Nine years ago we arrived to America

My Grammarly plugin is trying to change “arrived to” to “arrived in” but I disagree. Or I just don’t like it.

So we arrived to America.

It was a huge life event. I guess most acts of emigration and immigration are big life events but there was an extra layer of “big” in the story of my life. I’m Russian but I’m also a child of Western society and culture, belonging to the first generation of young Russians in the post-Soviet era who got their education outside of Russia and worked outside of Russia.

A decade ago I had the biggest standoff I’ve ever had with my wife. She demanded we leave Russia.

On the other hand, our move to America wasn’t THAT huge exactly because I had already experienced the West, intimately. I lived in Oklahoma as a teenager, I spent many years in England, and I then did my MBA at Harvard.

America was a familiar soil and my feelings towards it were overwhelmingly warm, notwithstanding my broken dreams about being part of modern Russia.

We never went back to Russia.

Here’s the stamp in my now defunct and useless Russian passport.