Choosing Freedom: A Journey of Determination, Setting Goals, and Achieving Success

By Leo Frincu

Choosing Freedom, written by Leo Frincu, is a story about an individual who, despite his circumstances, is able to succeed in all areas of his life. This intriguing story will take you from a view of Communism from the eyes of a young boy all the way to a grown adult who is now living the American dream. It is a heartwarming story where you learn about the struggles and triumphs of a young man trying to discover who he is based on his past, his present, and his dreams. This story will have you examining your own life and the decisions you have made to better yourself.

Choosing Freedom is a compelling narrative that keeps the reader in its thrall until the end. It is a story of resilience and grit yet is tender and heartwarming. This book delivers a powerful message for anyone with goals and dreams. It is more than a story of personal sacrifice and dedication. It reveals the possibilities and obstacles inherent in the human condition and provides a psychological road map for digging deep and achieving success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479772926

Book preview

1 LIFE IN ROMANIA

ESCAPE. FROM MY EARLIEST CHILDHOOD memories, escape was always in my thoughts. At first I didn’t know that I wanted to escape my birthplace of Romania or the oppressions of Communism. I was too young to understand that not all people lived like we did. I didn’t know anything about democracy or freedom as a child. All I knew was I wanted something other than what I was living day in and day out. As I got older, I came to learn, even see firsthand, what it was my young mind had already been dreaming about for so long. These glimpses of a different kind of life, one that allowed for individual choice and freedom, only made me want to have that for myself even more. Eventually, my every thought revolved around finding some way to control the outcome of my life. Either in or out of Romania, I would escape the predetermined, lifeless existence that my fellow countrymen endured in a daily struggle to survive.

I was born on April 1, 1976, in Bucharest, the capital city of Socialist Republic of Romania. Roughly the size of Oregon, Romania is the second largest country in the area, after Poland. Romania was part of the infamous Eastern Bloc with Mother Russia to the north and Hungary to the northwest. I am the youngest of three children. Seven years separate me and my sister, but only eight minutes separate me and my brother. My parents did not know they were having twins until my brother was delivered and my mother’s labor continued. Medical care under Communism was marginal, and the technology to detect multiple fetuses simply didn’t exist for us.

Coming home with two babies might have been a shock, but unlike life elsewhere, Romanian parents didn’t have the option to turn to each other and ask, Should we move someplace bigger so we’ll have more room for our growing family? Like every other family in Bucharest, we had to make do with the limited space allotted to us. In our case, it was a tiny one-bedroom apartment on the tenth floor of one of the cookie-cutter, flat-roofed concrete buildings that sprang up and crowded the city. With only a few random exceptions, the beautiful architecture of our ancient capital city had been flattened during the early years of Communism; the new Bucharest was thrown together in a mishmash of rectangular buildings, some lined end to end in long rows, others offset in jaunty angles, and all with the same depressed look in varying shades of gray and brown with row upon row of square windows and narrow balconies. It was supposed to be the new golden era of Communism; instead, it was a city built like a concrete patchwork quilt of oppression, and it weighed heavily on its residents.

Every aspect of life under Communism was depressing especially death. Death seemed to be everywhere. Every neighborhood had a cemetery at its center. We had to walk past the graves every day, and they were a constant reminder that death was always present. In Romania, we had a very old funeral custom that required the body to be laid out and watched in the family’s home for three days. This gave people an opportunity to come and pay their respects, which probably wasn’t a problem in smaller villages; however, the high-rise apartment buildings that took over Bucharest made the ritual difficult to conduct. With elevators that barely fit two standing people and were often broken for weeks at a time, the deceased’s body needed to be carried up the narrow stairs, possibly ten stories, and then back down again when it came time for the burial. Seeing several strong men toiling with a coffin in the stairway was never a surprise to us. And because it was tradition to burn incense throughout the three-day watch, the entire building was aware when death was in the air.

Funerals were one of the rare times when citizens were allowed to gather together in one place. Normally, we were forbidden from walking in groups of more than three or four people. There was too much risk of subversion within large groups. Funerals were the exception. We were expected to grieve the dead. In fact, to ensure the dead were mourned appropriately, women from the countryside were sometimes paid to come and cry during the ceremony. Yes, we had professional criers. These outsiders made their living wailing for people they’d never met, while those who lived in the city trudged on day after day, surrounded by grayness and death.

Life inside our cramped apartment was always challenging. With five of us, we were constantly in each other’s way, getting on each other’s nerves. Privacy was nonexistent. My parents used the only bedroom. My brother, my sister, and I slept in the living room. My brother and I shared the larger of two beds until I was fourteen and went to live at the wrestling camp. Besides the beds, we each had a black nightstand to store our schoolbooks. We also had a dresser that we called the display because that was where my family put little treasures out to show off rarities that had come into our possession, such as a bottle of Coke or a hard-to-get brand of soap or cigarettes. We’d savor the product and then keep the container on the display, not only to show visitors what luxuries we were lucky enough to have experienced but also to remind ourselves. Such things may sound like silly things to be proud of, but when people live in a society that represses individuality and propagandizes conformity to such an extent that Ceauşescu’s regime did, they cling to the smallest of things to feel alive. Communism under a radically dictatorial leader is the most degrading, inhumane form of living imaginable. Only Communist prisoners have life harder than Communist citizens.

