stereotypes

в 1996 в Рочестере я оказалась одной из первых россиянок из пост-Советской России. были ребята иммигрировашие со своими родителями в Бруклин и несколько лет раньше, были ребята из Казахстана и Узбекистана, но вот так вот что прямо из Питера в Рочестер -- таких не было.
от меня ждали, что я буду представлять россию в буквальном смысле. например, организация международных студентов устраивала костюмированную вечеринку, где всем студентам предлагалось нарядиться в национальные костюмы. у многих студентов из индии были с собой сари, с удовольствием переодевались и студенты из японии, малайзии. а мне что делать? надевать кокошник и сарафан, что ли?? (когда-то в моём счастливом советском дествте мы с мамой сооурдили изумительный кокошник из картона и бисера, но даже вспоминать об этом было как-то неловко). я принялась объяснять всем, что на самом деле, я из еврейской семьи, и вообще в пост-советской россии национальные костюмы это отстой. пироги я тоже не пекла, а борщ хоть и приходилось готовить, но это потому, что особого выбора не было.

на вечеринку национального костюма я не пошла, хотя на красивые сари посмотреть и хотелось, но долго проблему игнорировать тоже не получалось. жизнь в россии интересовала всех поголовно, от парней в общежитии до моих профессоров и начальниц в библиотеке, куда я устроилась работать. а что в россии едят на завтрак ланч и обед? в россии правда все очень умные? ты наверное с детства танцуешь в балете и занимаешься фигурным катанием?
чтобы как можно вежливее объяснить свой отказ одевать кокошник, я быстро научилась при первой же встерче с новым человеком представляться иначе: я не из россии, а из петербурга, балет не люблю, люблю Битлз, и вообще я не русская, а из еврейской семьи, бОльшая часть которой находится в израиле. впрочем, с таким ответом тоже время от времени случались проколы. как, например, при встерче с дейвом, который вырос в еврейской семье под Филадельфии и не понаслышке знал об иудаизме. при разговоре с ним быть еврейкой по паспорту становилось тоже как-то неловко. в питере, в моём окружении, были ребята, которые ездили в сохнутские лагеря и которые занимались в синагоге. я была не из их числа.
не помню, подсказал ли мне кто-то, обсуждалось ли это, скажем, на занятиях международного бизнеса, или я со временем сама догадалась, что стереотипы трудно разрушить, отвечая в лоб на продиктованные ими вопросы. а может быть, это урок из крёстного отца, it's not personal it's just business. вопрос -- признак заинтересованности собеседника, и нечего злиться и раздражаться, когда тебе в очередной раз предлагают водку на вечерине. водку со льдом, т.к. россияне привыкли к холоду.
поиск креативных ответов на продиктованные стереотипами вопросы -- вот, на самом деле, огромный стимул к творчеству

air-conditioning

In August 1996, Rochester was oppressively hot and humid. The heat caused me considerable discomfort the following summer, and during all three summers that I spent in Rochester without air-conditioning, but when I think of my first summer days in Rochester, it's not the heat that comes to mind, but the cold.
I'd never been exposed to air-conditioning before. I'd hardly been aware of the existence of air-conditioning as a practical technology outside of science fiction novels. Not even my father's car had an air-conditioner. For one week a year when the weather in St. Petersburg climbed into the 70s, people took cold showers and made cold soup for dinner.
Every indoor space in Rochester seemed air-conditioned on high (except, later, it turned out, student housing). My host parents took me to Wegmans, K-Mart, Sam's Club, and all I remember is being extremely uncomfortable and wanting to get back outside into the heat. From the store to the back seat of the car, where I was also too cold. I soon learned that I wasn't supposed to open the car window when the air-conditioning was on. They explained that the air-conditioning had levels, and tried to adjust the blowers just right, but I wasn't used to having a blower directed at my face, and so couldn't tell whether the temperature was too hot or too cold. It was just wrong.
When the time came to go to orientation at RIT, I put on my stockings and heels, suffering through the day of being alternatively too cold inside and too hot outside. How did people manage stockings in these conditions? It turned out, they didn't. Most of the students around me, men and women, wore jeans with something that looked like oversized pajamas on top. T-shirt was a new word in my vocabulary. Another new word: sneakers. These were what I considered gym shoes. Few women wore make-up, unless they put it on so carefully that I didn't even notice.
I recalled having a conversation with a friend, back in St. Petersburg, about her aging grandmother, who, though she hadn't left the house in some years, began each day by putting on her powder and mascara and lipstick. "She just doesn't feel like a human being without it," my friend said. We both agreed: her grandmother was a strong old lady who didn't allow old age to get to her. Wearing make-up to one's dying day was the example of womanhood to aspire to.
The college students around me decidedly treated the college as though it was some kind of country village. The whole atmosphere was very country side. People rode their bikes, lay down to rest on the lawn, and, to my amazement, some even took off their shoes in the classrooms. Campus buildings were surrounded by nature: woods on one side of the property, swamp on the other. I saw a squirrel! There was talk of deer! Having spent every summer of my life in the countryside fifty kilometers north of Petersburg, I'd never seen a deer in my life.
My host family had a decently sized back yard, and it was a sign of true luxury that all of the plants they grew were purely decorative. They could've grown tomatoes and cherries and plums, but they didn't need to.
When the sun neared the horizon, the smell of freshly mowed grass stood in the air. The full sky was brightly lit with stars. I heard chirping of a myriad of voices, which from novels about Ukraine, I decided must've been the cicadas. It was a shame to have to sleep behind the closed window, but because of the air-conditioning, the windows were supposed to stay closed. Intimidated by the machinery of the blinds, I kept them shut too.

