Russian for Native Speakers

Hobbling through the Yard on a twisted ankle, I had just left the Saturday afternoon performance of Cultural Rhythms with my first interviewee, Lotus Cannon ’14. As we strode through the Science Center Plaza on our way to Pforzheimer for dinner, chatting about LL Cool J and how neither of us could remember any of his songs, Lotus’s phone rang. The caller: her mother. The conversation: unintelligible—at least to me. Russian, interspersed with the occasional English idiom, flowed from her lips, like a bilingual mad-lib.

The American-born daughter of an immigrant mother and an American father, Lotus considers herself a cultural hybrid of sorts. Her mother, Marina, arrived from St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) with the rest of Lotus’s extended family in the late 1980s. Fleeing from religious persecution in the Soviet Union because of her Jewish heritage, Marina arrived in Chicago at the age of 17, struggling to navigate a society in which she neither spoke the language nor understood the culture. She studied hard, eventually earning a master’s degree, and started a family of her own, having Lotus at the age of 21. When Lotus’s biological father left when she was six years old, Lotus grew to see her mother’s second husband, Dmitri—also a Russian immigrant—as her true father. She and her family now live in Edison, New Jersey, her house an island of Russian culture nestled in a predominantly Indian-American neighborhood.

Culturally and linguistically, Lotus had a blended childhood. At home, she communicated with her parents in a mix of Russian and English (“a 60-40 split”), ate predominantly Russian foods (her favorite: her step-father’s “pan-fried pelmeni”), and watched mostly American movies and television (“The Disney Channel and MTV”).

Despite her exposure to both worlds, Lotus says she feels at times like an outsider in each of them. During freshman year, she remembers sitting in Annenberg one day when she overheard two women down from her conversing in Russian. Typically eager to meet new people, Lotus turned to the two, introducing herself with a friendly “'Privet.” The two girls, however, told Lotus that she did not “look Russian,” and abruptly turned away from her after learning that she was both American-born and had Jewish roots. The experience, she notes, made her feel as if her exposure to Russian culture was somehow fraudulent, that she was a cultural impostor.

“Sometimes,” she says, “you feel as if you can’t fully identify with either your American or your foreign side. Russians, when they find out you were born in America, immediately dismiss you for it. And yet, despite having been born and raised in America, there’s always that part of you that shares another perspective, due to the influence of your parents and family.”

Even her name, redolent of “hippies and Pokémon attacks,” often engenders confusion. A common reaction: “Wait, but your last name isn’t Russian, is it? But I thought both your parents were Russian…” Her family has likewise taken to “Russifying” her name. “Lotus” has now become “Lotusya,” “Lota,” “Lotka,” and “Lotachka”—the latter two meaning “boat” in Russian.

Growing up, she was attracted to friends who had similar experiences to hers. Though geographically diverse in their origins, she and her childhood friends bonded through their shared experiences as the children of immigrants. In her aunt, Luba—whom Lotus, because of their small age difference, thinks of more as a sister—Lotus also found a mentor to help bridge the generational gap that she herself sometimes felt with her parents.

“Sometimes I feel as if I have to bridge a sort of cultural divide, justifying American politics and culture to my family just as I have to demystify some parts of Russian culture for my friends,” she notes.

At Harvard, Lotus discovered a community of people with whom she could explore her own hybrid identity after taking Russian for native and heritage speakers during her freshman spring, in which she gained a newfound appreciation for her bilingual background. Among her classmates, she discovered a cohort of peers who had, like her, been raised in a Russian-speaking household or had immigrated to America from Russia at a very young age. While the group differed to some degree in prior exposure to Russian, they bonded together through their joint exploration of the language, exchanging stories of their multicultural upbringings.

"It feels good to meet other people who come from a shared background,” she relates. “As much as I love having a group of diverse friends, it’s comforting knowing people who can identify with the experience of being an American from a Russian immigrant household."

Despite the complications of navigating both identities, Lotus is proud to be Russian and American alike.

“Some parents try to shield their kids from any trace of their immigrant roots in an effort to have them fit in and feel truly ‘American.’ That’s how many of my cousins were raised. It’s only now that I’m realizing how lucky I am to have had those experiences, for which I’m extremely grateful.”

Matthew M. Beck ’14 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.