From Thursday - At LAX returning rental car

It has been a cool adventure.  Beautiful sunny day, 64 degrees. I dropped a car (and company) that would not allow me to extend my rental for the next five months. Then I took their shuttle to LAX and got off the first place they stopped because it didn't matter what airline I was near, I was just going downstairs to get the new rental car company’s shuttle.

Well it looked so different from the Southwest terminal! I was in the international area. Standing waiting for the shuttle outside I saw a lot of little Asian pilots and tiny "stewardesses" in their modern slim skirts with hair in chopsticks. It felt like I was suddenly in a foreign country, with signs for Malaysia, Philippines, Thai, Swiss, etc airlines. There were very few Caucasian faces and very little English spoken. One man was carrying a Chinese(?) department store bag with a beautiful Asian woman on it in an elegant modern black dress. But she looked uncannily American, with a high bridge to her nose and wide eyes and her perfect heart-shaped face. So beautiful! I had read that plastic surgery for those two things, in China, has become very common, to heighten the nose bridge and open those inner eye "pockets" (not sure that's what they are really called). So interesting.

I overhear folks with lots of heavy accents on lunch break at work, talking about their long flights home, their investment adventures on the stock market, what's up, what's down. They seem so worldly and able, working here, knowing a second language well enough to do this very complicated technical work.  Pretty impressive.

I also asked a cab driver one evening about his accent and he said that he is Armenian. I had heard the same accent at work a lot and wondered. He asked a lot of questions about my ancestry. It seemed to matter to him. When I said that the greatest part of my lineage is Hungarian, my paternal grandmother’s father having come over to escape the Boer wars, he told me about Armenian history. He said that scads of Armenians had escaped a civil war and come to the Los Angeles area, that there is a large community of Armenians here. But there are two groups, one of which had done a huge genocide against the other.  This was before the Jewish genocide that we all think of, and it killed many more people, but most Americans aren’t aware of it the way that we are of the Jewish holocaust.  So there is still resentment in America between these two groups of Armenians.  He knew by my co-worker’s first name that he was one of the “other” ones.

I know that my Dad and lots of other people right now are concerned about so many immigrants coming into America, but I can’t seem to see it as a problem without feeling hypocritical.  Since Grandpa Kosh immigrated, that makes me only a third  generation American on that side of my lineage.  How could I say that others shouldn’t be allowed to come here and seek a better life for their families like he did?