A Little Bulgarian Kid At A Waffle House In Rural Georgia

A true story, properly embellished. 

I dedicate this story to my friend Marlinee Iverson.

When my husband and I first moved to Memphis five years ago, we would always get introduced this way: Kyle is a professor at Rhodes College and his wife Petya here is from Bulgaria. Every. Single. Time. I did not like that. I remember thinking… oh, please, I am a strong, outspoken woman. I am educated, I have opinions, I have excellent taste. Surely, there is SOMETHING else you can say about me. But, no, Kyle works at Rhodes, Petya is from Bulgaria. Ugh.

Over time, however, I have stopped being bothered. I still give my friends a hard time about it but I really don’t mind. Because, I realized, this introduction is not only helpful, it’s also necessary!

Let’s be honest, most people in Memphis don’t know other people from Bulgaria and they don’t know much about Bulgaria either. So, it’s always worth clarifying. The conversation always starts innocently enough… Oh, Bulgaria, where exactly is that?… (Like they know generally where it is, just not the specific location)… and then, usually, goes some place weird really fast. For example, I keep finding myself in endless conversations about utensils. I was asked by this girl Zoe if we had forks in Bulgaria. Forks?! I don’t even know how that even came up. I was too shocked to even be offended but I recovered quickly and told her, No, we don’t. Zoe was not surprised. I thought so, she said. But what DO you use? I told her we used sporks. Sporks?! So, what, you saw a fork for the first time here in the States? No, Zoe, I tell her. We watch a lot of American movies in Bulgaria, I’d seen a fork many times before. I just never USED one. In fact, that’s the reason I wanted to come to the States.

Another time, I was actually telling this exact same story to a guy friend of ours, a philosophy PhD student, a pretty smart guy, and he was like… wait, wait… is that true?! What, what?! Do you really not have forks in Bulgaria? Oh my god, he thought I was serious!!! No, I told him. We have them now. We started recycling our tanks after the Cold War was over. We used the recycled metal to begin making forks. Plus, what do you think happened to the Iron Curtain?!

But please don’t let these stories make you think that I am looking down on people. Or that I come from some especially cultured place. My family back home think they know everything about America but the choices that actual Americans make, make very little sense to them. My grandparents, for example, were devastated when I announced I was getting married to Kyle. Not that they didn’t like him, they didn’t know him. They just couldn not understand why I couldn’t marry a nice Bulgarian boy instead. Their worry turned into near panic when they heard that he was a vegetarian.

What do you mean, he doesn’t eat meat, my grandma wanted to know
He doesn’t, Grandma. He just doesn’t.
But what does he eat?
He eats everything BUT meat.
Oh. Never meat?
No, never.
Not even for dinner?
Not even for dinner.
Oh, god. Does his mother know?!

Another reason why I’ve stopped minding being introduced as Bulgarian is that when people introduce me that way, I’ve chosen to take that to mean
this is a person who made an unconventional choice. She moved from Bulgaria (wherever THAT is)…to Tennessee (and we know what THAT’s like). That’s sweet, right? And, honestly, I agree. It WAS a pretty unconventional choice. As you can probably imagine, most Bulgarian kids don’t grow up dreaming of moving to Tennessee when they grow up.

I came to the States when I was 18 to go to a small liberal arts college in Tennessee called Sewanee: The University of the South.

When I arrived at the Atlanta airport, I was greeted by two Sewanee kids, who very thoughtfully helped me with my bags and asked if I was hungry. Which, of course, I was… so they took me to the Waffle House. Now, let me bring this in focus for you, just a little bit. Here I was, 18 year old, NEVER left Bulgaria before. Literally, fresh off the plane, in AMERICA! Ready to begin building my American Dream! And before I can figure out what’s going on, I am sitting in a Waffle House, somewhere in the middle of Georgia and a 60 year old waitress with hair up-to-here is taking my order. I know she must be speaking English but her Southern accent is so strong that I really have no clue what she is saying. And just asI am finally starting to relax because I have managed to order my tater tots, I notice the lyrics of the song that’s playing on the radio:

She thinks my tractor’s sexy
It really turns her on
She’s always starin’ at me
While I’m chuggin’ along…

Do you know the song? It’s by Kenny Chesney. And, I swear to god, I felt my spirit lift up above me, looked at me from behind my shoulder and asked: Girl, what did you get yourself into?!

I’m not going to lie. Things were hard for me at first because of my English. I’d studied English all throughout high school so that was a surprise to me. I could read and write. I was absolutely fine in class. I wasn’t shy so I didn’t even mind participating. But outside of class, I was a mute. I just didn’t know why people were talking about the things they were talking about and, most importantly, I didn’t know when to laugh. It was like people were speaking in code. I could understand the words they were saying, I just didn’t know what they meant and I most definitely didn’t know why they mattered. It was awful, I just couldn’t be myself. This guy I knew told me at a party, Oh Petya, I love you! You are nothing like American women… with all their issues. I didn’t know how to respond to him, so I nodded and left but what I thought on the inside was, Fuck you, asshole. You like me because I never speak.

Over the years and the longer I live away from Bulgaria, however, the more I enjoy being introduced as someone from Bulgaria because it allows me to tell stories about my family and friends back home. For example, I get to tell you about that one Christmas when my family was gathered to slaughter a pig, a Christmas tradition in much of Eastern Europe, but the sweet men of our house, being the manly men that they are, felt bad for it and decided to kill it more humanely. They would put it to sleep first and then they would take a knife to its neck. It was decided! So, my uncle brought a small bottle of pepper spray and maced the pig. Turns out, pepper spray doesn’t work the same way on pigs the way it does on humans. Not only did the pig not fall asleep, it raved and ran through my grandparents’ backyard for hours, the entire family watching it from the kitchen window… wondering when would be the right time to call in some help.

I enjoy being introduced as someone from Bulgaria because I get to tell you that in Bulgarian we have a word for private space but not a word for privacy. In fact, I am not sure if we understand the concept of privacy. If you are not sure what that means, ask my husband. The summer he moved to Bulgaria, we talked about going to this one place in the mountains called the Seven Rila Lakes. It’s an area that is kind of hard to reach, way up in the South East Balkans that is occupied by these seven beautiful alpine lakes. You get to hike up and either camp out or spend the night in this really rustic lodge. It’s kind of primitive but incredibly beautiful and I really wanted him to see it. So we planned how to travel there and what to pack and the day before we were getting ready to leave, I remembered to mention that some friends from work would be joining us too. Kyle was surprised, to say the least, it had not occurred to him at all that we wouldn’t be going alone. The morning of the trip, we picked up our backpacks and went to the train station ready to begin our journey where, to Kyle’s shock and dismay, we were greeted by about 40 of my very enthusiastic co-workers. PLUS my parents. I had failed to mention that in Bulgaria we always vacation with a group.

***

The reason I wanted to tell you these stories is to remind you but also to remind myself that sometimes, the most obvious, most boring parts of ourselves… the parts we just own, not the ones we chose, are the ones that challenge us in the most amazing, wonderful, hilarious and weird sorts of ways. And, I am so thrilled and excited to be a part of this performance* and hear the stories of so many amazing women, because, let’s be honest, being a woman in Memphis is not much unlike being a little Bulgarian kid at a Waffle House in the middle of rural Georgia. It’s all sort of like… I got this, this is no big deal… until at some point you simply must confess that you have no idea what you have gotten yourself into.

* I performed a shorter version of this story at The Memphis Monologues, in support of Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region.