(no subject)

[dreamwitch]

People often ask me where I grew up. I usually tell them, 'what does it mean to 'grow up' somewhere? how long does it take? how long must you stay?' and they generally don't have an answer. They must feel a bit cornered, having thought they asked a simple question. But in fact, it's one of the hardest questions you can ask me. One more reason I've resented the fact I wasn't simply born somewhere like Boston (why not? Boston sounds good) and grew up there till I was 18.

My whole life I've been plagued my this question of 'where is my home' and 'what is my best destiny/future?', and both the past and the future seemed to be yawning gaps I couldn't imagine how to fill. There was only me, out of place and out of time, on some level actively refusing to find my place, to tie myself down to any direction. I was running away so fast, I actually managed to never quite figure out what precisely I was running from, except the certainty of a life I did not want in exchange for the ambiguity of a half-life I didn't quite have.


For some reason, seeing this blog & specifically this post on Russia vs Ukraine by a 'Russophile' (a concept which strikes instinctive derision in me, to start with) made me realize that a little like Spock, a lot like most immigrants, I suppose, I'll never really have a place, but I can also put it another way: I have two places.
    
    The way I'm not like most immigrants is that usually people who move to another country consciously cling to their former culture-- even children who're born here do this. As for me, that whole idea made me sick. I hate the ghetto-like feeling of talking mostly to other immigrants, reading/eating/watching stuff from a culture you can no longer truly participate in. It's always felt to me like a particularly noxious lie. I was all too aware that I wasn't in Russia, and no amount of eating Russian food or reading Russian books or even speaking the Russian language would ever make me forget that even by .00001%. All I could do was be where I was-- which was New York-- as fully as I could, except I hated New York. I hated Brooklyn. I hated school. I didn't hate America, but I hated what I saw around me, so there was no escape except into my own head. In that sense, I'm not like my mom, either-- who integrated pretty well. She talks with ease both to Russians or Americans, speaks English or Russian-- she adjusted quite fine without any overreactions in either direction, I think, culturally. In retrospect, I really didn't adjust well at all; while I speak and write probably better than my mom, and am definitely more culturally fluent, and for all intents and purposes 'fully integrated', what I have is a deep psychological scar in the shape of the land I was born-- shaped like the very idea of 'home'-- right across my psyche.


I thought I was being smart and cool-- I was 'lucky to escape' from the hell that was a Russia changed beyond recognition. To me, the horror of my home being completely transformed and my way of life all but destroyed completely overcame any homesickness (I thought). I was lucky. I escaped-- I was gone while the going was good. I wasn't there to see the city I loved infested with a McDonald's, the school system sunk, even the uniforms gone. For a long time, I felt a sort of echoing horror at my home being destroyed, really, so I just told myself I felt relieved. After all, I don't have to go there-- they don't even recognize me as a citizen, so I have nothing to do with them-- and I won't have to see any of this. Good riddance to bad rubbish!

But the fact is, Moscow is a part of me. It's not about whether I grew up in New York or Moscow, but New York and Moscow, Moscow and New York, and it was always both, inseparable. There's no separating parts of me, no pretending the first 11 years of my life didn't exist-- and pretending is exactly what I tried to do, and in many ways am still trying to, every day. Every day I avoid telling people I'm from anywhere but New York if they ask, every day I feel shame/chagrin if I do slip up and mention it, every day I immerse myself into an identity that 'feels like me', a basketcase geek, Trekkie, yaoi and fantasy addict, with all the Russian parts edited out, even though every fantasy-- and every story-- I'm into began with Russian fairy-tales.

It probably wouldn't be such a problem-- I don't think it was for my mom, and she still spent most of her life there, much more time than me-- except I'm just naturally fixated on the idea of 'home'. I mean, it's not that I miss speaking Russian, reading Russian books, talking to Russian people-- for me, all those things are easy to give up. For me, it was always about place-- my sense of place.

Russia is largely a place to me-- a whole mythology and psychology and sociology, living and breathing, impossible to pack up, impossible to continue in a vibrant way elsewhere. It needs the misty Russian fields with those beautiful slender birch trees (and the birch is still my favorite tree, probably), the distant vision of gold and blue church cupolas, the beautiful metro stations in Moscow and the horrendous snow-storms every winter. It's not that I somehow 'escaped' my memories of my first home; it's that I loved it so much, something in me quietly broke when I left, so quietly I barely noticed, and it couldn't survive in the same way elsewhere, like a wild flower that couldn't make it as a potted plant. I remember Russia, I remember my childhood, but I can't go back-- I can't be the way I was anymore than I can speak fluent Russian anymore. The language dried up in me from disuse, but I still understand every word that my mother speaks. I still know Russia intimately, I think. It is just that I myself have been muted. And even if I came back-- even if I returned, Russia is no longer the country I left. There is no going back; no speaking the very same language I spoke as a child, really. Subtly but truly, it would be a different language, if I was to be fluent again.

