- A lot of you may not know this, but I actually was born in Russia. (speaks in a foreign language) - Don't nobody understand
the words that are coming outta your mouth, man. - Bee-a-whoop, I'm a young
five-year-old boy in Russia, and my parents tell me
that in a couple weeks, we're about to move to the United States. I can't even comprehend what that means. When you're five, six, your
world is, like, this big. My world was preschool, home,
maybe the ice cream store. My parents tell me
we're moving to America, gave me no information
about why we're doing it, how long we're doing it for. They told me I'm not
allowed to tell anybody, because it was a secret. I had no idea why this was. I thought they were playing
a game with me, actually. We had only 24 hours of
notice to our closest, closest friends to say that
we were, in fact, leaving. Later on, I've come to
realize that we came to the United States on
a refugee status visa, I guess, it would say. That was our governmental status. We came here to have a
better life for our family, for my sister, et cetera. I vividly remember the flight. Because it was my first
time being on an airplane, I was extremely excited,
also didn't speak English. My parents didn't speak
English, but my sister did. So she was ordering drinks for everybody, even though all she was
saying was Coke, Pepsi. I was like, okay, that's not really, you don't get credit for
knowing how to say brand names, and I remember the flight
attendant was so kind to me that she gave me like this
little Delta pin that I was like, oh my God, in America,
they give pins for free. I don't have to pay you for this. I didn't know if it was a trick. As a kid, you're like,
new land, new people, don't know what's going on. I'm not gonna trust anybody, but once we landed, I
remember my uncle coming to the airport. He gave me a gift of,
like, hot wheels cars, and in Russia, we didn't have anything. I'm talking, like, I might
have one color picture of me growing up. There was no fancy technology. There was no toys. A good birthday present was markers, and little did I know, markers
dry out if you leave them in direct sunlight. I left it inside of a car, and I literally was crying
because I had no markers, and that was my birthday present, and our cars, by the way,
were terrible in Russia. There was a company called Zhiguli. It was like, ugh. If you think whatever
car you have now is bad, take a sledge hammer to
the rims, to the windows, okay, maybe not that bad,
but abuse it for 20 years, and that's our brand
new version of our car, and then we took the car
ride over to Brooklyn where we were gonna live, and
it was during Christmas time. It was early December that we came. So there was lights everywhere, and I was like, oh my God, there's lights. There's holiday spirit. It's so beautiful. Looking back at it now, it
was a random neighborhood in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn
that I'm looking at now, and I'm like, okay, it just looks fine. Our apartment was only a one
bedroom apartment for my dad, my mom, my sister, and me. Our parents' bedroom was the living room, the bedroom was cut in
half for me and my sister, and the kitchen served as
like the little kitchen table that we ate at with four
people, as well as a computer, because we needed a computer
for my mom to be able to do some work and for my
dad to go to medical school for the second time in
his life, in his forties, in a new language. So this apartment was a disaster. The only thing that was
great about it, actually, was that it had an
enormously long hallway. Me and my dad ended up
getting a plastic ball and playing soccer in that
hallway kicking the ball back and forth to see who could score, and the more bounces you
got across the walls, the easier it was to score, because it was hard to
judge where it was gonna go. That was good times. By the way, this housing is like welfare housing, essentially. It was rent-controlled. I'm pretty sure it was $400 a
month when we first moved in, maybe even $300 a month,
cockroaches galore, mice galore. I was definitely afraid of these mice, because my mom was afraid. So I emulated her fear. You could hear the mice running around at night when we would watch television. So I came to the states, and I didn't go to school right away. We were planning on sending me to school, I think, right after the new year. So I came in the middle of first grade. Going into school when you
don't speak the language, teacher's asking you
questions right away, right? They want to get to know you. She asks me a question. I say one of the three words I know. I said, "Yes." She bought it. She comes in, asks me another question. I say the second word that I know, "No." She buys it. She asks me another follow-up question. I say, "Maybe." Now she realizes this dude
does not speak English. I need to find a translator. Luckily there was two
girls in my class, twins, Rita and Rosa, who spoke
Russian and English, and they translated. They understood where
I could hang my jacket. I was obviously very stressed out coming to a new school, meeting new people. I cried the first day and the second day and the third day. When our parents came to
pick us up, my mom came. The teacher grabbed my
mom and was telling her, your son is crying a lot. I wanna make sure he's
okay, this and that. My mom has no idea what she's saying, because my mom doesn't
speak any English yet. Cry, sad, they're using
words, sign language, anything they can essentially
show to each other that I'm upset, and they
want me to feel better. Blah, blah, blah, we figure it out. The one thing I didn't struggle with, even in first grade when I
first came over, was math. Because my mom was a math teacher, and in Russia, they're like,
