Marina
Mikhalchenko
SLAV 470
11.21.2007
Report
#2: Identity
There are three cases
that I’d like to consider for this report.
The three cases are all of the transition from Russia to America, but
differ from each other in certain key factors, mainly the generation that each
person belongs to and the motivation driving each person to make this
transition. My choice of the
Russia/America interaction might seem banal, but my desire was to write on
something that I had a more or less a deepened understanding of, to be able to
make my own written analysis of something that has generally been relegated to
the realm of inner contemplation and situations of social anecdote
exchange. The three cases I choose to
look at are of my mother, of me, and of a girl by the name of Natalie who was
adopted from the Crimean region at the age of seven.
I begin by looking at my mother,
Olga. Her desire to learn English (and
German) arouse at an early age of around thirteen. To her, the study of a “western” language meant the possibility
of travel, and if not that, then the possibility of at least engaging with a
world that existed outside of the boundaries of the Soviet Union. This world did not need to be a real one. The requirement was that it be “elsewhere.”
To some degree, this attitude, this motivation that was acquired when she was a
teenager still shapes her vision of America. Though she was actually able to
accomplish her childhood goal of moving to America and starting her own
company, which seemed a preposterous idea at the time, this idea of “elsewhere”
continues to define America for her. What this means is that the America she
inhabits now can, in no way, be real, since, for so long, it was a mythical
land of opportunity, a category of the mind more than a real place that humans
inhabited. In a way, such a
dehumanization of a country rendered the culture of that country a formula of a
sort. Thus, English became the language
of engaging with that formula. For her,
it was the language of commerce, of the free market, of travel, and,
essentially, of success.
To answer the question
that Pavlenko raises in chapter one of Bilingual Minds, my mother does
not feel or consider herself to be a different person when speaking Russian and
English. I think that this is mainly
due to the fact that her English-learning was done with a specific purpose,
namely to somehow use it to later succeed economically, and all within the
context of her high school and university studies in Russia. In effect, the “English-speaking” personality
became only a magnification of a certain aspect of her already more or less
developed “Russian” personality. Since
her interest was in commerce, she learned to speak and think like a
middle-class business-minded American entrepreneur. As her skill in English developed, though, this entrepreneur
personality infringed upon her Russian world and slowly began to take
over... From my perspective, basing my
opinion on personal observation and stories of family members, it seems that
the major change in her throughout the last thirty years was this gradual
progression to aligning more and more with the “English” personality alluded to
above. In fact, when she was little,
and all through her teenage years, she was encouraged to attend acting school,
because she was so shy and had great difficulty interacting with other people
her age. She made great friends with
teachers and with books. It was when
she began studying English and embracing her vision of what the culture was, of
picturing herself interacting with and acting within this culture, that she
began to emerge as the ultra-gregarious and extrovert person that everyone
knows her to be today. Really, she is
over the top and, in the marketing arena…this really works for her. The
critical element here, though, is a consciousness of her own performance in
English. Perhaps, though, it would be better to say… of her own need to
perform in English (which is then adopted into Russian). This acting was an asset and a defining
element of her English-learning in Russia, and this is also where things go
weird with her “Russian personality.” The kind of performance that is necessary
in, for example, American polite language, is seen as artificial and mocking in
Russian. In any case, it will simply
not be understood as any kind of a normal interaction. This is the part where one can see the
unified personality of my bilingual mother – the same cultural script is used,
regardless of whether she is speaking English or Russian.
The second case that I would like to
consider is that of myself…oi, how pretentious it sounds, though! While my
mother made a conscious dive into the Anglophone world, I simply chose to adapt
to it once I was thrown into it. My
adaptation necessarily meant an abandonment of all things Russian. So, for eight years, no memory of Russia, as
far as I can remember, crossed my mind or penetrated me in a way that it
actually launched me into a different, “Russian,” mindset. It doesn’t mean that I did not ever think of
my family in Russia…but it simply never occurred to actually call. They and the world they lived in belonged to
a hazy memory, like a book that I had read half a decade ago. They weren’t real. They were in my mind.
Their universe was not developed as mine, since they did not exist
outside of my mind. Understanding this
cognitive trick helps me understand something that I could not make any sense
of for some time…I am referring to a particular reaction I had while first
flying back to Russia at the age of 18 (I left when I was 10). It was not difficult to imagine myself
taking a random flight across the world…that was part of my “American”
personality, but it was difficult to imagine that I would actually interact
with real people. Hearing Russian on
the airplane, listening to the Aeroflot stewardess offering me a hot towel
struck me as a sudden sensation of being involuntarily stripped of my clothing…What
are these people doing in my head??!!! Why am I naked!?!? What right do they
have!!!...initial surprise and pure indignation of my imminent vulnerable
state, even anger and disgust at feeling exposed, struck me with a hard
blow. Was I imagining these people?
