Since Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States, things have been moving fast here, in my adoptive country. And not in a good direction. I grew up in communist Romania, but I thought I was past fearing my government, the way people used to be terrified of the Securitate, the secret police serving Nicolae Ceaușescu, our dictator, before 1989.
I’m trying not to sound alarming, but the first step to getting to a society where people self-censor because they’re afraid of their government—even though the First Amendment protects our freedom of speech—is already happening all around me.
People I respect(ed) are telling me how they’re planning to lie low and not attract attention to themselves by protesting or donating to organizations that would protect their rights. Everyone who thinks they can let others do the hard work of fighting off lawlessness, while they stay safe, is in fact putting themselves in danger by building the cage everyone will soon be in.
This is not theoretical for me. I grew up in a country with closed borders. I was in a cage where the rationing of resources was used as a tool to keep the population busy running from one store line to another, unable to coalesce and protest their living conditions. Where everyone feared that their neighbor, friend, or even family were informants for the Securitate.
We’re not in such dire conditions yet, but we’re inching in that direction every day, so here’s a story that shows where we’re heading if we keep at it.
How I met Radu Codrescu (name changed for privacy reasons)
It was one evening in 2001. I was new to America when I met another Romanian at a supermarket. His alias is Radu Codrescu. The friend I was with introduced us and told me that Radu had done time in Romanian jails for trying to flee the country during communism. Now he was a fellow software developer at Microsoft.
Right then and there, I wanted to know his story. He was a young man in the 1980s, when I was just a child. My understanding of those years was filtered through my ignorant/innocent view of life at an early age. But Radu had felt that lack of freedom viscerally, as a young person trying to build a life for himself in his country—and not being able to.
It took a few years for us to grow closer and for me to decide I wanted to shift careers from software development to professional writing, but I ended up interviewing Radu about his ordeals in 2005, while I was taking journalism classes at the University of Washington. We spoke casual Romanian for our chats, so I ended up translating and adapting the interviews into narratives that used his quoted words whenever possible. I also wrote about the country I remembered as a Pioneer, a state-mandated organization for all kids in Romania (you know the kind, red scarves around our necks and all that).
Our Borders: A True Story
The result of those interviews was a series of articles with illustrations, which you can read at length here: Our Borders: A True Story.
Radu started our conversation with his most vivid traumatic memory: when he tried to cross the Danube at night, only to witness the border patrol harpooning people to death in the water. Harpooning. People. To Death. No due process, no nothing. Just death—painful death—for daring to wish for freedom.
And then things got worse for Radu and his friends and family. Sometimes it was just bad luck, like when he made it over the border but had to return because his friend was injured and could not continue their journey. Sometimes it was being unprepared, like when he and his friends took an inflatable boat across the Black Sea, only to realize that they could not keep it inflated. Sometimes it was good luck, like when they got rescued at sea or from sealed shipping containers where they would have died from lack of water.
Throughout his story, he had friends and supporters. His mom was always there, helping him plot his next attempt at crossing the border. But one time, he was betrayed by someone he never thought could do that to him. As a result, he was beaten savagely by the militia and almost died in the process—then ended up in jail.
So how does someone with such a harrowing past end up working as a hiring manager at Microsoft years later? (Fun fact: He interviewed my brother for a job in his division and hired him. So my brother’s path to America is connected to this series of interviews in a strange way.) Radu finally got his chance at freedom through…Canada. And if you want to learn how, I won’t spoil it here. But suffice it to say, Canada has always been the beacon of hope for many Eastern Europeans and other immigrants, since the US is less welcoming to refugees and asylum seekers than our neighbors up north.
Another fun fact: Parts of these interviews ended up as fictional bits in my immigration thriller, Extreme Vetting. But I don’t want to overwhelm you with too many reading recommendations. If you have time, check out Our Borders. It’s a true story, a thriller, and a warning for our times.
