Not quite Russian, not quite American - thoughts my ethnic identity
At the beginning of this year, my mom wrote about her conversation with annanov, where my sister said that she feels like she's an American - an American with Russian roots, with Russian cultural background, an American that happens to be ethnically Russian, but an American nonetheless. And that she felt this way for a long time, but she is at the point where she no longer feels bad about it.
in the comments, natasha_kob asked how I felt about it. Originally, I was just going to reply. But as I was planning out what I was going to write, I felt that it would be more interesting to write about this here. And there was no better time to write it than today - the date that marks my 19th year living in these United States.
As you may recall from my 16th anniversary post, for the first few years in this country, I didn't want to be here, and I certainly didn't want to stick around. My feelings about America weren't that positive to begin with, and spending my first few years struggling to learn the language and customs, and all of the implicit assumptions that every culture has and that every culture sees as self-evident only reinforced the "me against the world" mentality. It wasn't until my second year in college when a conversation with tweelore made me realize that actually spending the rest of my life in United States wouldn't be so bad.
In her post, my mom talked about absorbing America values... And that has obviously been the case with me. In American society, the idea that individual freedoms take primacy over everything else, the notion that people should be free to pursue their passions, the idea that having diversity in communities is a virtue in on itself profoundly informs many aspects of the American culture. It's not that Russians don't believe in freedom - but there is also the importance of personal sacrifice, the idea that we must deprive ourselves for the sake of greater good. Most of the Russia's population lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there is fear that we'd go back to that that you won't find in America - safe for, perhaps, the increasingly shrinking number of people who were alive during the Great Depression.
I understand where Russians are coming from - but those aren't the values I really hold.
I first realized it back when I visited Russia in 2004. I was at Grandma Tanya's place, showing her and Grandpa Gena some of my drawings, when they noticed a photo of a girl I had a crush on. A girl that happened to be Korean.
Grandma Tanya assumed she was my girlfiend - and she was appalled. I took offense on sheer principle, because, we'll, what if it was my girlfriend. Grandpa Gena was a voice of reason, thank God, and the matter was eventually dropped... But I realized that it never even occurred to me that it might be an issue, because in United States, interracial dating... Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's never an issue, especially further away from major cities, but it's certainly not as big of a deal as it used to be even 10 years earlier.
And it isn't just about values. At this point, I'm more comfortable writing in English than in Russian. In the 18 years since I've been in Russia, the culture had changed. Russian language has new slang, more loan words than I remember. If I were to move back, I would need at least a few month to re-acclimate back, to relearn things I forgot and learn things I never had to know in the first place (like, how does one file taxes in Russia? I never had to do that when I lived there, because, you know, I was a kid).
Yet, despite it all... I can't quite bring myself to call myself American.
I've thought long and hard as to why - and, in the end, it comes down to experiences that defined me.
Early in our relationship, I told Lore about what happened with my great-grandparents on my mom's side, how my great-grandfather was killed during Stalin's purges, how my great-grandmother was sent to a labor camp and how their children - my grandfather and his brother - were, too, eventually detained, tortured and sent to labor camps. And I watched Lore stare at me with abject horror. I realized right then and there that, for me... what happened to my family was tragic, but it's not like they were unique. Millions of people have similar stories. But to Lore, this was completely outside her realm of experience. It was something she knew had happened, but it was abstract. Seeing someone who was actually affected by it made it real.
I grew up in a city where thousands upon thousands starved and died. I saw my entire country collapse. I got to read the old books of Soviet propaganda while new, more modern books were slowly making their way into schools. Those are experiences that defined me as much as my experiences in America did, that give me insights most Americans don't have.
And it goes the other way, too. There are just some aspects of American culture than I never really experienced. There are still cultural references that occasionally trip me up - children's books, cartoons that never made it to Russia, TV shows and movies that were never imported, celebrities that, for some reason, didn't make as much impact. I've never seen a video game console of any kind until I came to this country, so there are a lot of video games that people my age grew up with and I, well, didn't. Reading and listening to current and former made_of_fail_pc contributors was eye-opening to me, because they touched on a lot of late 80s-early 90s culture that was as strange to me as Russian culture was to them.