Our makeshift bedroom-living room combination was where we enjoyed our nightly entertainment. For two hours every evening—from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.—we were able to gather together in that cramped room and watch propagandist programming on a small black-and-white television that took nearly thirty minutes to warm up enough to see the picture. The shows usually talked about the greatness of our leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, and his wife, Elena. This was not the highest level of entertainment, but that didn’t stop us from watching it or from fixing that little television set whenever it broke. We couldn’t buy a replacement, and even propagandized TV was a luxury no one wanted to give up. So whenever the TV broke, which was often, we fixed it, just as we did with all our appliances.

When the programming was promptly shut off at 9:00 p.m., we would busy ourselves for bed, lighting candles and whispering conversations so no one else in the building would hear. We were afraid to talk about a better life or trying to change the situation. We were scared to even think about it. No one could be trusted. We never know who was listening or who might hear and turn us in to the militia. Being arrested as a political prisoner would mean being detained for God knows how long and possibly never coming back. People used to whisper under their blankets, trusting nobody. Anybody, even a lifelong neighbor, your best friend, or a relative could’ve been an informant for the Communist Party. The only safe place to live the life you dreamed was between your ears, and the Communist propaganda machine did their best to make sure that didn’t happen either. So at 10:00 p.m., when the power was cut off and all the lights in the city, including streetlights, went out, we were left to our thoughts in the silence and darkness.

Our apartment had one small bathroom and an even smaller kitchen. The kitchen was so narrow that you could stretch your arms and touch both walls at the same time, but it had the normal accoutrements—a sink, a stove, a pantry, a small refrigerator (no freezer), a radiator that tried to warm our apartment with little success, and a very small table. Sitting down and lingering over dinner was not part of our routine. We were expected to get our food, sit, eat quickly, and clean up. We had a larger dining room table in our living room that was used more for ironing than family meals. With food being scarce and variety nonexistent, the idea of enjoying a meal as a family was just as foreign to us as the idea of not doing it sounds to Americans. Besides, we only had three small wooden homemade chairs for the kitchen table where we ate, so the five of us couldn’t have sat together even if we wanted to.

The bathroom had a sink, a toilet, a bathtub, a broken electric washer (the one appliance that never got repaired), and a tiny window. Because we lived on the top floor of the building and had to compete for a limited supply of hot water with all the other families living on the floors beneath us, getting up before the crack of dawn became a ritual. If we didn’t beat the morning rush, we’d be left without a drop of water after seven or eight o’clock in the morning. During the summer, we used to keep buckets filled with water for cooking and sparse daily washing. Bathing was difficult. We would get up at 4:00 a.m. every Saturday to take our turn in the shower and then begin laundry before we ran out of water. Saturday was our day to wash ourselves, wash our clothes, and get our weekly ration of food. This was the norm. We didn’t know anything else, so we didn’t think to complain. This is how Romanians came to accept life.

During the bleak years before the 1989 revolution, only the seasons brought change. Winter brought snow and unending cold that no amount of clothing could deter. There was no insulation in communist-era housing, and the cement walls turned our apartment into a virtual icebox. We would take turns, huddling around the radiator in our apartment to thaw our hands from the unyielding cold. The one advantage that came from living on the top floor was that gas, being light, easily reached our stove. In an attempt to stay warm, we would keep all four burners and the oven lit day and night, which helped a little. Neighbors on lower floors struggled with very low or no flames on their stoves; I remember them knocking on our door, asking to use our stove to cook their food.

Washing clothes was especially challenging during the winter because the temperatures never got warm enough for anything to dry. We’d hang our wet clothes out on the balcony to dry as usual, only to have to bring them back in when they started to freeze into solid, breakable masses. The only way to dry them on days when temperatures never rose above freezing and the sun stayed behind thick clouds was to drape our laundry over the radiator, drying our clothes one garment at a time.

Spring would bring a reprieve from the cold, but it also brought plenty of dirt and slush as the snow slowly melted away. Since very few people had cars, and those who did were only allowed to drive on certain days of the week, we were primarily a pedestrian society. That meant trudging everywhere through the muck and floods caused by poor drainage. But all this was nothing compared to summer. Summer brought such unbearable heat and humidity that wearing clothes became a task in itself.

