The Great Awakening
I would like to share a cultural experience, a seemingly usual yet of extreme significance and meaning to me. After the “cultural awakening,” I was not the person I had been before, an ignorant one who never realized what she really is deep inside. Now I would like to share my story, an experience that changed my whole life along with my views of looking at other people with various backgrounds of heritage and origin.
My family and I were on our way to visit Russia for a nice little vacation. Why Russia? Out of all the countries in the world, why did it have to be Russia? We could have gone to Guam or Hawaii to have some fun and get a nice suntan. But no, it had to be Russia. My mother is of German Russian heritage, and my father is pure Korean. Sometimes I just wonder how such different kinds of people were attracted to each other and marry to have me as their lovely daughter. Anyways, so there it is my heritage, half Asian and half German Russian. Inside the plane, I think about what my heritage truly means to me. Of course, it is obvious that I am of German-Russian heritage, but what did it really mean to me? So what if I was German-Russian? I was born in the United States, raised in the United States, and had all my childhood memories and friends in the United States. Except for some occasional German-Russian dishes we had for dinner, such as the Apple Beet Borscht my mother enjoys making, I was no more German Russian than my Asian American friends were. In the plane, my mother told me stories of my Grandfather who passed away when I was only six years old. When we finally got off the plane, my foolish belief that I was not German-Russian at all suddenly disappeared like magic as soon as I smelled the sweet scent of Russia. It was as if I’d been there for a very long time, as if I had lived there. The scent was somewhat familiar, reminding me of someone—indeed, my dear grandfather who passed away years ago, but who continues to remain in my heart and mind somewhere very deep inside. As the inner memories of my grandfather popped out with the reminding scent, the German-Russian inside me started to overwhelm me tremendously. But this was only the beginning of my “cultural awakening” process. My family history goes way back into the 1900s. During World War Two, Joseph Stalin deported my grandfather and many others of his German Russian companions to the far lands of Kazakhstan, Altai Krai, and Siberia, in the fear that the German Russians might aid Hitler’s Nazis. Only about 60 years ago, on Septemper 1, 1941, mass evacuation of approximately 440,000 German Russians was announced by Stalin, and my grandfather had to be deported to a land unknown to him and his fellow brothers. That was the last time he saw his home town where he was born, grew up, and had all his memories to cherish for the rest of his life. Deported in the winter of freezing cold, he was packed into a freight car along with about fifty of his fellows, about to experience a deadly journey which would kill tens of thousands of his kin. The freight car would stop every three or four days, and the officers would provide the “prisoners” with water but nothing else whatsoever. My mother told me that the corpses of the people who died during the journey were left in the cattle wagons or even thrown out in the tracks as if they were mere “things” of insignificance. But to the German Russians, to my grandfather, to me, they were valuable Busenfreunde that rightfully deserved a respectful ritual after death. Estimates from historians indicate that about 40 perent of the German Russian population perished in the process of deportation. Along with such a catastrophe of losing many of their beloved family and friends, the German Russians had been stripped of their citizenship and treated as prisoners, or even like slaves, working in labor camps of the wintry Siberian lands for countless hours. Most of the German Russians, including my grandfather, saw no vision in staying in Russia, a land that provided many memories of childhood, but also the land that caused some of the most greiving occurences in German Russian history. As Stalin died and Khrushchev came to power, some of the restrictions were negated but not fully annulled for German Russians until 1964. Starting in the late 1980s, many people of German Russian heritage emigrated to their ancestors’ homelands in Germany, taking advantage of the Law of Return, a thankful law that grants citizenship to all those who are of German ethnic origin. By the end of 1995, 1.4 million of my maternal ancestors had moved to Germany, and about 1.2 million would remain in the lands of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the Russian Federation. But my maternal grandfather chose to do otherwise, and left for the United States with his wife and daughter, my mother. As my family and I visited the German village of Alexejewka near the Caspian Sea, I felt a sense of blood rushing through my veins, a sense that has been peculiar to me, as I never really experienced it ever in my life before. This is the place, I thought, that my beloved grandfather had been born and grown up in, a place that he cherished and missed so much that he never stopped talking about it even til his last moments. I try to bring out the memory of my grandfather from deep inside somewhere in my heart and mind. And I try to imagine him as a little kid, running around, playing with his dear Busenfreunde in this very place that I stand with pride and ineffable excitement. And without even realizing it myself, I start to understand my grandpa’s joy, values, and grief all interrelated with one another, in this place that I stand this very moment. Now, I reflect, I can finally call myself a German Russian without hesitation. After all, I was German Russian from the very birth of my existence. Even when I was born in Evergreen hospital downtown, even when I was shopping for homecoming clothes with my American friends, or even when I was preferring Mcdonalds to my mother’s Apple Beet Borscht I had been German Russian in the inside all along. I just never realized it until very recently. And I value the cultural discovery more than anything I have ever experienced in life. I thank my grandfather who gave me the chance to reflect on his memories and family history. Now I shall value and treasure my heritage. Now I shall look to other people with varied ancestry and background with the highest regard. Now I daresay I am proud to be what I am—a German Russian.
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