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…