A few years after I came to US, after a long discussion with my American friends about life in Eastern Europe, I started writing little snippets about what meant to be a child in communist Romania.
I was not interested in my recent experiences as a student, as a young woman. I wanted to understand the child I once was, because I felt that that child held the key to my future. I wanted to understand what it meant to grow up there in the mid-sixties. How were my friends, my schoolmates, how was I able to figure out what was happening around us? How did we distinguish between bad and good - when they were labeled chaotically? How was it that we laughed a lot, as children?
More than anything else, I hoped that talking about that child, I would bring up the image of my young parents. Of course, I knew them as a child, then a teenager, then an adult myself, as they grew older and older. But writing is miraculous: suddenly, in my book, they had the same age I had. It was magical.