Summer also brought mosquitoes. Oh, how I remember the misery of those mosquitoes! Air conditioning and window coolers wouldn’t arrive in Romania for another decade. The only way to get any relief from the stifling, muggy heat was to open windows. Screens were also a luxury to us, which meant there was no way to keep the mosquitoes out. They tormented us nightly with their constant buzzing near our ears and feeding on any piece of exposed skin. Every night before bed, each member of the family would go to battle, trying to kill as many of the bloodthirsty pests as we could. We used old shirts or towels to swat and smash every last one we could find in an attempt to sleep without becoming a main course in their nightly feast. But since we had to sleep with the windows open in order to breathe, inevitably, more mosquitoes would find their way in during the night. To this day, the walls and ceiling of our apartment are still tinged with the bloody stains of our well-fed but unwelcome summer visitors.

Despite the confined living conditions and the filth of the street—or perhaps because of them—my mother was obsessed with keeping our apartment clean. She cleaned the kitchen so fervently that every appliance looked just as good as it did the day it was new, which would’ve been the same year the building was built. Nothing was ever replaced or changed. We cleaned the apartment from top to bottom every Sunday, regardless of whether it was dirty or not. We never ate anywhere except in the kitchen. Each of us was expected to clean up after ourselves by immediately washing our own dishes and sweeping up any crumbs we may have dropped. In order to prevent dirt from being tracked about, we were not allowed to wear shoes inside. These were just a few of the numerous house rules my mother strictly enforced.

My mother was a typical Communist factory worker, but she was not a typical nurturing mother. She was around 5’2" with a build that would swing from being overweight to skinny quite often. My mother never embraced femininity by wearing dresses or makeup or getting her hair done. Instead, she opted for pants and T-shirts, even on holidays, and kept her hair in a very short tomboyish cut. As the years slowly started turning her hair white, she never bothered coloring it. Her looks perfectly matched her personality: plain and hard.

My mother was never good at expressing kindness or love toward any of us kids. In fact, the first time she ever told me she loved me was after I was grown and living in America. My family sent me a videotaped message that I remember rewinding over and over to check if I really saw my mother say We love you. Even with all my accomplishments along the way or being away from home for weeks and months at a time throughout my youth, she never said those words. Perhaps she never thought she needed to—or perhaps she never realized she wasn’t saying them. While I was always close to my father, my mother and I never had the kind of relationship that fostered long, meaningful conversations. Then again, Communism didn’t exactly encourage individuality. People didn’t dare have feelings, ideas, or dreams, let alone express them. We learned to keep those thoughts buried deep inside or risk being arrested. That fact of life wasn’t something that could be turned on and off, even within the walls of one’s own home.

I never blamed my mother for being emotionally distant. (In many ways, her lack of affection led to my wrestling career, but I’ll discuss that more later.) It was the yelling that bothered me. What I most remember about her from my younger years was always being in trouble and always been yelled at. She had so many rules it was impossible to make it through a day without breaking at least one. We would get in trouble for the slightest things, like closing a door too hard, making the stove dirty, or leaving crumbs on the floor. Try as I would to make sure the apartment was spotless before she got home from work, she’d always find something wrong. I hated being in trouble all the time.

Thinking back on it now, I know that my thoughts of escape also included escaping my mother and her temper. In some form or another, we all wanted escape. In my mother’s case, she used an obsession with cleaning to escape the drudgery of life. I don’t think she even realizes how much she yelled at us. As much as I love her, she was not an easy person to be around.

Rules and routine. That summed up life in our home. Every Saturday, the family would go shopping. It wasn’t just our family that went shopping; the entire neighborhood shopped on Saturday because that was when the grocery trucks came. Every resident in the district would go and stand in line for the items they needed. There was a line for everything: a bread line, a meat line, a potato line, and so on. All the commodities were doled out on a first-come first-served basis. When they ran out of something, that was it for the week. No bread. No eggs.

To make the experience more interesting, we didn’t have ration cards to get our share. Every family member was entitled to receive a certain amount of a given product, but each person had to be present in order to claim it. Family members would spread out and hold places in as many lines as possible, and then, when one person’s turn came, the rest of the family would swoop in to claim the entire family’s ration. It was not uncommon to be second or third from your turn to get an item that was nearly gone, hoping you were going to get lucky, only to have a dozen people surge in at the last moment because their cousin was ahead of you in line. All out. Sorry. Move on to another line. Shopping was a game of strategy and luck.

On Sundays, my father would take over the kitchen and make two large pots of food. One pot was a soup of some kind, and the other was a main dish like stuffed cabbage or beef stew. Those would be put into the refrigerator along with our eggs and milk, and that would be our food for the week. This made daily mealtime simple enough for even my brother and I to fend for ourselves when we were home alone and hungry. Although, as I mentioned, we had to take precautions to clean up after ourselves even as very young boys. We were often bored with the lack of variety, but our parents didn’t care. Romanian parents didn’t believe in coaxing children to eat. Hunger, they’d say, is the best chef. My dad used to tell us there was no such thing as bad-tasting food. "You’re not hungry