you better know everything there is to know about
math as a six-year-old, I had the knowledge of
a third grader of math. So math was super easy,
and I could, sort of, coast on the math component
and try really hard on the English and everything
else that I was terrible at, and I remember going to ESL and then my grandparents
picking me up from school and then telling my grandma like, "I learned a new word today." She's like, "What'd you learn?" I was like, "Hot air balloon." She's like, "What is that?" I'm like, "Oh, it's a thing
that flies in the air." My grandpa actually, and my
grandma, religiously picked me up from school from grades one to three. After that, they said
you're old enough to cut it in New York City. Good luck as a nine-year-old, and we started walking
home as a nine-year-old. Luckily I lived one to two
blocks away from school. So it was a very short route for me. I had some close friends growing up, some were Russian, some were not. They all lived in the same vicinity, usually in the same building. We played handball a lot. That was the number one sport go to, and then as I started
becoming more interested in American culture, I
got really into basketball and watching like Michael
Jordan and the Bulls play. So I would watch it with my dad, and then my dad took me and got me this, it was like a children's ball, but it had the Bulls logo on it. I treasured it. It was trash, though,
like a piece of rubber. It'd bounce too much, and when
you threw it against the rim, it bounce like 50 yards back, but then when I went to go
play with the regular kids who've been playing
basketball their whole lives and they played with the real
basketball, I was terrible, because I was getting used to
playing with a five inch ball and now I'm playing with a legit-size 29 and a half inch ball. So that was, sort of, my
childhood initially coming over as an immigrant. A lot of kids teased you. That was, kind of, the norm when you came from another country. I don't know why it
never made me that upset. I think it was because our class
was so diverse and so mixed that it seemed like everyone
was getting made fun of for something. That just happened to be my thing. Something that also helped, I started doing Taekwondo
when I was younger. My parents saved up enough money to literally pay the tuition
of the Taekwondo school. That was the max that they could do. They were like, "Okay, you
have one after-school activity. "It's Taekwondo. "We want you to do that. "We want you to be in good shape." (people screaming comically) An activity that I had with my dad to do a little father-son
bonding when he had time at night was to go onto the
street called 86th street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn that
had a lot of stores on it and plan out some of the
stuff we hoped to buy when we had some money. One of the stores that we used to go to was called Nobody Beats the Wiz. (upbeat rap music) ♪ Nobody beats the wiz ♪ - and it was an electronics
store that sold boom boxes, televisions, they had
open box sales, whatever. It was basically like
the Best Buy of today, but it wasn't as nice. We were never able to
afford anything there, except once, we did buy
an open-box boom box, meaning someone bought it, returned it, and it was still open, so we took it, and it was like 200 bucks, and it was the biggest
purchase we ever had. Other stores on that journey
that we used to go to that I loved, 99 Cent
Store, our best friend. I'm talking we bought everything
at the 99 Cents Store. Oh, pizza was less than a dollar a slice and Sal's Pizzeria in
Brooklyn was the top for me. Brooklyn pizza, nothing tops it. Sorry, Chicago, wherever else people think that there's good pizza. The cheap 75 cents slice that looks like it has oil artificially splurged all over it, delicious. Oh, the number one shoe store
that I had all my shoes from, Payless, boom. Love Payless. If it wasn't for Payless, I
would never have new shoes. As you could tell, it was a lot of stores where it was humbling, but it's only humbling looking back now, because back then, I thought
Payless Shoes was a dope brand. There's so many more options
than what we had in Russia. So what you have here
and you may think is bad could be way better than what
we have in other countries, and I think that's sometimes
lost in the messaging of my social media content. People think like, he's successful. That means he was always successful, or he probably comes
from a wealthy family. That's furthest from the truth. I had a great family,
very supportive family who worked very hard,
educated in two countries. There was a lot of work put into that. There was a lot of times
where we were on the bottom, bottom, bottom, and in order
to get to where we are today, we had to put in a lot of work, and I want you to not lose sight of that, because I think the beauty
of where we live here in the United States is that opportunity is available for you. You have to be smart. You have to make some wise
choices, and you may mess up, and you may have setbacks,
but if you keep working at it, I really think America's the best place for increased opportunities. I mentioned my sister earlier. Well, here's a full video
with me and my sister to see how well she knows me. Watch it. It's a blast. She basically roasts me the whole time. As always, stay happy and healthy. I'll see you on this video, though. (speaks in a foreign language)
nice
If/ when doing another review, please cover 2 books written by an author named Steve rinella the books are called close calls: campfire stories they are amazing stories but a warning they are very realistic and they can worry you, I suggest and recommend you get it on audible and listen to it, it would mean the world to me if you covered them on your channel.