My husbands Russian teacher in college asked him to invite me to speak to the class and answer some questions. When I got their list of questions that had a lot to do with differences between being Russian and being American and culture shocks I realized how disappointed they are going to be in me and here is why.
I was born in Russia in 1988, just before the Soviet Union collapsed. My earliest memories are of the 90s, when the country was both struggling and roaring at the same time. There were lines for groceries and clothes, and sometimes we had to go all the way to Moscow to find what we needed. At the same time, new markets were springing up everywhere. It felt chaotic but alive. One of the clearest memories I still carry is my dad finally getting his salary after months of delays. A big part of it was paid in coins because the government somehow did not have enough paper money. He brought them home in his black briefcase, heavy and rattling like it was full of rocks. That image never left me.
And yet, alongside all of that scarcity, Russia was opening. I still remember the excitement around the first McDonald’s. Trying fries, burgers and milkshakes that we had only ever seen on TV or on fuzzy videotapes that were a copy of a copy passed around like contraband felt like touching another world. It was exciting, exotic, cool.
By the mid-90s, Russian television was exploding. A lot of what we watched were remakes, copies or dubbed versions of shows from abroad like American game shows (think Wheel of Fortune), Latin American soap operas, things pulled from Eastern Europe. They were everywhere. And as the market opened wider, we also got access to the internet, to language programs and trips abroad, to more direct streams of culture. Russian schools already had a strong tradition of foreign language study, and I was lucky to be in specialized schools that invested heavily in it. That gave me an opening. My English was strong early, which meant that when the internet came along, I could dive right into global culture.
By 14, I had a blog. I was sitting in our dingy school computer lab posting on US forums. I was obsessed with Linkin Park and joined their fan forum, the Linkin Park Street Team. That was my portal into early internet culture. I was not really learning it, I was taking part in its shaping. At the same time, I was glued to MTV: Cribs, My Sweet Sixteen, Becoming, the VMAs. We were watching and listening the exact same things American kids were watching and listening. That overlap still surprises me. My husband grew up in Baltimore and never saw Russia until adulthood. I have not stepped a foot in the US until I was 19. Yet we quote the same episodes of Friends, laugh at the same South Park jokes, remember the same music videos. Somehow our cultural foundations are identical, even though we grew up an ocean apart. It’s wild.
I realize now that I was part of a very narrow slice of a generation. We had access to good language training, western television, and the early internet. I was watching Beavis and Butthead, Celebrity Deathmatch, The Simpsons, often in English, which meant my parents had no idea what I was absorbing. It was not that we were special little snowflakes, just that we grew up in rare circumstances most Russian kids did not share.
That is why, when people tell me I do not seem like what they expect a “Russian person” to be, I understand what they mean. Not because there is one way Russians are supposed to be, but because I grew up in not traditional Russian circumstances. It was a fluke. I am part of that thin slice of Russian millennials who were raised on the same culture as Americans my age. Because of that, I never felt like a typical “Russian immigrant.” I should acknowledge that growing up in a Jewish family in Russia was also different from those we’re not not Jewish but that realization did not dawn on me until I came to the US and I’m not sure to what extent it’s responsible for me unwittingly “americansing” myself. When I lived in England I was always uncomfortable. Nothing felt familiar. The accents annoyed me, the cultural rhythms did not match me. I felt like a guest who could not quite settle in. Yes, some of the quirks were funny, like having to buy a license for a television, but it was more than that. The place just never clicked.
When I came to America, it was the opposite. I landed in Baltimore on July 4, 2008, and I instantly understood. Usually when you immigrate there is a long period of confusion as you try to figure out how things work, how people interact, how to navigate the bureaucracy. I never had that here. From the beginning, everything felt natural. Every time I left and came back, it felt like coming home. Even when I ran into the uglier parts of America, I was not shocked or disillusioned. If anything, those moments motivated me to dig in and do more to make things better. That is the difference. In England, I had to fight for every ounce of belonging. In the US, I never had to fight. It was seamless. It was familiar. It felt like the life I had been preparing for without knowing it. And maybe that is exactly what happened. All those years of consuming American culture in Russia… MTV, sitcoms, the internet, the music, the slang were sort of my preparation. Moving here did not feel like starting over. It felt like stepping into a place I already knew, like finding where I belonged.
That is probably also why I do not relate to many of the struggles other immigrants talk about, and why I do not participate in Russian community groups. I just do not feel that same connection. At this point, I have lived in the United States longer than I have lived anywhere else. When I look at my life, the majority of it has already been spent inside American culture. It makes sense that this is home.