Giorgi Managadze

Professor Colombo Russell

ENG 110 – Freshman Composition

September 17, 2025

Into the Other World

It was a warm and breezy august evening in Queens, where our Boeing plane landed in JFK airport. Within the plane, different people from all over the Eastern world got ready to book it to the exit with their baggage in hand. They might have all seemed different from one another, but every one of them had the same look on their faces.

Their faces, no matter if they were young or old, were showing hints of decrepitness from the almost 20 hour plane ride, their blood shot eyes all fixed on the exit from the worn down steel coffin, doddering their way off it, with some firemans carrying the bulk of their luggage with great spirit. We were all tired, covered with the dust and debris from another world, stepping off into what seemed to be an endlessly long hallway filled with promotional posters of all different sizes. There was some tension in the air, a feeling that we were not at the end of our journey, that there was still a chance that a last-second decision had decided that we were no longer equal enough to be allowed on the land of the free. We had all legally acquired the necessary documents for the trip, we weren’t coming with malicious intent and we just wished to get this over with so we could start a new chapter in our lives. But as we made our way down that newly cleaned hallway, we didn’t have enough time nor the mental willingness to invent scenarios within our heads, we were all too tired to not go forward and look at all the signs and arrows pointing us all around, including myself. Although my English was more refined in contrast to those aboard the same plane as me, I was still cautious and nervous like I had never been before. Growing up, my parents and relatives placed heavy emphasis on learning a foreign language extensively so that I could wield it as a native would. First it was with Russian, however, once I caught a glimpse of what American cartoons looked and sounded like, I already knew I wanted to learn English.

I had never flown in a plane before, let alone seen one so closely. The closest I had ever gotten to a plane before had been waiting in a small reception center within the Tbilisi International Airport. I had only seen planes fly high above me during my childhood years. Me and my dad would sit on our withering 7th story balcony and try to guess where all those distant planes were flying off too. On the night of our flight, I was sleep deprived and I was trying to contain my mind from wandering off into made-up scenarios. The only thought within my head before take off and whilst getting off to transfer to the final plane at Ataturk International was “Gate 4, International Transfer.” No other words had any meaning to me other than these words. My eyes darted around the littered signs across the monolithic Turkish airport, searching for this specific sign like a depraved and malnourished beast, desperately looking for food in a foreign environment.

The hallway turned into a small corridor littered with metal doors with unintelligible text in the middle of them and trash strewn all around, as if some poor family had had their baggage ravaged. The corridor then bled into four escalators descending into a large, ill-lit room with turnstiles leading into what seemed to be freedom, like a light at the end of a long tunnel. The room was faintly illuminated by the setting sun, mostly lighting up the path towards the gates and leaving the rest in darkness. Nobody was sitting in the darkness at that time and I could only hope we wouldn’t be the unlucky few condemned to it. I could only imagine that the same thoughts were within the minds of those who were behind us, as their ephemeral voices filled the barren halls with potential tales of adventure and lives lived in a bygone world. Not a single word of English was said behind us but so many different languages and accents were audible that it made me feel both a warm feeling of not being alone at this monumental place, but also an inexplicable, yet tempered fear.

When we finally got down to that ominous checkpoint, I began to worry about something. “What if I had suddenly lost the ability to speak English? After growing up learning and hammering concepts, words and whatnot, could I have spontaneously just lost all of it?” Instantly, I felt myself getting locked in place, my jaw becoming welded for a second, from the fear of saying just one wrong word or one wrong phrase and, potentially, getting turned back around and getting delayed or, worst case scenario, having to cross half the globe again and having to show our desolate and shameful faces at our relatives, who had helped us so much in getting prepared for the voyage. But as soon as the man behind the bullet proof glass called me and my family in and started asking standard questions, these worries were washed away with me trying to focus on not saying something foolish. I felt as though I was being watched by a thousand prying eyes, some from within the airport and some from the other side of the world, observing and taking notes. Although I was confident with my linguistic capabilities, I hadn’t actually conversed with a native English speaker before, which made the task all the more an achievement for me, albeit a small one. To my surprise, the words out of my mouth flew like a raging river, almost as if this had been routine to me, yet at the same time it was all the more foreign to me.

Although my experience in immigrating to the United States differs much more from other tales of immigration, mostly due to the circumstances in which I grew up in being specifically geared to learning English, I still believe that the core essence of all immigration stories, along the lines of mine, is still ever present in my essay: The fear of making a fatal mistake in a completely foreign environment. Even though I was supposedly “more prepared” compared to the others with me at that time, I still felt that sharp fear of failure, especially with how it seemed as though I was taking on such a monolithic task as an inexperienced teen whose family’s fate rested on his first impression into a completely different world.