Now What Will You Do With Your Luck?

Part 1: I could've been a Hannah

In December of 2023 I embarked on a 20 day trip to Ethiopia after not being back for 25 years. The revelations that followed suit have arrested me. This is a multi-part series dissecting my trip and identity as an Ethiopian-American, titled “Now What Will You Do With Your Luck?”

It’s hard for me to explain to you everything. Some moments explode with so much life you can only start by picking up a few pieces. These are the pieces I was able to scavenge. I hope it’s enough for you to understand how it has changed me.

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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (1998)

Part 1: I could’ve been a Hannah

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I have always wanted to be brave. And for one portion of my life I was. I wasn’t the one shaking in the corner. I was the one leading the charge.

At age 8, one night out at an Ethiopian restaurant rented by relatives, I choraled all the girls in the bathroom to marvel around a bright Clinique lipstick taken from my mom’s purse. It was the most furious shade of red. I slashed it on my lips and the rest of the girls followed suit. We exited the bathroom like visions.

The adults, upon recognizing their children had smears of red on their faces, were not exactly thrilled. My mother, upon realizing I had taken it from her bag, abruptly took the lipstick back and gave me a stern talking to. I couldn’t even listen to what she was saying. The red was on my lips and I was alive.

In school however, I was much shyer and quieter. The safe friend. The one who didn’t want to us to get in trouble. I would lean into the energy of my more confident, outspoken American friends to be exciting and me experience that excitement by proxy.

One day, after school in second grade, I asked my parents why they named me “Halleta”, why they couldn’t have named me something easier. They revealed they almost named me “Hannah” or another more obscure Ethiopian name.

“I COULD HAVE BEEN A HANNAH?!?!”

I was so distraught by this information. Scenarios flipped through my head of what my life would have been like if I was just named “Hannah”. Something that easy, that slipped off the tongue. Something that wouldn’t cause vacant stares or substitute teacher mispronunciations. I could have been a “Hannah” and if I was a “Hannah” I could have had everything.

Yet, even knowing I was an “almost Hannah” brought me a feeling of being that much closer to being American.

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My parents were born in Ethiopia and came to America in the 70s & 80s. They met in Los Angeles on UCLA’s campus. In 1993 I was born at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Hollywood.

In 1998, I went to Ethiopia with my mother for the first time. I remember a handful of vivid memories. The deep ruby living room of my well-off uncle’s house. The funny, starchy taste of the french fries. More potatoey, somehow more humble. Falling in the mud while running around at night. Seeing slain animals hanging to be eaten. Waking up to my cousins oddly staring at me after catching me sleep-talking. And eating pastel green ice cream with a taste I can still pinpoint yet still couldn’t tell you flavor. All I know is I’ve never had anything like it since.

25 years later, in December of 2023, was my next trip back.

I did not look forward to it. It was a daunting, dark blip haunting my December. I felt frustrated I would have to lose whatever momentum was left of the year to be put to the side for me to leave the country for 20 days.

Also, this would not be a normal vacation. I was going with my parents. The first time all of us would be going back together. We had slews of relatives to see and I had little control of our itinerary. It wasn’t that I wasn’t excited but more so I had no idea of what would be in store. I could not envision what this trip would be like.

People would tell me, “I’m so excited for you!!!”, and I wouldn’t know how to respond. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to think too much about it.

I was afraid of coming back to Addis Ababa. At this point in my life being Ethiopian operated more like a unique fact as opposed to something directly affecting my living. It was a world I stepped back into when seeing relatives or the few times I’d take friends to get Ethiopian food. Like slipping into a partial identity. Somewhat of a past identity.

See, when I was younger I was much more immersed in the culture. I was often whisked to this Ethiopian person’s house or that Ethiopian person’s house. Weekends were filled with going to the Ethiopian orthodox church, running around with fellow Habesha children, eating plates of injera, and watching the adults sizzle coffee beans.

As a I grew older and spent more time with my non-Ethiopian friends, this world began to dwindle. My identity as Ethiopian became smaller as I learned to become more American. I considered, as a child, that the more American I became, the more palatable I became. The easier it would be for me to fit in. To get things. To find success.

I’ve been told for most of my life that I’m lucky to have been born in America.

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Waves of paranoia entered my body in the days leading up to my trip. Hit with the perplexing parallel of how there was an entire land of people that existed who all looked like me and behaved like my family. Who were not living in the context of America. Who were living in the context of themselves.

I knew this, of course — but the understanding of how Ethiopia was now no longer going to be a place I referenced from distant memory but experienced vividly as an adult felt like the tremors of an unprecedented beginning. I would pinch and zoom my apple maps looking at the different names of cities in the region, feeling crazed, thinking of how there was really a place like this.

Months prior, a close friend told me she felt reconnected to her ancestors upon taking a trip to Japan, her mothers homeland. I thought in that moment if I had ever felt connected to my ancestors. I didn’t — not really, at least. I felt more connected to the stars, the sky, the trees….Was that a bad thing? I liked thinking of myself as some singular floating unit touched by eternity.

Out of all of my memories of when I had last been in Ethiopia, the most vivid was of when we were touching down. The sun was setting and as we descended closer to the land, I felt as though I could see the entire perimeter of the Earth. Even though we were just moments away from landing.

25 years later, descending, I witnessed that same image. This time as the sun was rising. That same peculiar feeling of being zoomed in and zoomed out tunneled through me. It was not my five year old eyes exaggerating the experience — it was true.

I’m not sure how to talk about Addis Ababa without sitting and peeling open its whole world for you. The entire mechanism. The city, the country, lives in my heart. It has grown its grooves through me.

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