On Ruse — my hometown

In this post I explore some themes related to family and immigration through some discussion of my hometown, my family, and my experience growing up between Bulgaria and Silicon Valley over the past two decades.

I hope you enjoy!

I was born in a city called Ruse (Roo-Sé) in Bulgaria.

Ruse is a stately city cradled on the green banks of the Danube, Europe’s longest river. The city’s architecture was largely inspired by the other large European cities up the same river — Belgrade, Budapest, and Vienna. Due to its location, Ruse has long been a gateway to Europe for commerce, art, and culture.

Looking east across Ruse and the down the Danube River.

This city will always have a place in my heart. It’s where my parents met and got married, and where my maternal grandparents, great grandparents, and great great grandparents lived for generations.

If that weren’t enough, I spent my summers growing up roaming the streets of Ruse for months at a time — biking, playing games, riding the bus, taking summer classes, and hanging out with friends. Despite living outside Bulgaria (in Japan and later Silicon Valley) since I was four, I spent much of every summer in Ruse with my grandparents.

Even my childhood friends in Silicon Valley were — to a large extent — tied to Ruse. Our parents studied computer science at the University of Ruse and migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. We would gather in Mountain View over winters and Ruse in the summers.

One of the buildings in the center of town, with grand and proud architecture.

My mom had a big and well established family in the city whose presence dates to at least the 1800’s. By most measures, being city folk was unusual in those days. I can tell from the old photo albums that the place was teeming with life and enthusiasm then. Grand architecture in the central area, a focus on the future with cinemas and educational facilities and art museums abound. Well kept buildings and homes. Young people. Families. Life.

These days, there are more broken windows on houses than I’d like to see and the kids have disappeared from the streets. When I was a small boy, I would go out every night. There would be crews of neighborhood children playing in every nook. It was impossible to not find friends. The same gardens between buildings sit empty now.

It makes me a bit sad to see the city wilting — especially in relative terms. In the 1880’s, Ruse was the most populous city in Bulgaria — more populous than Sofia, the capital.

The population has continued to decline every single year in recent memory, although the absolute change these days is small.

Today, Sofia boasts ten times the population of Ruse, whose population has actually declined by 27% in the past 30 years. Ruse is now only the fifth most populous city in Bulgaria, which itself was once the fastest shrinking countries in the world although that trend may be reversing.

Beneath the Surface of Population Decline #

On the surface, a 27% decline doesn’t sound so stark. The city kept 73% of its population, after all. But let me tell you — a 27% decline in the population of a place is painful. It’s indicative of deep economic and demographic problems. Human structures are dependent on growth.

Ruse didn’t lose 27% of its people uniformly. It lost 27% of the youngest and most ambitious — the sound doctors and promising youth and the wealthy and the strong. Trying to build a life in a place undergoing that scale of decline is like swimming upriver.

In fact, Ruse likely lost much more than 27% of its original population and got some replacements from a different one — mostly people coming from villages across Northern Bulgaria. The population became qualitatively different. You can feel it when you walk down the streets.

Despite the demographic challenges, the city remains safe and pleasant to roam.

My family in particular had strong ties to the local university — where both my dad and grandpa taught. Accordingly, our friends tended to be close to the same crowd. During my childhood in Ruse, I had many friends my age in the city — cousins, family friends, neighbors — certainly in the dozens.

As of 2022, only two still live there.

In fact, more friends from Ruse work at Meta in London than live back home. That friends from my hometown hold the same job at the same company that most of my high school friends in Silicon Valley aspire to makes me quite proud. It is a testament to their talent.

The rest of my old friends are scattered across Europe, Britain, and North America in search of education, work, love — in short, a better life.

Note: you don’t have to look as far as my small Bulgarian hometown to see the the story of hollowing out towns unfold. I’m sure there are portions of Middle America that have been afflicted in much the same way. In the latter part of the 21st century, the trend of population decline and aging is projected to only spread more widely across the world.

The Dark Side of Emigration #

The younger generation is doing well, mostly.

For us, the main collateral damage is that we can’t envision settling in our hometown. Our ties to it are dissipating year after year. We have to find and fight for a new place under the sun.

Practically everyone from my generation found path and place to pursue a better life — whether it be in Sofia, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Britain, Canada, or the USA.

Our grandparents were not quite as fortunate. My great grandma had eight siblings, so I had plenty of elders in the family to observe and pay respect to on my annual visits to Ruse. They were all warm and kind people — always eager to welcome me into their homes and offer me their blessings. When I’d visit, they would pull out snacks and scramble to find a ten lev bill to slip me — “take this; buy yourself an ice cream.” Practically all of them remained in the city throughout their old age.

Over the past decade, we’ve had dozens of deaths in the extended family as those same grandparents have marched into their 80’s. It feels like the bulk of family gatherings that happen these days in Ruse are the funerals — not fun.

That’s what 27% decline looks like. The young generation is gone in pursuit of a better life. The oldest generation are ailing and poor and a continent away from their offspring for eleven or more months out of the year.

Note: for the middle generation around my parents’ age, it’s a mixed bag — about half stayed and half left. It seems the most common is in families with two siblings is for one to have left the country and one to have stayed back.

Family in Ruse in the late 1990’s — at home with my great grandparents, grandparents, and mom.

The story of ailing grandparents with kids in a foreign country who wait for their annual visit is so pervasive that you can hear it from practically any elderly person you meet in Bulgaria. It is a story of longing and sadness, with a tinge of pride.

