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'I take the cows out to the meadow, just don't marry me', Emina Çunmulaj tells about her life in Tuz and the beginnings of her career as a model

2023-06-17 09:43:35Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
'I take the cows out to the meadow, just don't marry me', Emina
Emina Çunmulaj

The Albanian model Emina Çunmulaj, who already has a career around the world, has confessed in Prime Minister Edi Rama's podcast how she started her career as a model. She says that after the family returned from the USA, she was only 5 years old and they settled in Tuz, Montenegro. Çunmulaj says that she had to face the taboos of a small country, as she was looking for something bigger for herself, a career beyond Tuzi. The model confesses that girls in Tuz, at that time, were married at the age of 14-15 and she begged her mother not to marry her, and therefore engaged in other work, such as taking the cows out to graze.

Çunmulaj also shared the moment when he decided to participate in a competition. She used a white lie, telling an employee at her father's jewelry store that the family had allowed her to attend. Then she wins the competition and tells her parents who were on a visit to the USA what she had done before they read the newspaper headlines "Emina Çunmulaj, the Albanian started a career in the middle of Yugoslavia!".

Excerpts from the conversation:

Prime Minister Edi Rama: How did it happen that you were born there and came to cry in Tuz?
Emina Çunmulaj: Mom and dad fled as immigrants, and you gave your dad the letter of the deputy to go back and he returned voluntarily. Mom was pregnant, with three daughters, and she said to dad, I feel like I have a son and I don't want to lose my son's right to have an American passport. He said, I'm staying with the children, because he was right, they allowed it, and he said to return it. After three months, her brother was born, as she had thought, and then she returned. I was almost 5 years old and we grew up in Yugoslavia, until I was 15 when I got the courage to tell my mom and dad that I'm going to be a model.

Prime Minister Edi Rama: Where did this courage come from, in that small village.
Emina Çunmulaj: Many things have influenced. However, to some extent I grew up with this thought in my head, how is it possible that my parents brought us to the United States of America. They gave us everything they could and in the end they sent us back to a country that is a "third world country" at that time, even I could not believe that my future is as limited as the whole village and I always thought that I will follow in my mother's "footsteps". Not that it's a bad thing. My mother was an extraordinary woman. An unprecedented mother, but I always wanted something bigger for myself and I didn't know how I would achieve it because all the girls in the village didn't go more than eight grades, almost even high school.

This culture, this mentality that girls should get married at the age of 15 and I was telling myself, I will do anything in the world just not to end up like that. From the age of 10, I used to tell my mother, give me the cows, I will bring the cows to the meadow, no problem. Give me work outside the home, I will do it, no problem. Just don't learn to cook, don't learn to wash, hide that I didn't want to be married at the age of 14-15. Meanwhile, people came asking for my hand. I was crying, saying please don't marry me and I understood that it is a fixed "silver line" moment in life when "Elite model look" came to Yugoslavia at that time and they were looking for models. All my school friends told me "You have to be a model!". Where did I find the courage to tell my father who was a strong father at that time and my mother who had the inspiration,

However, dad had a jeweler at that time and a woman who worked in the jeweler had a daughter who would bring her to the competition. And I told him my dad left me, "dad, sorry", I lied, but it was at this moment that I knew that if I don't take these deeds into my hands, I will end up almost like all the girls in the village. Married, with children at the age of 20 and this is "my destiny". And I did it, I ran away, I won and within two days my father and mother were in America at that time because they had the right after 40 years to be given a "green card" and I told them that the time has come that.... I told them a very big lie, but they will know anyway that the next day's newspapers will write: "Emina Çunmulaj, the Albanian started a career in the middle of Yugoslavia!".

This was the general title. Then the situation eased a little. Dad said: Okay, you can go to Belgrade, - because at that time the competition was in Belgrade, to represent Montenegro in the Yugoslavia competition, - you can go, but you have to go with family members. No problem, I tell him, just go and I've won. This has been a big "boom", and for me this has been such a big "push" that I told myself, nothing could come between me and my goal. And so the career began. They hand me a Worldide contract, I signed it and there was no turning back.


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