Newcomers

This project started with a book, "Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing" edited by Ilan Stavans. I thought: could I do something like this in Oregon -- collect writing about the immigrant experience? After talking with my editor, I came to the conclusion that moving and being an "immigrant" (a newcomer) is a universal experience, one known to both immigrants and Americans who move from state to state. Learning a new language and culture adds a completely different level to a new arrival. Still, similarities abound. I solicited writing from people who moved to Oregon in 2009 -- whether from India or from Kentucky, from Washington or Mexico. They wrote about what moving and coming to a new place meant to them. And I wrote about my own experience...

New to Oregon: The chase of a fresh start rewards a refugee with a richer life
http://www.oregonlive.com/O/index.ssf/2009/12/new_to_oregon_the_chase_of_a_f.html
By Gosia Wozniacka, The Oregonian
December 26, 2009

The first time my family moved, it was supposed to be just a vacation. Communist Poland lay behind the Iron Curtain then, in 1988, and getting passports for a family of four verged on a miracle. Paris seemed the most exciting summer break destination.

After three weeks of sightseeing, instead of folding up the tent we had pitched in a Parisian campsite and returning to our Polish concrete-block high-rise building, my parents asked France for political asylum.

I was 11 years old. Learning a new language, living in a refugee center and writing letters to friends left behind was not how I had imagined adolescence. A year and a half later, we sat on an airplane bound for New York City after being granted political refugee status in the United States.

America offered freedom and better jobs for my parents, a psychologist and sociologist. But this second relocation proved even more painful than the first. Language woes, cultural isolation and the scramble to survive marked our initial years in a Connecticut suburb.

What we wanted most was to go back home: to Poland.

Today, many other moves later, I wonder what propelled us, what made us persevere -- and what launches anyone to relocate across international borders or over state lines, and resettle in a new place.

Between July 2008 and July 2009, 16,130 people moved to Oregon. They came from Africa and from Atlanta, from Los Angeles and from Russia, and Mexico. What did they leave behind, and why did they come to our state? What did moving teach them? What did they gain?

People have moved for millennia -- of free will or pushed out by circumstances, legally or clandestinely, alone or streaming en masse -- in search of work, a like-minded community or sanctuary. They crossed plains and deserts, flew over oceans or rode for days in cattle wagons like my grandmother, forcibly repatriated across Eastern Europe after World War II.

The act of moving has always meant the chase of a fresh start, a more generous fate. That's what my family sought: a place where Communist Party membership didn't determine comforts or careers, where neighbors didn't spy on neighbors, where oranges were not just a rare gift under the Christmas tree.

It wasn't easy to leave Poland. Still, while others stayed on, my parents chose to move. They gambled everything they'd achieved -- family, friends, good jobs, a home -- imagining that a new place would bring at least a kinder reality. They couldn't predict the hardships.

Relocation is a feat of letting go. You disconnect from familiar people and places, ones you loved without knowing it. You shed habits and furniture, the accumulation of a life. Moving is, in a sense, the ultimate act of destruction.

But uprooting can also be an awakening. It can give you a new perspective on where you came from and where you are now. You can discover strengths and viewpoints you didn't know you had.

My parents eventually found jobs in their professions, while my brother and I attended universities. We bought a house, learned English and became U.S. citizens. When I tried to decide whether to go to graduate school on the East Coast -- close to family and friends -- or the West Coast, an American friend wrote me: "Go West, young woman!"

An early version of this 1851 advice of Indiana journalist John Soule had served as the mantra for 19th-century American migration. U.S. citizens and immigrants moved across the country, to the Pacific Ocean, including to Oregon. They have not stopped since.

This vast country lends itself to epic journeys. That's what Americans do -- that's how we all became Americans.

So back in 2001, I bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco. In a few years, I relocated, via a brief detour in Texas, to Oregon. Though I miss my family and friends, my life is larger, richer still by the people and landscapes I found.

But there's a burden left, a nagging grief: a grandmother who lives alone in Poland, a brother and parents whose lives are distant. Moving is, sometimes, a search for absolution -- a hope that what we've found vindicates all that we've left behind.

-- Gosia Wozniacka