But Russia is also a concept-- a series of concepts, an idea, and it's not an easy or pleasant one. In some ways it's really hard to be nostalgic about a place that is so unabashedly, endlessly brutal. Russia is brutal, just as New York City is, except more with the deep down drowning despair and less with the mad rush of manic scrambling to survive. In fact, if any part of me is brutal (and I know there are some parts like that), I like to think now that maybe I can blame it on Russia. :) It's a country and a people who are deeply divided, deeply frustrating, deeply suffering. It's like that state of simultaneous laughter and tears, joy and despair, bitterness and bittersweetness-- a sort of music in hopelessness. It's definitely no accident Russians drink so much, Russian men die early, and most Russians don't really even expect their lives to change except when they're nihilistically fighting for change, for a better life, even knowing it's hopeless and possibly dangerous to their health. The whole concept of 'a happy Russian' is a bit funny, even. Not like Russians are intrinsically any more depressed than any other people; but Russia is a pretty depressing place, though not simply so. Not something that evokes merely pity or charity, like a run-down third-world country, because of course Russia is brilliant and cultured and proud. It's a train-wreck, quite frankly. It's not really just my imagination that perhaps it's healthier to just forget it exists as much as possible, because like I said, Russia is brutal. Even the idea of it. In many ways, it really is true: the degree to which I'm brutal is the degree to which I'm Russian, as is the converse: the degree to which I'm kind is the degree to which I'm Russian.



I think there's this outpouring of Russophilia (don't expect to ever see it again) because of this quote on the blog about the first glimpse of Russia:
     I remember looking out the window of our airplane as we flew in to Moscow, and I could feel this kind of aching pit in my heart. As I look at the little red roofed dachas, black soil and deep green patches of forrest, I thought, “Uh-oh, I’m not going to be able to let go of this place.” And that deep, aching adoration for the place has only intensified.
    This is exactly the feeling I had on my first sight of England, exactly the ridiculous head-over-heels adoration I have for England which no one I'm mentioned it to seems tounderstand. People say 'but England is a dried-up imperialist power' and 'their TV isn't as good as it used to be', which is, sorry, missing the point entirely. But to love a place like this, so deeply and Quixotically and impossibly-- that is something I understand.

It's like I love places differently; Russia, I do love, in the exact same aching painful way you love someone when you're a child or young teen, and they die or just go away forever, or you're forced to part: you'll never feel the same way about anyone else, and something in you would never quite heal from the shock of losing something before you could understand or integrate such loss, the ache of remembering feelings from a time when you hadn't yet learned self-defense, but the only sane thing to do is move on, or it'll destroy you.

England I love also with the last pure passion of childhood, because I was in love with its stories and fairy-tales from some of the very first things I'd read and imagined. Just like with Russia, it's not that I'm blind to flaws, far from it-- it's that flaws are nothing to this deep of a love, this bondedness with a place with a fervent purity you have a hard time understanding or duplicating when you grow older. England-- and Scotland and Ireland, to some degree-- call to me; whisper to me that they know me, they love me, they can heal me. It is that aching, trembling, overwhelmed devotion described in the quote: your second love, when you'd given up hope and then realized that home is a place in the heart, after all.


Japan I love sweetly, and from a distance; it is a late-adolescent type love, admiring and shy, courteous and a bit punch-drunk. A love built on differences and only stoked by the chasm between you. The exoticism in combination with a hint of kindred spirits. The intoxication of the mysterious and the fascination of a place you learn to know, which rewards you with that knowledge.

America I love conflictedly, just like one's husband, the person you settle down with and whose flaws are all too apparent but whose beauties too easy to forget. America, in its way, is as alien to me in temperament as Japan, and yet in many ways the differences are also endearing and fascinating. The friction between the parts of me that are of this country & the parts that never can be-- that is something that's a constant source of growth and movement in me. And it's impossible not to love the sheer scope and breadth and hope at the heart of this huge land: the endlessness of it, the hugeness of its dreams. In that, I am most at home here, after all. Does it even need to be said that it's beautiful? So different, so wide, so broad, from desert to rainforest, you can feel like you've travelled the ecosphere just going cross-country, and in my case across Washington State. The sky itself feels literally bigger, especially driving over the desert or staring out across the Grand Canyon, or into the horizon at the ocean shore. The land stretches and stretches and stretches, like there's no end to it, and you can just keep walking and walking and never find yourself any closer to your destination. It's easy to get lost here; easy to disappear.

It feels like everything is possible here, in a way it's not anywhere else. The dreams are bigger, the sky is wider, the faith is nearer that the darkness can be beaten back. Only an American could come up with Star Trek, I think. And that is all the more striking for all the dark and shameful things in the country's past and present. It is at least partly because of the pedestal it's on that America is always on the verge of falling. But the dream at the center of the land isn't something that's tied to any particular political or cultural epoch, and certainly economic period. If America survived slavery and the atom bomb, it could certainly survive something like the rise of China, or George Bush.

That said, the land is too huge for me to love with the intimacy I could bring to Russia or England or Japan. There is everything here, and sometimes it feels like there's nothing (for me) here. So I can say I love one thing at a time: the Pacific Northwest, the coast of Northern California, the desert around the Grand Canyon, the quiet hills of Pennsylvania, the forests of New England, the cold sea off New York. This country is so huge, it's swallowed me long ago and I've only started to find myself, but here I am: right next to the Olympic mountains, on the coast of Puget Sound. I like it here, and it's home enough for now.