Author Gary Shteyngart learns a hard lesson about the American culture

Gary Shteyngart, acclaimed author of books such as Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, has just published a memoir with the delightful title Little Failure (the cover picture is perfect). This story from the book discusses his family's encounter with an American tradition soon after their immigration to the US from the Soviet Union in 1979, when the author was seven years old.

An official letter arrives in our mailbox. MR. S. SHITGART, YOU HAVE ALREADY WON $10,000,000.00!!! Sure, our last name is misspelled rather cruelly, but cardstock this thick does not lie, and the letter is from a major American publisher, to wit the Publishers Clearing House. I open the letter with shaking hands, and...a check falls out. 

PAY TO THE ORDER OF S. SHITGART
TEN MILLION AND 00/100 DOLLARS 

Our lives are about to change. I run down the stairs to the courtyard of our apartment complex. "Mama, Papa, we won! We won! My millionery!" We are millionaires!"
"Uspokoisya," my father says. Calm down. "Do you want an asthma attack?" But he is nervous and excited himself. Tak, tak. Let us see what we have here....

We sit down and, using our collective four-hundred-word English vocabulary, begin to unravel the many documents before us. If we take the ten-million-dollar check to the bank tomorrow, how long before we can buy a new air conditioner? Wait it says here that... Yes, we have already won the ten million dollars, no disputing that, but a panel of judges still has to award the money to us. First we must fill out the winner's form and select five national magazines that will be sent to us free, or at least the first issue of each will be free, and then the Americans will likely send us the rest of the money. Fair enough.... 

We sign everywhere we need to, even places we probably don't need to. We sign the fucking envelope. "Write neater!" Mama shouts at Papa. "No one can understand your signature!" "Calm yourself, calm yourself." "Get the stamps!" "Wait with your stamps already, what does it say. No postadzh necessary." The Publishers Clearing House has even taken care of that little detail. Classy. ...

We find out the truth quickly and brutally. At their respective workplaces, my parents are told that the Publishers Clearing House regularly sends out the YOU HAVE ALREADY WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS missive and that these are routinely thrown in the trash by the savvy native-born. Depression settles over our nonmillionaire shoulders. In Russia the government was constantly telling us lies - wheat harvest is up, Uzbek baby goats give milk at an all-time high, Soviet crickets sing the "Internationale" in honor of Brezhnev visit to local hayfield - but we cannot imagine that they would lie to our faces like that here in America, the land of the This and the home of the That.

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