life in suburbia

I don't know if the writing skills I've acquired in these twenty years are quite enough to describe the confusion I felt when in 1996, age seventeen, I was overnight transported from post-Perestroika Petersburg to suburban America.
Directly from the airport, my host family took me to Wegmans. The international news reports had so recently been filled with the lines for bread and milk in Russia, and they wanted to show me the best of what America had to offer. (Wegmans is a Rochester-based supermarket chain that was just coming into its prime.) I saw my host parents' desire to please, to impress, and I was duly impressed, no doubt, and I wanted to be grateful. I was also disturbed. Did they think I came to America for the food?
What I came to America for I couldn't have expressed succinctly if asked, but it had something to do with Mark Twain, Jack London, Mayne Reid, even Jules Verne and Alexander Dumas -- all the adventure literature I'd read as a child.
Food wasn't it, but food certainly overwhelmed. "What do you like to eat for breakfast?" my host parents asked. I didn't know how to answer this question. Whatever was available? "Buckwheat" was not yet in my vocabulary, and I didn't particularly want buckwheat. On Sundays, my father used to make eggs sunny-side-up with "hunters sausage"--but that was my father's specialty, and nobody, not I, not my mother, not either of my grandmothers, could quite replicate it. Anyway, I didn't come to America to eat what I was used to. What I was used to was boring; I wanted to try new things.
The host family set out a couple of boxes of cereal in front of me. Probably something like chex and apple jacks and cinnamon toast crunch. The cinnamon taste I decidedly didn't like; everything else was sweet and delicious. Once they left me alone in the house--eventually, in the two weeks that I stayed with them, they had to go to work--I went through every open box in the pantry and every open container in the fridge, trying and re-trying everything. I knew what I was doing was wrong: I was binging and I couldn't stop myself; I was sneaking in foods I hadn't been specifically offered--and I couldn't stop myself. I had few distractions from the fridge. There was nowhere to go from the house without a car. My host family had given me access to a computer and explained how to use a modem, but I didn't fully get it and, anyway, I had only one email address with me--my father's--and I had already written to him. Once I got some paper, I wrote letters to my friends, trying to turn my recent experiences into funny anecdotes. I browsed through the TV channels and watched a couple of shows without understanding what was going on. There were few books in the house, and, anyway, I didn't think my English was good enough to attempt a serious book. The couple of Russian-language books I'd brought with me seemed too outlandish to read in my present circumstances.
One other detail stands out from those two weeks. There were cats in the house--to me, entirely alien beings. I'd never been around cats before, and these two, I now understand, must've missed the previous inhabitant of my room, my host parents' daughter who'd gone off to college. They came into the room looking for her and climbed onto her bed. Of grief, one of them peed onto the blanket. When I discovered the puddle, I was terrified. Was something wrong with the cats? What did I do wrong? What would my host parents think of me? I couldn't face the idea of greeting them when they came home with, "I'm sorry, dear host parents, I'm loving my time in your house, and thank you for being such lovely hosts, but pardon me for saying so, one of your cats peed on my bed today." I didn't want to embarrass them, I didn't want to create a situation, I didn't want to attract even more attention to myself than they were already giving me, I didn't want to admit to not understanding all the things I didn't understand. They already had a lot to explain to me, a lot that I wasn't getting.
I don't know why I couldn't tell them the truth. I just couldn't. So I did the simplest thing I could do: I lugged the blanket to the bathroom and washed the peed-on part in the sink with hand soap. The blanket was a thick down comforter I'd never before encountered and had no idea of how such a thing could possibly be washed. I don't think my host parents had showed me the dryer yet, and even if they did, I would've been to scared to try using it on my own. Having washed the part of the comforter that got wet, I wrung it by hand as well as I could and then put it back on my bed. It was thick and it didn't dry well. I felt lucky that they didn't notice anything was off when they got home, and the cats seemed fine.
That night, I woke up wet and freezing in the middle of the night. My nightgown had soaked through. The airconditioner (another completely new piece of machinery to me) was on high. I got dressed, sneaked to the fridge for some milk and a piece of cheese, and then slept the rest of the night on the rug next to the bed. It was a comfortable cushy rug, perfectly clean except for some cat hair, and it seemed just the right thing for me. With rugs like that, who needed beds? Come the next day, when the comforter started to dry, the cat came back and peed on it again.
Don't get me wrong. I knew that, with time, I would learn and get used to all that seemed alien and strange at the moment. I knew these were misunderstandings I would eventually laugh about. Nevertheless, I was hugely relieved when the time came to move to the dorms.