Their generation in particular has been afflicted by the aftermath of retiring with no savings into the decline of Communism, in a country which was lacking the institutions to provide for them with dignity, then losing their children to emigration because those children needed to leave to find a better life for themselves and couldn’t bring them along.

Back in Ruse — with mom and grandma and a cousin — in 2022 on my grandma’s 80th birthday.

It does weigh on me that my grandparents, who were educated and kind and hardworking people, had to choose for the final few decades of their lives between heating their home and having functional teeth, or between having a car that didn’t break down every few trips and putting good food on the table.

When I think back to the later years of their lives, I remember too many hardships and stress. Looking at the old photos from the 1980’s and 1990’s, it wasn’t always like this. Ruse was cosmopolitan at one point — especially for its time. My grandparents had good jobs, a vibrant social life, and a vacation home on the sea. My mom wore braces as a teenager (expensive!) and I have never once heard my family complain about healthcare in those times. The last time I flipped through one of their old albums I had the thought that they might have lived a better life than I am now.

But they lost so much of what they had in the decades between then and the 21st century. They lost their children to the pulls of globalization and economics. They lost their welfare to a country whose economic and social structures failed them when they were most vulnerable. And they were seeped deeply in an environment where such decline was the norm.

My grandma says things very literally. “I hate America.” Why? “Because it took my kids away from me.”

This isn’t just their story. This is the story of the whole city, the whole country even. In a nation of emigrants, Ruse is the quintessential example of a city of emigrants.

Dream of Switzerland in the Balkans #

When I was in Bulgaria most recently, I had a recurring thought that my dream is to have our own Switzerland in the Balkans in this century. It sounds like a pipe dream now but it’s one Bulgarians could practically could taste in the 1960’s, before Communism turned sour.

Fact: in 1965, Bulgaria had the 9th highest life expectancy in the world, on par with Switzerland and Denmark and higher than Germany, Canada, the United States, etc. Today, we’re 89th, in the neighborhood of Vietnam and Mexico. Something clearly went wrong.

That dream means to have a country with world class healthcare, transportation, and education that can provide a good life for all its people again.

For the people, it would mean being able to make decisions for where to live their lives from a position of strength rather than being forced to move away if they want to realize their potential.

For my family, it means enough wealth to not have to worry about what to eat or whether to keep the temperature in their homes comfortable or how to get from A to B.

For me, it means direct flights from New York and San Francisco and Singapore. It means world-class hospitals and institutions and jobs back home. It means being proud to see our products, technology, ideas, airlines, and people all across the world.

These days, I can see myself living in Sofia for at least part of the year — there are people to see, things to do, and moreso by the year, career opportunities to entertain.

Aside: I bet the wealthy Swiss didn’t have grandparents who had to make the same difficult choices that mine did. They didn’t lose their kids to globalization and their teeth to poverty and old age in the same way. They lived with more dignity, I think. They could take things for granted that mine couldn’t. They got to see more of the world instead of staying their small apartment and worrying about the necessities of life.

As an immigrant, you can never truly make it until you can lend a hand and elevate the people you left behind. To me, a necessary pre-condition of claiming to have a good life is to give a good life to my family — the broader the definition of family, the better. In my experience, it takes decades to find the strength to be able to do so. The process is not just financial, either. The society which you left needs to have the infrastructure to support a good life and people need to learn how to leverage that infrastructure — you can’t just give a Bulgarian grandma an iPhone and expect her to know what to do with it.

As I sit here in Silicon Valley two decades after leaving Ruse, I can’t help but wish I could have done more for my grandparents over the years. They were too lonely and too poor for too long.

I wish I will be able to do more for my parents, too. They had to work too hard and sacrifice too much on this journey — to take care of her ailing parents in Ruse for my mom, and to establish himself in Silicon Valley for my dad, because going back home was never an option.

Eclectic Takeaways #

Growth of companies, institutions, and countries is not guaranteed. It’s certainly not linear. I remember growing up in a poor country and a poor family, but they were — in relative and global sense — quite rich in the decades before I was born. I can take some solace in the fact that my grandparents did had a good life filled with optimism for decades before I knew them.

The wealth of a nation and a family isn’t just about financials. It’s about what I call having the infrastructure to support a good life and knowing how to leverage that infrastructure.

Aside: none of this means anything without good health.

Escaping the systemic poverty caused by the economic and demographic decline of a country is a long and challenging process with lots of real human costs. Often, at least one generation gets lost.

Youth, talent, and drive find a way to thrive. Markets are efficient enough and our world values them.

There’s a difficult to make tradeoff between leaving home and pursuing a better life when the going gets tough.

The process is difficult on young people, who have to work harder to survive in a new place without the safety net of being home. But it’s impossible for the older generation who have to let go of what is often their greatest fortune — their kids.

My hometown only died anecdotally as a place that could draw and retain its talented people. Many others came from tougher neighborhoods — thinking of Palestinians or Ukrainians — for whom the loss of a home is even more drastic and literal.

I was still privileged that I got to spend summers back in Ruse every single year. Many people get to go back to their hometown less often, if at all, after they leave.

Families should be able to stick together, especially when things are tough.

The road to get here shouldn’t have been this hard.

As I write this, two decades in, the journey is still not done.

Anyway — if you want to get to know me a little bit better, read about my little city on the Danube and talk to me about anything relating to Ruse or Bulgaria or the immigrant experience.

As a bonus — here’s a rendering of my favorite coastal town in Bulgaria — Sozopol — a four hour drive from Ruse.