![]() “One day, I saw this restaurant that had a vaguely Turkish name and I walked in,” he says. He was that kid at the Apache Mall Food Court-you may remember him from his large mop of black hair-who handed out samples of orange chicken in front of Manchu Wok. ![]() Uluç took jobs at Old Country Buffet, the Super America on Second Street SW. I never showed up to the school high again after that.” O’Neill put his hands on my desk and looked me directly in the eyes and said, ‘I know what you did, but I’m not going to say anything this time. “Once, I left during lunch hour to smoke, and I came back in the class completely ripped,” says Uluç. He treated me like he cared.”Īnd Uluç will never forget one incident with Tim O’Neill, JM’s social studies teacher. I knew he loved lemon Turkish delights, so when we’d visit Turkey, I’d bring them back for him. Like Jack Samuell, the high school science teacher that Uluç describes as “just a ball of warmth, kindness, and understanding. In 2001, Sertaç and then 12-year-old Uluç moved into a northwest Rochester apartment complex that he describes-at the time-as being “no place for a young kid to live.” During his first tornado warning, at home by himself, he called his grandma back in Turkey, asked her what he should do. So Uluç would walk home from school alone and spend the day watching TV. Sometimes, Uluç says, she would leave at 7 a.m. In Rochester, Sertaç, now a single mom just starting a residency, worked long hours at Mayo. “I went from being the most popular kid in my elementary school to being the loser foreign kid who couldn’t speak a lick of English,” he says. Now he was hiding in the bathroom whenever he could. He had been a popular kid back in his school in Istanbul, Turkey, which Uluç describes as “vibrant, like the New York of the Middle East.” He even did some child acting in commercials for things like tuna fish and candy bars. We walk in and it was like one of those scenes you would see in those films where you open up the cabinets and there’s cockroaches just flying out.”Ĭontributed / Amy Shamblen (amy shamblen creative) “My mom and I had just traveled 16 hours from Turkey to this foreign land and we enter into our apartment,” says Uluç, who turned 34 this month. They arrived on a beautiful August day, 1998. Decided that she and her son, her only child, would leave their native Turkey-and Uluç’s beloved hometown of Istanbul-for the unknown of Rochester, 5,500 miles away. Then accepted a residency in the pathology department at Mayo Clinic. Uluç’s mom, Sertaç, had gotten divorced from her husband (and Uluç’s doctor dad), Orhan, a few months earlier. On his first day in his new hometown of Rochester-on his first day in America-9-year-old Uluç Ülgen and his mom burst through the doors of their new apartment.Īnd saw the filth. “This is what America tastes like, and I’m here for it.”
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