calling my father

The reason I moved into the dorms so late, arriving there a full month after classes had started in August 1996, was that, according to the arrangement my father had made with the international student office, I was supposed to stay with a local Rochester family for the first year of my college career.
We had corresponded with the family ahead of time. They picked me up from the airport and drove me around town before showing me to their daughter's room, available after their daughter went off to Cornell in Ithaca just a few days earlier. They introduced me to their son, a high school senior, the grandmother who lived in her own apartment in the same house, and two cats. Two days later, they gently asked me whether I was planning to buy a car. A car? I laughed. My father had just bought his first car a couple of years earlier; buying a car was a major life event that surely came after graduation, marriage, apartment, and children.
How was I going to get to RIT then? The family lived in Penfield; RIT was in Henrietta; to get from one to the other I would need to take a bus to downtown Rochester, and from there to the suburban mall, where RIT's shuttle made a stop every hour. In the best case scenario, the route would take me two and a half hours one way. By car, it would take twenty five minutes, but they were not prepared to drive me, back and forth, for the whole year.
What to do? I was raised on my grandparents' stories of overcoming difficulties. My grandmother who survived the Leningrad blockade told a story about how during the war, when the trams had stopped, she had to walk for over an hour in the snow to get to work and an hour back. That narrative was prescient in my mind, and yet I could not quite fathom spending five hours in the bus each day. With a sinking heart, I asked my host parents if they had the bus schedules.
Why don't you call your father and ask if he would agree for you to move into the dorms? my host father suggested. (My host parents had hosted international high school students before, and they knew to speak slowly and in full clauses.)
The idea of calling my father terrified me. I had only been away from home for three days and placing this international call so soon after my departure felt like a major failure. I knew that the call would instantly alarm my entire household. My grandparents were likely to pick up the receiver and wouldn't let me talk to my father directly until I told them first what was wrong. Once I did, their confusion and fear for me would know no bounds. The whole arrangement of staying with the host family had been made just so I wouldn't have to stay in the dorms. Staying with a family and out of the dorms had been the key point, how my parents could convince themselves and my grandparents to let me go away in the first place. My grandparents had had enough of communal living in their lives, and they were forever marred by the experience. In the American dorms, I would surely be exposed to drugs, sex, AIDs. No dorms for the precious child, never. Clearly, they had been justified in thinking it a mistake to let the girl go to the United States. What a wild place it was turning out to be!How was it possible that a major university in a major city had not a better bus service? Surely, the girl had misunderstood something. Surely she was too young and too clueless to fend for herself. My grandparents would prevail and that would be the end of my American adventure. Next thing I knew, I would be on the plane back to Petersburg. Would they let me stay for at least two full weeks?
My host father gently pushed the telephone receiver into my hand and dialed the international connection. The telephone rang. I don't remember who picked up first. My father got to the phone. As coherently as I could, I explained the situation. I remember hearing my grandparents voices in the background, asking, "How is she? How is she?"
"I don't know what to tell you," my father said. "I'm here, and you're there. Do what you think is best."
The conversation didn't go on much longer after that. International telephony was expensive, and the connections scratchy with static. I hung up the phone and turned to my host parents. The decision was mine to make. "Ok. I'm moving into the dorms."
"We'll help you buy everything you'll need," they said.
The actual move, however, took a month to execute. By the time I showed up in the residential facility office, it turned out that no rooms were immediately available. RIT didn't keep a very good track of the dorm spaces they'd assigned. They had rooms, they just didn't know which ones. At the time, something like 60% of incoming freshman class dropped out in the first quarter. I would have to wait until the administration figured out who was still there and who'd already left.
Freshmen who needed housing were temporarily placed in a hotel just off the property. I spent full two weeks with my host family; then, for the next two weeks, I moved into the hotel, sharing a room with a girl from Jamaica.