There are also those inherent assumptions I talked about earlier. I absorbed some, but there were some that, for some reason, never took. It took me a long time to realize that, in America, it's expected that owning a house and owning a car is something that you should, at least, aspire to. In suburbs, there is this implicit mistrust of public transportation that I still find strange. It took me a long time to understand where it's coming from, but, in my heart of hearts, it still seems strange. Plus, there is this ever-insidious implicit assumption that you have to believe in something, that, if you are an outright atheist, then something must be wrong with you.
(Granted, in modern Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church and the United Russia propaganda would probably agree with that, but I grew up at the time when Russia was just seeing a major religious revival, and being an atheist wasn't all that unusual).
I guess, in the end of the day, I'm not fully Russian - but I'm not fully American, either. Which I guess doesn't make me all that unusual - a lot of first-generation immigrants who came here relatively young would probably feel the same way. But while many people are comfortable saying they are [Ethnicity]-American, I can't really bring myself to identify the same way.
I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's the few lingering bits of resentment from the decades ago (letting things go has never been my strong suit). But it could also be because "[x]=American" implies that you are American that also belongs to another culture, that there are certain fundamental values they share with Americans. And, like I said, while I share some, there are others that I don't share. And I honestly don't know if it makes me an American. Certainly not a full-fledged one.
And, so long as we're on the topic, I would be remiss not to mention one more thing.
Growing up in Russia, I knew that I had Russian, Polish and Belarusian ancestry, but I never really thought about what it meant. But living in America made me want to explore that. The fact that Chicago has way more Poles than Russians was definitely a big part in it, but there's also the fact that, in America, you don't have to choose. You can be more than one ethnicity, just like you can be more than one race - and there isn't one that's necessarily more important than the other. Attending Polish-American events, talking with Poles... It did stir something in me. Not nostalgia, but a vague hint of familiarity. It made me want to know a bit more. Something similar happened with my Jewishness. Living in America, it's something that I've become increasingly conscious of. Even if I'm not Jewish, it's still part of who I am, where I came from.
If nothing else, being in United States lets me explore these things. I'm not sure it would have even occurred to me to look at my ethnic identity this way if I stayed in Russia.
in the comments, natasha_kob asked how I felt about it. Originally, I was just going to reply. But as I was planning out what I was going to write, I felt that it would be more interesting to write about this here. And there was no better time to write it than today - the date that marks my 19th year living in these United States.
As you may recall from my 16th anniversary post, for the first few years in this country, I didn't want to be here, and I certainly didn't want to stick around. My feelings about America weren't that positive to begin with, and spending my first few years struggling to learn the language and customs, and all of the implicit assumptions that every culture has and that every culture sees as self-evident only reinforced the "me against the world" mentality. It wasn't until my second year in college when a conversation with tweelore made me realize that actually spending the rest of my life in United States wouldn't be so bad.
In her post, my mom talked about absorbing America values... And that has obviously been the case with me. In American society, the idea that individual freedoms take primacy over everything else, the notion that people should be free to pursue their passions, the idea that having diversity in communities is a virtue in on itself profoundly informs many aspects of the American culture. It's not that Russians don't believe in freedom - but there is also the importance of personal sacrifice, the idea that we must deprive ourselves for the sake of greater good. Most of the Russia's population lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there is fear that we'd go back to that that you won't find in America - safe for, perhaps, the increasingly shrinking number of people who were alive during the Great Depression.
I understand where Russians are coming from - but those aren't the values I really hold.
I first realized it back when I visited Russia in 2004. I was at Grandma Tanya's place, showing her and Grandpa Gena some of my drawings, when they noticed a photo of a girl I had a crush on. A girl that happened to be Korean.
Grandma Tanya assumed she was my girlfiend - and she was appalled. I took offense on sheer principle, because, we'll, what if it was my girlfriend. Grandpa Gena was a voice of reason, thank God, and the matter was eventually dropped... But I realized that it never even occurred to me that it might be an issue, because in United States, interracial dating... Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's never an issue, especially further away from major cities, but it's certainly not as big of a deal as it used to be even 10 years earlier.
