- 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)