After Boston, A Look At The Dark Side Of Teen Immigration
MARTHA IRVINE MAY 6, 2013, 10:40 AM
CHICAGO (AP) — Anna Tabakh didn’t know a word of English. At age 5, a stranger in a strange land, she was en route with her parents from the Soviet Union to a new home in Kansas City, Mo. But she understood the intent when security guards at a New York City airport suspiciously eyed her stuffed animal, a rather rotund plush toy pig.
“They thought we were smuggling diamonds in my stuffed animal friend,” Tabakh, now 27, says, recalling how her mom, pleading in broken English, persuaded the guards not to tear apart the toy to search its contents.
Tabakh still has the pig in her New York apartment, “to remind me how far I’ve come since those first days.” The beginning was traumatic, she says, but the transition to American life was relatively smooth — a result that some social scientists would say was partly due to her age.
There is, in fact, a term researchers use to describe young people who, like Tabakh, were born in other countries but came to the U.S. between the ages of 5 and 12 and have a foot in two worlds. They call them “Generation 1.5.”
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