More great questions from twicerandomly:
You said once that immigrating was hard, both first to Canada and then to U.S. I can see that Ukraine to Canada would be a big adjustment, but I’m surprised Canada to U.S. was hard. What was difficult about each experience? How did you cope?
I had absolutely no cultural shock when I emigrated from Ukraine to Canada. What was shocking was how easily I got into the flow of life in the new society. There was no adjustment to make. Of course, the fact of emigrating is still an enormous trauma, but when I moved to Canada, it was the trauma of leaving, not of arriving. The new country was completely clear, easy to handle, and unquestioningly beautiful to me. Emigration was hard, but immigration was a breeze.
When I moved to the US, though, both emigration and immigration were extremely painful. I knew leaving Canada would be bad, but at least I was prepared for that. I didn’t anticipate the encounter with a new country to be so intolerable. I figured that if moving between such enormously different countries as Ukraine and Canada was easy, then going from Canada to US, countries that are supposed to be almost exactly the same, would be easier still. What I wasn’t taking into account was that I’d never lived in Canada. I was moving from Quebec to the US.
Arriving in the US
The very first thing I noticed when I crossed the Quebec / US border (we were traveling by car) was poverty. The more we progressed into the US, the scarier the landscape was getting. All I knew about America came from movies, TV shows, magazine, and books. I kept hearing that this was the richest country in the world. The possibility of driving for hours and hours and not seeing anything but devastation, abandoned houses, boarded up windows, dying industrial buildings, dusty small towns where every public building looked on the verge of collapsing simply never occurred to me. I knew this was a country of contrasts, but there were no contrasts to be found, just unrelieved poverty.
After I finally arrived in New Haven, CT, I started noticing more things that were scary and disturbing. The sky-high crime rates, the need to move in a very circumscribed area to avoid being assaulted, the danger of going out after 8 pm, the racial segregation, the general ugliness of everything, especially houses, and the way everything was organized so that to make daily tasks of life as inconvenient and problematic as possible – all of this was all the more traumatic for being so unanticipated.
British Council
Back in Ukraine, I remember the time when the British Council came to our university. I loved going to the rooms it occupied and just sitting there. Everything in that small space was beautiful, clean, and arranged so as to be as convenient and comfortable as possible. Even the sun shone differently through the windows of the British Council than it did anywhere else in that huge building. That British Council was, to me, an embodiment of the principles that should organize human existence. I could go there and spend some time among beautiful things, feeling beautiful, and enjoying the environment where everybody read or wrote quietly among the neat rows of books in plastic jackets.
Those plastic jackets placed on every paperback were a revelation. In Ukraine we also had protective plastic covers for books. Our book covers, however, had one important difference: they were not transparent. You could never know what book they concealed simply by looking at the cover. It always took forever to find among my textbooks the one I needed because they all looked the same in these impenetrable covers. I know this might seem like a tiny insignificant thing, but of such small things our reality consists. Everything, and I mean absolutely everything in the USSR and later the FSU (buildings, book covers, pens, trains, cars, stores, human interactions, family relations, etc.) was based on hatred of people. You could pick up any object, like a potato or a toy, and immediately see that this potato and this toy had been grown or manufactured by individuals who detested human beings with a fiery passion. The possibility that there were people somewhere who wanted to make things nice and comfortable for themselves and others was very shocking.
I emigrated in search of that British Council with its plastic book covers and of what it represented to me. In Quebec I found it immediately, so the sacrifice of emigration was justified by the rewards of immigration. In the US, however, it took me many years to locate the plastic book covers. (And if at this point you think I was looking for actual plastic covers, you need to stop reading this blog immediately and go away because we are too complex for you here.)
Plastic Book Covers in the US
Years later I finally figured it out: the areas of beauty, elegance, intellect, kindness, comfort, good food, beautiful clothes, quiet voices and rustling book leaves did exist in the US. It was very hard to locate them because, unlike in Quebec, they were:
1. Hidden from view;
2. Expensive;
3. Very segregated on the basis of class, race, profession, and level of education.
As a result, you need to hunt for these plastic book covers, maybe even dedicate your entire life to seeking them out. In Quebec, they are just thrown at you in massive amounts, but in the US you have to go on a quest to encounter them. Moreover, these quests are the whole point. People do everything in their power to ensure that ugliness (meaning, poverty, segregation, hopelessness, etc.) continues to exist because that makes the quests more difficult and their results more valuable.
