Immigrants/expats to US, what is your funniest “Coming to America” story?

14 comments

1. Not me, but a good friend of mine: he kept hearing about “ice cream sandwiches” but never actually saw one in person. He decided to try one on his own by putting ice cream between two pieces of Wonder bread.

   He didn’t care for it.

2. Friend of mine came here from Nepal. They can’t have beef over there, plus he grew up dirt poor in a dirt poor country; his family pooled their money to send him to college here.

   He landed in Newark Airport, the first of his family to come to America, and the very first thing he did was go to McDonald’s and have a Big Mac.

3. I have a friend. He came from a refugee camp and is Hmong. They are THE most honest culture I’ve ever met. He is also a very hard worker and literally did TWO shifts at a factory for about 15 years. 7-3 then 3-11. I met him because he didn’t speak English but was trying to cash a check at a bank and didn’t understand he needed a account.

   When he first came here he was trying call in and say he was sick. He truly was because the dude would never lie about it. So he told me told me he was “fucking lazy”. Come to find out he was trying to tell his boss he was sick and his boss explained he was actually “fucking lazy”.

   I have maybe 100 stories from him and his extended family were done dirty when they came.

   One story — his cousin saved up money for a car. Went to the dealership – gave cash and they told him to pick it up tomorrow. He didn’t understand getting a receipt. He came back the next day and they said the guy didn’t work there anymore. 10K saved and gone.

4. A really good one for two Vietnamese friends of ours. They wanted to do an adventurous road trip down in Texas and accidentally crossed the border on a dirt road into Mexico. They did not have passports and crossed illegally though unknowingly.

   One guy was able to get his passport and got let back in. The other guy was unable to get his. He got deported back to Vietnam and his student visa canceled. So he had to fly back to Vietnam from Mexico. He was not allowed to fly through US airports. So he had to go the long way to Vietnam, bus to Mexico City, flight to Japan, then on to Hanoi. Then he had to completely redo his visa and finally come back to the US after getting a new passport in Vietnam.

5. When my mom came to the US from Pakistan, she saw a hockey stick in my dad’s closet. In Pakistan, hockey means field hockey.

   Mom: What’s that?
   Dad: Oh a coworker gave that to me. It’s a hockey stick
   Mom: That is not a hockey stick, I used to play hockey but I’ve never seen that before
   Dad: It’s an ice hockey stick
   Mom: Oh. What’s ice hockey?

6. Moved to the US (California) in 1985 from Africa, but was born in and spent the first six years of my childhood in the Philippines. So I only knew of one way to eat avocado: mashed up, with sugar, evaporated milk and maybe some ice. A yummy dessert. One day my family and I went to a lunch gathering, and there in the spread on the table was a big bowl of mashed up avocado. I was excited and put some big scoops on my plate, and dug in, putting a spoonful of avocado in my mouth.

   And that, kids, was how I first learned of the existence of guacamole.

   Another story is that back in Africa, if you wanted chicken for dinner, usually you would buy the live chicken, maybe let it hang out in your yard a bit before slaughtering it, then plucking the feathers and butchering it. Piece choice was of course limited—two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, two breasts, and so on.

   After we emigrated to the US my grandmother decided to cook us dinner, which entailed broiling a package of maybe eight drumsticks. When Grandma served us the food, my little sister wondered out loud, “How many chickens did you have to kill for that?”

7. As a Brit arriving in America, I made all the stupid mistakes, asking to bum a fag, never understanding why people wanted to smack someone’s Fanny, oh the list goes on

8. My spouse is an immigrant from Thailand and has witnessed a few coups. We were watching January 6 unfold on the news and the nonchalant way they asked ‘oh, is it a coup?’ was both hilarious and terrifying.

9. My married friends are refugees from Kosovo. They arrived in the US while the wife was pregnant. One of the first cities they stopped in when they arrived in Michigan was a city called Albion. When their daughter was born, they named her Albiona.

10. I don’t live in the US anymore but I did for a while during my childhood. Coming from Canada, a lot of the language and pronunciations we use are different. One of these is the letter ‘Z’. Americans say ‘zee’ and Canadians say ‘zed.’

    I remember learning basic algebra in a mathematics class, and there was a question about “solve for *z*” that I needed help with. I went up to my teacher’s desk for help and said ‘What formula should I use to solve for zed?’

    It took way longer than it should have for her to figure out what I meant!

11. Some family friends had immigrated from the Philippines to the UK to the US

    Bringing them to Sam’s Club was humourous. One of them asked for a slice of pizza and got one of those huge slices

    “Uh ma’am I only asked for one slice not the whole pizza”

    “Hon, that is one slice”

12. My dad came to the US 6 months before the rest of us to rent an apartment, buy a car, etc. When he picked us up at the airport when he arrived, he pulled me aside and confidently said, “They don’t pronounce it ‘tiger’ here… I learned it’s pronounced ‘tigger’ in America.” I believed him until I started school. Turns out he had overheard some winnie the pooh and thought that’s how Americans pronounced it

13. My parents had some friends who escaped from the former Czechoslovakia on foot with their two small children, ages 2 & 4.

    They told the 4-year-old when they get to America, he will get to have a bicycle.

    After a long arduous journey, they were here several months, but he was utterly unconvinced they had arrived in America.

    Nothing they did or said could persuade him they had made it to the US. Finally, he said “you said when we get to America, I will get a bicycle.”

    They went right out and bought him a little bike, and that did the trick.

14. NYC Department of Education gave me terrible options for high school. It was dumping ground for East New York failing students. We had new principle every year for all four years of my high school. It is closed and building divided into 4 or 5 smaller high schools.