IMMIGRANT SON (Book Two): Refusing to Grow Up

By Harry Chinchinian

How can you see the bright side of failing when you hear words like these?

"Go! Get out of my sight!" from an uncle.

"You've been a disappointment to me," from a teacher.

"I have to think of myself first," from a best friend.

"How could you be so dumb?" from an irate fellow doctor.

Reflecting on his pop's arrival to America from Armenia, Dr. Harry Chinchinian writes: "I must have inherited some of his stubbornness because I also kept on trying, kept running like mad to achieve, in spite of failing . . . . That's why when all is said and done, just look at how, in this crazy, wonderful life, you can fail and fail and fail and still win."

Here are more stories of the immigrant Armenian kid, with no means and no background, who remembers with pleasure the kindly spirits that smoothed his path, describing predicaments while working in his uncle's grocery store in Troy, New York; camping with the precocious gang leader Antranik; traveling Europe during and after WW II; and attending medical school to become a pathologist.

Plum Tree Press (First Edition, 1997)