Of course, as always happens, once you figure out the right strategy, the quests become easier and the rewards are much greater than anywhere else.
At Peace with Immigration
It was only after I figured all this out that immigration stopped being painful. Emigration will remain a trauma I will carry with me for life. It’s not a bad thing because traumatic experiences have an unrivaled potential to spur personal growth. But I’m finally at peace with my immigration and know where to look for plastic book covers. One of them is located right here, on my blog.
Clarissa's Blog 
That is just phenomenal writing. After I read it, I immediately went back and read it again. Thank you.
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Thank you. You are great at eliciting good writing, so here is the result.
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Loved this. As somebody who has never travelled, even (and especially) small things about USA are a revelation. Now thought about more blogging ideas – you have stopped “through the eyes of an immigrant” series, and if you have more post ideas about USA, they are welcome. 🙂
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“Everything, and I mean absolutely everything in the USSR and later the FSU (buildings, book covers, pens, trains, cars, stores, human interactions, family relations, etc.) was based on hatred of people. You could pick up any object, like a potato or a toy, and immediately see that this potato and this toy had been grown or manufactured by individuals who detested human beings with a fiery passion.”
This statement really struck a cord with me. Could you explain why this was/is so in the USSR & FSU? How does a society get like this? And once a society has degenerated into this sort of lack of civility and kindness, how does it recover?
By way of background, my family is Czech. My mom told me stories about life in communist Czechoslovakia that are similar to what you are telling here. How people showed hatred for one another, how everyday items didn’t work or worked poorly (assuming you could buy them in the first place), how bureaucracy seemed designed to make the lives of people difficult, etc. I always wondered where this hostility came from.
Thanks, and keep up the interesting blog!
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Back in the 80’s (after my first visit to communist Poland) I was in an anthropology seminar and someone mentioned dignity.
“Marxists don’t believe in dignity!” piped up a resident conventional marxist (brazilian specialist).
I have no idea if that’s a real tenet of marxism but at the time it really seemed to explain a lot.
One of the reasons I’ve been able to adapt and stay in Poland so long as that while ideas like privacy and dignity were in short supply in communist times Poles (and Czechs as far as I can tell) instinctively like both once they have a taste. This eased the considerable shock of transition to a post socialist reality (that seems to escape non-Baltic FSU countries).
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There were so many policies that were implemented for decades and that led to this result. Forced sociability, people having to share living quarters with strangers. Imagine sharing an apartment with a single bathroom with 6 other families. This is enough to make one hate people for life. Constant absence of privacy, degrading medical care. These were strategies employed purposefully, and they worked.
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This is good writing and we have many parallels, even down to us both having a revolting experience of an anti-creativity, Marxist FSU.
https://www.fsunion.org.au/
I think what has taken far too long to dawn on me is the nature of cultural classes. I used to think everyone was equal, but now I understand that cultural classes very much exist. Sure, in some instances their strange culture is a result of some kind of shared cultural trauma, for instance in inheriting a degree of poverty or lack of spark that would enable them to participate more fully in higher cultural experiences, for example philosophy.
But the deliberate knocking down of inspired effort — the collective tendency to make it much more difficult than it really is — that seems to be an entrenched attitude for whole groups of people. Even the idea that you cannot simply perform effectively without being passed and assessed and endlessly monitored by your authorities in the hierarchy stems from a certain hatred and suspicion of humanity. (I found that very much in the culture of the FSU.)
In all, I have discovered that most groups have to some degree created a culture of obstruction. They may complain that they are very sad they cannot get ahead and that these obstructions are objective and external to them, but very often they have acquiesced to them so as to belong to a community.
As an outsider, one has to learn to look beyond the complaints and really just not pay them out. After all, this is pointless unless one is seeking group membership, which I am not.
But certainly, the potential of most people is kept at a very low level on the basis of all sorts of superficial justifications about safety and being realistic, when the real issues are about power and belonging.
Even problems with communication are rooted in other people’s needs to associate with power and to feel they belong. For instance, whilst in the FSU I raised an objection to my degradation by asserting that it would be appropriate to treat me with respect.
“Respect?” exclaimed the supervisor. “You have to earn it!”
