan, you get to win a chance at a better life.

Growing up behind the iron curtain, Talgat said his impressions of America were formed by the government and the media. In school he regularly took Political Information classes. The Soviet TV news programs and the newspaper Pravda (Truth) portrayed America as an “imperialistic aggressor who intervenes everywhere around the world.”

Western influences began pouring into Kazakhstan after the USSR crumbled in 1991. Talgat began to see America through the eyes of Hollywood. With Stalone and Schwarzenegger leading the way, he saw America as a “pretty cool country.”

Perhaps the best way to learn about a country is to get to know its people. During the 90s more and more Americans visited Aktau. Talgat began to see America not so much as the world’s big bully, or the land of Rocky and the Terminator, but as a “rich country, full of opportunities, with a different culture, better supplies, and promising salaries.”

Spiritually speaking, Aktau under the Soviet rule was as lively as Lenin’s tomb. He said that he never heard about God and that people lived without prayer and without the Bible. “We believed in Lenin, in Communism. They were our gods.” Sure the Russian Orthodox Church was present, as was Islam. But Talgat said nominalism was the liturgy of the day. He said the protestant church was hiding underground and that slanderous rumors about such religious sects kept people away.

In the book, “What’s so Great about America,” author Dinesh D’Sousa devotes a chapter to the magnetism of the American ideal. Obviously, money is a main factor. D’Sousa spends a few pages highlighting the differences between the USA and Third World nations. America is a country where even the “poor people are fat.” But a lot of countries have rich people, not just America, and in those other places the rich are treated like kings. The difference is that while the wealthy in other lands may enjoy the “pleasures of aristocracy,” in America, somebody like Bill Gates isn’t fundamentally any better than you or me. “America is the only country where we call the waiter, ‘Sir,’ as if he were a knight,” writes D’Sousa.

And yet, socio-economic status is not the only pillar of appeal for the American Ideal. Here in America we get to blindly map out our own lives. My college, career, and spouse were not hand-picked for me. In most of the world, this is not the case. We are “architects of our own destiny”. D’Sousa says that the founding fathers captured this notion perfectly with the phrase, “the pursuit of happiness.”

The author writes that the founders primarily succeeded in meeting their goals. Ever been to New York City? Ever seen tribal or religious battles there? But have you seen white and African-Americans lunching together? How ‘bout Jews and Palestinians, Hindus and Muslims, Serbs and Croats, Turks and Armenians, Irish Catholics and British Protestants all working, eating, dreaming, and playing chess in the park together. In New York, and America, every immigrant is competing to “get ahead,” to “hit it big,” to strike it rich. “And even as they compete, people recognize that somehow they are all in this together, in pursuit of some great, elusive American dream.”

“The founders invented a new regime in which citizens would enjoy a wide berth of freedom – economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech and religion – in order to shape their own lives and pursue happiness … the American founders created a rich, dynamic, and tolerant society that is now the hope of countless immigrants and a magnet for the world,” said D’Sousa.

Which brings us back to Talgat. He left his home and came here without a job or a car or even a driver’s license. He’s found his own church and is making his own friends. He loves peanut butter and fresh orange juice. He’s amazed at Downtown Disney, but even more by the produce aisle at Albertson’s. He’s pursuing happiness, reaching for the American dream. He’s attacking it like a child eating arbuz at a Fourth of July picnic. He said, “while I’m here, I’m going to suck out all the juices of America.”
Isn’t that just what the founders had in mind?