Somehow, they seemed a little different than my imagination. I simply had no skills to deal with “real
life” Russian people, they had always lived inside me as memories. Now they were emerging out of me…was I
creating them?...and speaking back. Scary…Horror, even. To me, the fact that they (the people on
the airplane) were emerging out of my head meant that they knew what was going
on inside my head…They see my thoughts.
I felt the need to hide and couldn’t escape the sense of being exposed
(…exposed to myself, since they emerged out of me? It’s almost as if I was rebelling against myself, then.) The
other factor contributing to this impression, besides inexperience and lack of
contact with any kind of a Russian community, was that I couldn’t speak the
language. Like a dog, my ears were
attentive, my mouth muzzled, unable to speak ‘human.’ A smile and a head nod were the only tools available to me at
that moment. I took the hot towel from the stewardess.
Once I was able to
recall some kind of a lexicon in what was once my mother tongue, I realized
that the lexicon was that of a ten-year old…that’s common enough, but the other
thing that hit me is that there was already a code of behavior that was somehow
encompassed within my particular way of talking. Not only was a code of behavior encompassed, though, but also a
certain kind of a mental state. As
psychotic as it may seem, I understood that I was responding to my family as a
shy ten-year old and that which I was experiencing in interacting with them
greatly exceeded my child’s lexical ability to process it. I had to write my diary in English. Then it made sense. I wanted to interact with them as an adult,
but no adult personality was available to me in Russian. I had to create
one…and once I began speaking the language, I realized that, through it, I had
inherited a little sister (this is all metaphorical, of course). We had some kind of a similar genetic code,
but we were different people. My emotions made sense in English, but, in
Russian, I was a confused little girl.
Articulation created reality. It was better at times to keep silent
instead of uttering something in a wrong way and then feeling like I have to
walk through this lexical labyrinth that was just created by me. The utterance would come of its own
volition, but then…I still had to make sense of it, once it came out…and this
seemed like a totally separate process.
I had to rely on my memory of the words, a memory that was only
partially accessible. Re-learning
Russian was reawakening Russian in me…and when it came to the surface, when I
was able to perceive this Russian audibly, I realized that the utterance often
came as a surprise to me.
The third case that I would like to
present here is of a girl by the name of Natalie. She, along with older sister and two other children, were adopted
by an American family, where the father was German and the mother
American. Neither one spoke
Russian. Natalie was seven at the time
of the adoption, she is sixteen now.
Her adopted parents launched into the idea of adopting children from
Russia because of their extensive experience, extending to over twenty years,
with working with children and youth from all kinds of backgrounds. The ones with the most difficult lives were
the most interesting ones, so, when choosing whom to adopt, they were
particularly drawn to some of the more “problematic” ones. In Natalie’s case…well, she had several
attractive qualities: tuberculosis, categorized as officially retarded, minimal
language capability. These qualities,
however, worked in combination to condense a nine-month long process to a
period of three weeks.
Once she arrived in the States, she
was immediately tested for all of these things and it was discovered that her
motor skills were fine, she was able to respond to various social promptings
appropriately, but her vocabulary had consisted of less than one hundred words
in Russian. These words were a random
sample of things like “carrots,” “eat,” “come,” etc. that she would hear on a
constant basis at the orphanage where she spent a couple of years. The minimal vocabulary, as was discovered,
was due to practically not being spoken to until the age of eight, when she was
actually already in America. Certainly,
this has had a profound effect on her ability to pick up English vocabulary in
the nine years that she has lived here, even being part of a very tight-knit
community. The second element to play a
significant role, as I understand, was the fact that, due to a poorly matched
medical treatment, she actually experienced puberty at the age of eight, and,
in two years, went from a gangly 35-lbs-er to a fully developed teenager. At the age of nine, she wore a 36-C bra
size.
What I aim to highlight here is
simply how different Natalie’s case is, in terms of the motivation and volition
behind engaging in learning English and Russian, from that of my mother’s and
mine. In all three of our cases, there
has been a gradual transition from a native Russian
personality/mentality/attitude to a learned, and preferred, American one. My mother sees herself and is perceived by
others as belonging much more to America than Russia, though she retains an
accent when speaking English. This is
true for me as well, though I have a barely noticeable (if at all) accent. Both my mother and I are able to and do
engage in both languages and cultures on a daily basis. For Natalie, however, there is no such
choice. There is neither the choice to
choose which language to engage in, nor the opportunity to feel as if she fully
belongs to either of the cultures.
Simply put, she is branded as being Russian when speaking English for having
a thick accent and a stunted understanding of grammar, and she is branded when
speaking Russian, for the mere fact that she never got to develop her
vocabulary beyond those initial hundred words, most of which have faded into
oblivion anyway. Essentially, only one
of these options is open to her.
Namely, she is only able to engage in the American culture at this
point, and she is necessarily perceived as Russian while doing so. She is very
responsive to music, so the actual phonetics of Russian do produce a different
emotional state in her, though she is unable to really explain what that means…she
sees pictures in her head, a film of her life there, of her family, rolls
through her mind…