One Giant Steppe for Mankind: October 2014

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Orienting

One month into the grant period (at the beginning of October), the US Fulbright grantees to Ukraine had orientation in Kyiv. I’ve been to L’viv, a Western city with old European charm, which is largely hailed to be the most beloved city to visit in Ukraine. I also have gotten relatively comfortable in my placement city, Dnipropetrovsk, an Eastern city with old Soviet industrial (charm?) influences. Kyiv appeared to be a seamless combination of both the West and East.

Maidan Memories

We visited Maidan, the site of the chaos that ensued this past winter. Our hotel was right around the corner. The most interesting part was how clean everything was. You would never know anything had happened, that is, until you see the memorials lining one of the avenues where the Heavenly Hundred were killed. Each photograph had the person’s name, age, profession, and home city. The biographical and profession information added a personal dimension to each face, and further, the listing of each victim’s home city added an undeniable sense of patriotism. The US Fulbright grantees to Ukraine are scattered around the country and we hail from varying oblasts. We saw victims from most, if not all, of our home-oblasts. Ukraine is the largest country lying entirely within the continent of Europe and these victims, though numerous and disparate, serve as a symbol of nationalism.

Maidan nightlife. Note the Ukrainian flag colors on the right building
The guy with the fire was actually a street performer.
Needless to say, the police were all over him in seconds. It was quite the scene.

(From rt.com) Before and after from February/March
This is from the opposite side of the square from my picture above
Use the tower/statue for reference

On the Waterfront

Continuing with the politically sensitive section of this post, we were also “fortunate(?)” enough to visit the former residence of former Ukrainian president Yanukovich. This is the place plenty of people saw on the news when Ukrainians stormed the estate after Yanukovich made some less than agreeable decisions and fled the country. I believe CBS did a special on this place since it was the first time the public had access and the findings were awesome, including a zoo of exotic animals. This is the lasting product of corruption and the tax money of the Ukrainian people, and the adjectives I have for it are beautiful, diverse, opulent, and awful. One of the best parts of this excursion was paying the entrance fee. They are using the funds to assist refugees from Eastern Ukraine, so I could not have been happier to help this estate give back to its people.

Fall Foliage; Professional-quality golf course to the left

The front of the main house

Wedding party using the grounds for a photo shoot

Geology Alert! Imported rocks and minerals for decoration
My on-the-spot analysis: LEFT: Top, granite; Middle, something sodalite-based; Bottom, alkali feldspar granite
RIGHT: assorted marbles
(However, I did alert the tour guide to not go around calling things granites and marbles willy nilly)

The back of the main house, overlooking the Dnipro; note the confused architectural style

What Lies Beneath

The metro system lived up to its reputation. The system itself is a worthwhile tourist attraction, and at less than a 20-American cent entrance fee, you can't beat it! Although I didn’t get to visit some of the reportedly more beautiful stations, I was thoroughly impressed with the ones I did see. The absurdly long escalator rides down were also quite enjoyable. Not that putting your hand on a public escalator handrail is ever an advisable or pleasant experience, but these were entertaining. These moving handrails were never in sync with the stairs, so keeping track of your hand before inadvertently gliding into a stranger was critical. The best moment came on the metro when a fellow Fulbrighter who is from Boston referred to the subway as the T by complete accident. I didn’t even realize until no one else understood what the T was supposed to mean. Boston Strong.

One of the endless escalators
(I think we were already a quarter of the way to the top at this point)

Metro station; I forgot which one

Another metro station. I forgot again.
Perhaps Khreshchatyk (the main avenue of Kyiv)

Sunset in the Motherland

The Mother Motherland statue was quite impressive. It is the headpiece of a museum commemorating the losses on the Eastern Front of World War II. Some might even call her the Ukrainian Statue of Liberty (in physical presence, not historical relevance). Seeing her peek over the hill and through the trees as the sun began to set was a great sight after such a long walk.