In other words, there is a system of emotional blackmail in place. Once you start to please us by your abject obedience to any and all requests, no matter how arbitrary, we will give you your human dignity back piece by piece. But don’t expect it, just because you happen to work here. You’re got to earn it back now.
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This is also the experience of working at my university. A colleague calls it fascist and says it has to do with cultural nationalism and Catholicism combined.
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Yes, a lot of people working at MY “FSU” were catholic and they were quite hostile, in part, to what they (mis)understood about my original nationality.
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Clarissa
I am sorry that you saw only saw Quebec. I have got to see most of Canada, and I love it, including most of Quebec. I remember seeing two young sweeties in the Yukon visiting from Brussels and imagining that we were actually bilingual. Hell, I had five years of French, but had lost most of the use, and their speed of their language and the accent was disturbing. It came down to us literally writing in the dirt as to how to find their bed and breakfast. We couldn’t speak to each other worth a damn, but they did afterwards buy me a drink and laugh together, so they knew that we had all tried to be at least be polite ;-D
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“I didn’t anticipate the encounter with a new country to be so intolerable.”
Ever noticed how there’s a mythical country outside the United States referred to as “overseas”?
Canada? Why, it’s “overseas” … try not to laugh too hard when you hear this again.
There’s also this dual-purpose country called “abroad”, which serves as a synonym for those who realise that Canada is in fact not separated from the United States by the world’s largest moat. Naturally, another moat exists along the Mexican border, but of course this has a partial basis in physical reality. 🙂
America the Island turned into America the Fortress after Dubya the Younger decreed that there would be such a thing as a Dienstheimatsicherheitspolizei to enforce such oddities as the removal of shoes, the presence of liquid-filled quart baggies, and the unquestioned existence of a newly expanded security state.
It was better before then, but there was always a considerable amount of attitude surrounding the crossing of the frontier …
“The possibility of driving for hours and hours and not seeing anything but devastation, abandoned houses, boarded up windows, dying industrial buildings, dusty small towns where every public building looked on the verge of collapsing simply never occurred to me.”
After World War 2, America went hog wild with the modernist programme of “existenzminimum” architecture — even so-called “permanent structures” were thrown up in a temporary way. You can read the malcontents from the classical and urbanist architecture programmes in America for useful and sometimes amusing critiques — James H Kunstler, the Centre for New Urbanism, and others have at least documented the decline and what could have existed in its place. There are breezy books on the phenomenon known as “sprawl”, which is a codeword for economically and socially segregated “communities” that are assemblages of domiciles that are “just affordable enough” to a particular economic or social segment.
It looks most especially awful from the air. Not that Ontario looks much better from the air, mind you, but I am keenly aware of when I’ve crossed over into Ontario from the United States …
You’d hope that the remaining urban fabric would be preserved, but I can name only a few major and semi-major cities in the United States that have a workable urban fabric that includes working transit: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.
Everywhere else, you need a vehicle, one that won’t get you stuck in some of that devastation you’ve described. I think the greatest horror you could face in the United States would be to step off a long-haul bus or train, only to realise you have no options whatsoever to get away from the environs of the station except for walking several kilometres across dull industrial and motorway wastelands.
I have been to scenic resort American towns that are like this.
As for plastic book covers …
I remember making these as a young student — my teachers were Canadian and British early on. Later I spent time in the US, and I didn’t understand why all of my textbooks looked like they’d narrowly escaped the wood chipper and didn’t have plastic covers on them. After all, we could make plastic covers if we spent a little time on that.
Also later on, I realised the truth this spoke of Americans: many of them regard books as consumables that are also disposables, and more than a few of them are hostile to the entire enterprise of books in the first place.
“Moreover, these quests are the whole point. People do everything in their power to ensure that ugliness (meaning, poverty, segregation, hopelessness, etc.) continues to exist because that makes the quests more difficult and their results more valuable.”
I just admitted to a friend that during the two remaining weeks on a work assignment in the United States, I’d been spending some of my time inventing quests as you describe. Things that I could simply rely on being available in the lower level of NK in Stockholm or at Hedengrens do not in fact present themselves as easily found. I was told repeatedly that “you should just use the Internet for that”, as if ordering things on the Internet actually would solve the problem for me.
Finally …
Do they still have that horrible dormitory at Yale where there are no right angles, or did someone have the decency to knock it down? If there’s something of the Yale experience that speaks of the “hatred for other people” you’ve described, to me at least it’s that building …
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Great post!
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