Matushka Rossiya (Mother Russia)

By now I'm used to the perfectly uniform rows of two-storey plastic doll houses with neatly cut green lawns on most streets of suburban Americana.  Sometimes I'm even comforted by this vision of prosperous conformity, with every citizen religiously mowing their lawns and sprucing up their garden patches on a weekend.  However, it still feels fake, like living a doll life in a doll house of some Barbie commercial, complete with a cute plastic Barbie-mobile and Barbie's Furry Friend pet cat.  (Ken is mostly at work).  After all these years of living in Suburbia, my heart still yearns for the chaotic urban noise, graffiti, and crowded streets.

Hence, I'm repeatedly struck by the bouts of nostalgia and yearning for the stone buildings with fleshy and muscular caryatids holding up the century-old homes of history. Mind you, those never existed in my provincial Russian hometown of Belgorod, which was filled with the Soviet Realist architecture and ugly 5-storey cardboard cutout apartment houses, lovingly dubbed Khrushchevka, as they sprouted like unwanted weeds during Khrushchev's reign in the 1960s. (For more on pictures of typical Soviet and Russian architecture, click here.)






No, what I'm yearning for is the perfectly preserved pieces of memory of some of the beautiful cities visited during my childhood, like Odessa in Ukraine, a loudmouthed melting pot of Jews, Greeks, Germans, Turks, Ukranians, Russians, etc., and Riga, a polished, reserved, and cultured capital of Latvia.  For fear of a huge culture shock, I dread visiting my hometown and all the people left behind, so the perfect solution to my worsening nostalgia is to visit the next best thing - my childhood havens.

Riga has been on my mind for several years.  I get struck by a vision of its cobblestoned streets of the Old Town, while I'm teaching a class, or I get a whiff of a salty Baltic sea air, while grocery shopping in Wegmans.  It seems I simultaneously lead two lives, one in America, and another in Riga, in some other parallel dimension.  The obssession with Riga has become so bad, that I'm struck by nightmares of being back home in Russia, and feeling the ecstatic belonging in my soul, only to wake up to the freshly groomed lawns of foreign Barbieland. Those dreams, accompanied by gut-wrenching emotions and tears, are enough to spoil my whole week and take it out on my unsuspecting pampered students and poor dutiful Ken (who luckily spends most of his waking hours at work).



So, what's the solution?  The easy answer is - to travel back to Riga.  But the hard thing is - to travel back to Riga.  One: No one is able to accompany me, and I'm horribly scared to travel alone. Two: I'm afraid to have a culture shock and discover that Riga of my sweet candied childhood dreams is no more.  Three: If I travel back home, at least I want to show my home to my lovely Ken, so he can see what I grew up in, but Ken is always at work, and unable to travel. Four:...............Well I'm sure I'll be able to come up with something.



So there you have it.  Thus is life of an immigrant, between two worlds, never belonging fully to either one - his native land or his host country, but always longing to be simultaneously in both.