And it isn't just about values. At this point, I'm more comfortable writing in English than in Russian. In the 18 years since I've been in Russia, the culture had changed. Russian language has new slang, more loan words than I remember. If I were to move back, I would need at least a few month to re-acclimate back, to relearn things I forgot and learn things I never had to know in the first place (like, how does one file taxes in Russia? I never had to do that when I lived there, because, you know, I was a kid).
Yet, despite it all... I can't quite bring myself to call myself American.
I've thought long and hard as to why - and, in the end, it comes down to experiences that defined me.
Early in our relationship, I told Lore about what happened with my great-grandparents on my mom's side, how my great-grandfather was killed during Stalin's purges, how my great-grandmother was sent to a labor camp and how their children - my grandfather and his brother - were, too, eventually detained, tortured and sent to labor camps. And I watched Lore stare at me with abject horror. I realized right then and there that, for me... what happened to my family was tragic, but it's not like they were unique. Millions of people have similar stories. But to Lore, this was completely outside her realm of experience. It was something she knew had happened, but it was abstract. Seeing someone who was actually affected by it made it real.
I grew up in a city where thousands upon thousands starved and died. I saw my entire country collapse. I got to read the old books of Soviet propaganda while new, more modern books were slowly making their way into schools. Those are experiences that defined me as much as my experiences in America did, that give me insights most Americans don't have.
And it goes the other way, too. There are just some aspects of American culture than I never really experienced. There are still cultural references that occasionally trip me up - children's books, cartoons that never made it to Russia, TV shows and movies that were never imported, celebrities that, for some reason, didn't make as much impact. I've never seen a video game console of any kind until I came to this country, so there are a lot of video games that people my age grew up with and I, well, didn't. Reading and listening to current and former made_of_fail_pc contributors was eye-opening to me, because they touched on a lot of late 80s-early 90s culture that was as strange to me as Russian culture was to them.
There are also those inherent assumptions I talked about earlier. I absorbed some, but there were some that, for some reason, never took. It took me a long time to realize that, in America, it's expected that owning a house and owning a car is something that you should, at least, aspire to. In suburbs, there is this implicit mistrust of public transportation that I still find strange. It took me a long time to understand where it's coming from, but, in my heart of hearts, it still seems strange. Plus, there is this ever-insidious implicit assumption that you have to believe in something, that, if you are an outright atheist, then something must be wrong with you.
(Granted, in modern Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church and the United Russia propaganda would probably agree with that, but I grew up at the time when Russia was just seeing a major religious revival, and being an atheist wasn't all that unusual).
I guess, in the end of the day, I'm not fully Russian - but I'm not fully American, either. Which I guess doesn't make me all that unusual - a lot of first-generation immigrants who came here relatively young would probably feel the same way. But while many people are comfortable saying they are [Ethnicity]-American, I can't really bring myself to identify the same way.
I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's the few lingering bits of resentment from the decades ago (letting things go has never been my strong suit). But it could also be because "[x]=American" implies that you are American that also belongs to another culture, that there are certain fundamental values they share with Americans. And, like I said, while I share some, there are others that I don't share. And I honestly don't know if it makes me an American. Certainly not a full-fledged one.
And, so long as we're on the topic, I would be remiss not to mention one more thing.
Growing up in Russia, I knew that I had Russian, Polish and Belarusian ancestry, but I never really thought about what it meant. But living in America made me want to explore that. The fact that Chicago has way more Poles than Russians was definitely a big part in it, but there's also the fact that, in America, you don't have to choose. You can be more than one ethnicity, just like you can be more than one race - and there isn't one that's necessarily more important than the other. Attending Polish-American events, talking with Poles... It did stir something in me. Not nostalgia, but a vague hint of familiarity. It made me want to know a bit more. Something similar happened with my Jewishness. Living in America, it's something that I've become increasingly conscious of. Even if I'm not Jewish, it's still part of who I am, where I came from.
If nothing else, being in United States lets me explore these things. I'm not sure it would have even occurred to me to look at my ethnic identity this way if I stayed in Russia.