Romeo, Romania

Romeo was born in Romania and grew up under communism. He has lived in the United States since 2005, when he and his wife, who had just won the green card lottery and was expecting their first child, landed in Boston. He studied medical biology, holds an MBA, and built a career in lab diagnostics, including marketing for Latin America and North America. Today he also runs a franchise business in Indiana, where the family lives with their two sons.

In this conversation, we talk about the boy who watched Dallas on television in communist Romania and decided that if he ever left, it would be for America, and about the sixteen years of patience between the fall of communism and the day he finally moved. We talk about what stayed Romanian (faith, food, holidays with friends in Indianapolis) and what it meant, after twenty years, never to be excluded for his accent. And we talk about raising two boys in Romanian and Spanish, neither of them the language of the world they live in: books with one language on each half of the page, a trip to Mexico, and Spanish songs on YouTube during ping pong in the basement.

Spanish came last, and by choice. It began as a project with his older son and a teacher from Madrid, and stayed because Romeo found he loved it. Speaking a third language, he says, is a victory for his brain, and a window he keeps open for the day he works across Latin America again.

The conversation starts in English, the language of his last twenty years, and moves to Spanish, the one he chose for himself.