Rodina Mat', "Mother Motherland" Statue

Cultural Enlightenment

Orientation at the United States Embassy/the Fulbright office was exhausting, yet enlightening and truly helpful. We have an incredibly talented group of students and scholars, whom I’m excited to work with and stay friends with in the future. Some of the scholars and students are descendants of the Ukrainian diaspora and they truly did feel like family. I have always known the stories of how my Ukrainian grandparents got to be where they ended up in the US and how my mother and her siblings were raised. However, since I was removed from the greater Ukrainian community in the US, I’ve never met anyone who can relate to those same stories. I found myself explaining things to them, at which point they would cut me off and finish the story for me because their grandparents had experienced similar journeys.

Possibly one of the most fascinating moments of not only this trip, but my life, was when I heard these “diaspora” people speak Ukrainian. I’ve heard roughly three different types of Ukrianian while here. (1) In L’viv, Western “L’vivski” Ukrainian- which is “Polishified”, (2) In Dnipropetrovsk only when I ask because they really only speak Russian here, Eastern Ukrainian- which is “Russified”, and (3) Surzhyk (still hard for me to recognize, but I know it exists and I’ve even spoken it by accident a couple of times)- a Ukrainian-Russian hybrid, literally just mixing elements of both in conversation, which is technically not a feasible way to be speaking in general. Throughout hearing these three variants, I knew they were roughly the same language my mother spoke with my grandmother. Yet when I heard these diaspora descendant US Fulbrighters, it all clicked. The first moment I heard each of them speak, I knew that it was the Ukrainian variation that my mother/grandma use/used. They used certain phrases and said things in a particular way that was unique to my mother and babcha for me up to this point. It was incredible. I later learned that these people are like linguistic time capsules because they preserve the type of Ukrainian that existed in the motherland when the diaspora occurred. Their Ukrainian is essentially the Ukrainian of Western Ukraine in the late 1940s/early 50s. My mother even admits sometimes after Skyping with our family in L’viv that they laugh when she uses certain phrases or words because no one uses them in Ukraine anymore.

Cultural Confusion

On one hand it felt like meeting long-lost cousins (which is funny because there is some distant chance that we are related in some far-off generation), but on the other hand I still felt like an outsider (in a very similar way that I had felt like an outsider at Chinese Student Association meetings at BC) . They all speak the language, whether fluently or with some basic level of proficiency and I’m still working on my academic Russian. They also grew up deeply immersed in Ukrainian culture by going to Ukrainian school and Ukrainian camp (which is a whole other world of cultural immersion). Meeting these people answered a lot of questions for me, but definitely left me searching myself for more in terms of cultural identity.

I’ve lived my entire life in the USA wearing three ethnic hats. Whether wearing them simultaneously (at a big family Thanksgiving with turkey, pierogis, and spring rolls), or flipping them on and off (blessing Easter baskets and rushing to Flushing for a belated Chinese New Year celebration) they have always been within arm’s reach. For the first time in my life I feel that two of those hats are just outside of reach. I have yet to meet any Americans living in Dnipropetrovsk and the nearest American Fulbrighters are hours away from me. I have met a student from China but he only spoke Mandarin and Russian. How strange was that for me? I found in one-person the two languages that currently out-populate the traditional languages of my parents, Cantonese and Ukrainian. I feel that my hat of Ukrainian ethnicity is dominantly going to be on my head for the upcoming months. Still, I am planning some lectures, not only at my university but hopefully at other Fulbrighters’ universities, on cultural identity and being multiracial. Therefore, I will get more comfortable integrating these ethnicities into my presence here. After all, part of my responsibility is to communicate American culture in addition to English language and being multiracial is a quintessential part of American culture today. (That, and I will likely have to vocalize my dim-sum withdrawal syndrome at some point. The struggle has never been more real).

The Kyiv trip was full of awesome experiences and this post was dedicated to digesting them. Therefore, stay tuned for another post (hopefully soon) about the life and times of Dnipropetrovsk.

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Here are some additional pictures,