mapping Rochester

in August 1996, on my Russian map of the world, Rochester, NY looked like a big black dot on the shore of lake Ontario: a city with over a million people. as my father was quick to remind me, in the Soviet Union, a city with over a million residents qualified for the construction of the underground metro. (In contemporary Russia, seven cities have at least one-line subways).
My family members tried to locate Rochester in an encyclopedia and in an atlas. Information was scant. My grandmother with the atlas reported that Rochester lay nearly on the same latitude as Yalta, Crimea: I was going far, far South! A good thing, because I had no room for a winter jacket in my luggage.
I couldn't think "Rochester" without picturing Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre: English, noble with major character flaws, blind.
What else did I know? The names of all the five Great Lakes--we'd memorized them for an exam in my English class. The Pathfinder, a much-beloved novel by James Fenimore Cooper, was set on the shore of Lake Ontario. Niagara Falls.
I recall being surprised that "New York" was a name of a state, as well as a city. I recall being confused about the nature of "states" (America is America is America.) I recall hearing rumors that cities in the US were so clean, people wore white socks outdoors.
Adventurers before me had set forth on far less information.
Rochester, however, turned out nearly beside the point. The town I landed in was Henrietta, NY, where Rochester Institute of Technology's campus was located.
Oh, and speaking of James Fenimore Cooper, let's not forget Mark Twain's essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." According to Twain, Cooper commits 114 out of possible 115 offenses against literary art. To summarize, Twain didn't think much of Cooper's attention to detail.

 

 

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anniversary

coming up this August is the 20th anniversary of my arrival to the United States. i'm giving myself a gift and a challenge of posting some about 1996, in Russian and English.

here's one image I'm working with. Rochester, New York. a dorm hallway. September, a month after classes started. it's late afternoon, lots of kids are at home, doors thrown open, music pouring from each room and clashing. most of the kids in this dorm are men and most of the men are programmers. in each room there's a computer or two. some computers are without their cases, wires exposed, boards flashing. many kids have TVs. the microwave is in the hallway, and from it emanates the smell of popcorn. many kids are on the telephone. many are simply hanging out in the hallway, talking to each other in their brand of English that might as well be Martian for how little I understand it. nobody appears to be studying. in any case, there are lots of people to ask for help. I'm moving in, and I'm lost. the longer I'm walking back and forth, the more attention I attract to myself. 

I'm looking for a staircase to the second floor. the building clearly has a second floor, my instructions clearly state that my room is on the second floor. where is the staircase?

in one end of the hallway, a tall man with long purple hair and wearing a gown of a 19th century grande dame is going on about something to his entourage. I've never seen cross dressers before; I'm not familiar with the idea of gender-fluidity, and so I interpret each of his gestures is a miniature drama. he is a beacon--I recognize this guy, which means I've gone the wrong way again.

(though I'm only now moving into the dorm, I've been at the school since August and have already had the traumatic experience of walking through a closed door marked "Exit" and setting off a terribly shrieking siren. for the moment being, I've decided to assume, incorrectly, that all doors marked "Exit" are armed. generally I prefer to walk only through doors that somebody else has already opened.)

I try not to attract too much attention, but I've got a lot of stuff and I'm making plenty of noise. i'm conscious that the guys are staring at me. I'm 17 years old, hair down below my waist, dressed in a polyester summer dress, black with bright paisley print. (the dress also has shoulder pads--it's 1996.) I'm carrying a large duffel bag over one shoulder, a guitar over the other, and I'm dragging a suitcase (it does NOT have wheels).

one of the kids approaches: hey, I'm Wesley. Do you need help? and then, after I try to explain, what's your accent? where are you from?

he then leads me down the hall and around the corner, where another guy asks if I need help. his name is Dave. apparently my room is just above his.