Discovering America on edge of a knife

For many, the U.S. brings up images of bald eagles, or battlefields, or Black Friday sales. For me, it’s represented by a knife bought at the Dollar Store.

For context, my parents are immigrants from Guatemala. The stories of such immigrants are many and varied, some coming to the states for a future or a new beginning. For my parents, the move was meant to be temporary. My mom and dad both grew up in the capital, studying to become a dentist and a cardiologist respectively, and had never seriously thought they’d leave Guatemala for long.

They’d moved to Pennsylvania shortly after getting married so my dad could further his medical training and specialty. They planned on moving back to Guatemala after this was done, so they packed what they could carry from their homes and began life in the states in a tiny Philadelphia apartment that my dad tells me was as big as our current living room.

One day after work, my dad came across the Dollar Store for the first time.

See, there’s no such thing as a Dollar Store in Guatemala. It takes 8 quetzales (the Guatemalan currency) to make an American dollar, and the “8 Quetzales” store isn’t the catchiest of names. Besides that, small markets that sell touristy trinkets seem to be the most similar things to Dollar Stores, at least when my parents were growing up.

So it was kind of crazy for my dad when he went into this store in Philadelphia, the cradle of American liberty, and everything was actually a dollar. Coming straight from college and another country without much money to their name, this was pretty cool.

After that, he started coming home after work with little household items he’d bought at the Dollar Store (or, as he liked to call it, “My Favorite Store”). One of these purchases was the knife. We’ve had it ever since.

This all came back to me recently when I was making salad at home with my mom. I’d taken out the tomatoes and had been looking for a knife to chop them up. I’d grabbed the utensil that was most familiar.

After asking my mom how long we’d had it, she reminded me that they’d bought it shortly after arriving in the states. It struck me that I was holding a knife possibly older than I am.

The knife, made from a cheap, bendable metal with a now scuffed plastic handle, doesn’t look like anything special. But the story behind it makes it special for me, like a weird family heirloom (though I’m guessing my parents hope the family name is remembered by something more elegant).

After all that’s happened in the last 20 years — moving houses, moving states, the birth of new siblings, the accumulation of stuff broken, tossed or stored in the back of a garage — one object that has managed to survive is the knife.

My family never planned to stay in the states, never planned to move to Washington. It just came together that way; by the time my dad’s internship was over, my family had already situated itself. It can be hard at times to live far from the majority of our relatives, and we miss them often.

But I also love the perspective of growing up in the states while having parents from Guatemala.

The knife kind of reminds of that. Its Dollar Store origins are quintessentially American. And honestly, this is one the first things that comes to mind when I think of the U.S.: the unexpected intersections of world views, two distinct slices of life, all wrapped up in the story of a knife.

This story was originally published July 3, 2016 at 2:58 PM with the headline "Discovering America on edge of a knife."