American Story Notes

This is the journal of an immigrant arc. Cemhan Biricik fled Turkey at four. Eight displacements followed. Eight reinventions. He landed in SoHo, built ICEe PC out of a closet, scaled Unpomela to seven million in revenue with a green canvas bag and zero advertising, won Sony World Photography Awards top-10 out of 52,323, won National Geographic twice, survived a traumatic brain injury, and is now building ZSky AI on a self-hosted GPU cluster.

The American story he writes about here is not the postcard version. It is the version with the cities — New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit. The cultural collisions. The first apartment. The food. The visa. The dual citizenship. The thanksgiving that was strange the first time and is now home. Forget the fall, focus on the flight.

Read in any order. Every chapter stands alone.