Brandon Stanton's Blog, page 206

“I’m a union ironworker. I built New York...

“I’m a union ironworker. I built New York City.”
“And I built him. He had chicken legs when I met him. Look at him now.”

“I took care of my mother for seven years when she got...

“I took care of my mother for seven years when she got Alzheimer’s. In a way, the experience boosted my self-esteem because now I know how much I can offer to someone I love. I’m a ‘ride or die’ chick.”

“We let our four-year-old name the dog. So this is...

“We let our four-year-old name the dog. So this is Broccoli.”

“I came from Malaysia as part of a work-study program where I...

“I came from Malaysia as part of a work-study program where I worked as an au pair. The company assigns you to an American family, and you take care of the children and do ‘light housework’ in exchange for a place to live and $195 per week. My first year was with a family in Connecticut. They were very nice to me. But when they moved away I was assigned to a family outside of Boston. It was a very difficult year for me. I had no car, no friends, and no activities. I was supposed to have free time while the kids were at school, but the mother would always cut it short so I could do laundry or start cooking meals. She criticized everything I did. One time she asked me to wash winter coats during my free time, and then got mad when I didn’t do it right away—even though it was during the summer. She treated me like an employee, but then gave me extra chores because I was ‘part of the family.’ I even had to take care of the pets. I felt trapped because the company made it extremely difficult to get reassigned. My only other choice was to go back home. But I was lucky, I guess. A lot of my friends in the program had it worse.”

“I thought I’d be a much more secure person at this stage in...

“I thought I’d be a much more secure person at this stage in my life. I thought that if I played by the rules, I’d learn to be happy and becoming an adult would somehow reconcile all my issues. I’m realizing now that nobody grows up. Everyone just grows old.”

“He just got grumpy at Macy’s so we had to...

“He just got grumpy at Macy’s so we had to leave.”
“There’s way too many types of pajamas.”

Many of you have been asking these last few days if I could...

Many of you have been asking these last few days if I could upload all the refugee stories to a single place.

I’ve done that here: http://bit.ly/1MCBR8k

(3/3) “I did all I could to find out information about my...

(3/3) “I did all I could to find out information about my father, but it seemed that everyone who knew him had been killed. I traveled to Poland and searched records. We hired a researcher. We took out an ad in the paper, asking if anyone had information about Klaudiusz Jamiolkowski or Stanislaw Jamiolwski. But we heard nothing. The closest we came was discovering a family in my father’s village that shared his family crest. Their bloodlines crossed over one hundred years ago, but they had no direct knowledge of my father. I ended up becoming great friends with this family. Then one day, just a few years ago, I got a phone call from that family: ‘Tadzio!’ they told me. ‘The commander of the Polish Home Army just gave an oral history. And he mentioned your father by name!’ I went to Poland and found this commander. He was over ninety years old. He told me that he remembered my father well, because he’d lied about his age to become the youngest soldier in the Polish Home Army. And he confirmed every one of the stories that my father had told me.”

(2/3) “My father died when I was six. His entire family was...

(2/3) “My father died when I was six. His entire family was killed during the war, so everything I know about him came from his stories. We know that he was seven when the Nazis invaded Poland. He told us that my grandmother had been stabbed and pushed out a window. He said that he became a child sniper and he’d been shot many times. He was missing part of his ear. He told a story about how he was alone in a house that was being attacked. And while he waited for backup, he fired one shot from every window to convince the Germans that the house was full of soldiers. He said he smuggled guns through Nazi checkpoints by hiding them in his school bag. He said he ran messages through the sewer system during the Warsaw Uprising. All of this supposedly happened before the age of twelve. And all of this was told to us during a time when his memory was being affected by the brain tumor. So I grew up never being sure what exactly was true.”

(1/3) “I was volunteering for Cesar Chavez to organize a grape...

(1/3) “I was volunteering for Cesar Chavez to organize a grape boycott in Canada when I met my husband. We were meeting at a church when I saw an older man walking toward me. He was so dramatic. He had the most beautiful white hair. He looked like a Polish cavalry officer. Three weeks later I was pregnant. I fell madly in love with him but almost immediately he started dying. I knew that he’d lived through the war. But he never really talked about it. But his brain tumor was growing in the part of his brain that affects memory. And toward the end, he could no longer tell the difference between past and present. So he began to tell these wild stories.”