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The Faking It star immigrated to the U.S. at age 6, but her struggles weren’t over.

Rita Volk can still remember the pit she felt in her stomach when she heard her parents utter the words, “We’re moving to America.” It’s not

that Rita didn’t understand why — even at 6, she knew that her hometown of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was undergoing a major change that made it difficult to thrive — but the thought of leaving everything behind to start all over on the other side of the world seemed too much to handle. How would she learn the language? Would she make new friends? “I was 6 years old when my family came to the U.S. from Uzbekistan,” Rita opens up only to J-14. “The Soviet Union had collapsed and then there were all these little parts that were part of Russia that became unstable, so we had to get out! At that time, everyone moved. Some went to

Israel and others went to the United States.

We had relatives in California, so we moved to San Francisco.”

“I honestly don’t know what would

have happened if we stayed in Uzbekistan.”

— Rita

“my familywas on welfare”

Rita Volk’s parents risked it all to give her

a better life:

◀ Kid at heartWhen the last school bell rang each day, Rita would always rush home to watch MTV. “I was a really big TRL fan growing up — I’d go home every day and watch it,” she tells J-14.

How Rita made her dreams come true!▼ Fashion throwbackRita says she was a bit of a tomboy growing up. “I had this Daffy Duck boy sweater that I’d wear, and I would wear these baseball caps,” she confesses to J-14 exclusively.

▲ Pop culture fan“There was so much about America that my parents didn’t know when we came over here,” Rita admits. “Everything that I wound up know-ing was kind of pop culture stuff.”

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“We had to start over” The move posed so many questions, among them, how would Rita’s parents find work and pay the bills? “I remember that the jobs that they had [in Uzbekistan] before we first came here didn’t really count, so they basically had to start over,” Rita recalls. In those early years, money was hard to come by for the Volk family. “Growing up, my family was on welfare for a while and my parents were never able to have the careers that they wanted,” Rita says. “In-stead, they kind of went from job to job to support us.”

“People made fun of me”Once school started up, things only got worse for Rita. “I was just looked at as a weird kid,” she con-fesses. “I used to fake

English when I was younger and because it took me a while to [learn], people made fun of me. I remember being in the 4th grade and having temper tantrums because I felt like people weren’t able to understand me. I was like this little tomboy who couldn’t speak English.” There were moments when Rita felt helpless, but she had her family to comfort her — and a family tradition actually helped her learn the language. “We’d have movie nights and watch big blockbusters,” Rita reveals. “Watching movies is how I picked up English.” In addition to improving

“my familywas on welfare”

▲ Real life vs. TV lifeWas Rita’s high school anything like the one on Faking It? Nope. “My experience wasn’t anything like Hester High,” she opens up. “It was very academic and wasn’t as cool.”

Miss SmartieIf you weren’t seeing Rita on TV, you might be bumping into her at a hospital. “I was a psych and pre-med major at Duke,” Rita says. “If I wasn’t acting, I’d be a surgeon — cutting people open.”

her speech, the glamour of Hollywood also healed Rita’s bruised spirit. “[I learned] that we can be anything we want to be,” she opens up. As her confidence gradually started to increase, school became easier to navigate, and it wasn’t long before Rita was coming home with straight As. In fact, she even attended one of America’s most prestigious colleges, Duke University! There, Rita studied hard and also explored her love for performing by joining Joke, Duke’s sketch comedy troupe. That led to small roles on TV and eventually her big audition for Faking It, and the rest is history. “I’m forever in debt to my parents and I’m so grateful that they got us out of Uzbekistan,” she tells only J-14. “I feel very lucky to be here, in the U.S., and doing what I love. I mean, it’s a totally different life that I’m able to live now. Everything turned out the way it was supposed to!”

▲ Major role reversal“I originally auditioned for Karma on the show, which I can’t even see myself playing now,” Rita tells only J-14. Wow, we can’t imagine her not playing Amy — she brings so much heart and charm to her!

“MTV is such a huge cultural world, so to be a part of it now is not normal,” Rita says. “It’s just incredible!”

“My parents had no idea about American culture so they would dress me up for school in little boys’ clothes and hand-me-downs,” Rita tells J-14.

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