Anna Kim
Common Ground: Embarrassments
Let’s start with the embarrassments. They always occur where we’re at pains to live interculturally: the assumption that being an EU citizen I wouldn’t need a visa for Minsk – in Belarus, a European country; the Russian-German dictionary left at home on the shelf in the belief that everyone everywhere speaks English; the stereotypes that seem more interesting than the nuances – the Stalinist architecture, the stories of intellectuals interrogated by the KGB, the debates on Belarusian as the language of the opposition (the word opposition of course instantly conjuring up the arrested or disappeared Russian opposition politicians), the amazement that literature in Belarus is not primarily political.
In Saint-Nazaire, in France, it was the crêpes (in every possible flavour, size and thickness) that prompted that greedy satisfaction that occurs when you feel your clichés are confirmed. But not only the crêpes – also the fact that I received French responses to all my English questions, eventually giving up on sparing my pathetic French; that the restaurants offered all kinds of parts of animals, not just frog’s legs; and that there was a strike on at the Aristide Briand School during my stay.
I’m perfectly aware that my thoughts are embarrassing, of course, and I feel extremely uncomfortable as I write this, begging mentally – and now in writing – for forgiveness. Because I really ought to know better, having grown up in a Korean household and in Austrian and German schools and cities. How often have I been told about Asian humility, the immobile Asian tongue that shrinks back from the letter R, how often has my origin been interpreted into my words, how often has it been suggested there were no difference between the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans: they all look the same after all.
The fact that I’ve now had to observe these embarrassments in my own person has reinforced my conviction that there is only one cure for this kind of thinking: travel. Even if we know in theory that frog’s legs are not the only item on the menu in France, it changes our attitude radically when we’re studying a menu, having to choose between chestnut soup and a fish with a strange name that even the locals can’t identify.
There’s nothing for it, we have to leave the nest.
And it won’t always be pleasant; there’ll be delays, overcrowded buses, trains and planes, we’ll get lost in stations, in unfamiliar streets in unfamiliar cities, we won’t speak the language and we’ll have to make ourselves understood through wild gestures, and often we won’t even be able to do that because the language of wild gestures soon reaches its limitations, and then there’ll be nothing we can do but say nothing, and saying nothing will be bearable to begin with, but in time it’ll grow and grow into an embarrassment that no one can cover up, and we’ll pretend we don’t feel it but it’ll spread and spread until we find an excuse to skedaddle, which will be nothing but an admission of defeat; and it’s in strange places that we notice how strange we are ourselves, not only for those around us but for ourselves as well, how little we actually knew about ourselves and how surprised we are at our own reactions; we’ll put up a fight when we’re stared at, branded as strangers, and we’ll be pleased as punch when we can remain anonymous, seeming like acceptance.
I think that’s what we need.
Especially if you’ve made it your business to state your (or an) opinion in public, you ought not only to know what you’re writing about, but also to have experienced it at first hand. The aim of writing can’t be to spread or establish clichés and stereotypes; on the contrary, I hope that the opportunities we are given are used to rob these pre-fabricated ideas about the world of some of their potency. Yet to reveal them as such, we have to go to unfamiliar places, to be outsiders, travellers for whom the world around them is strange and new, who behave in and towards them almost like children, needing help, dependent; perhaps those travellers have to learn the country’s language first. In any case they’ll recognise that they have to overcome barriers, barriers of language and behaviour. They’ll surprise the people around them with their odd behaviour, sometimes even offend them, and they’ll have the feeling of being intruders, in the wrong place, so they’ll remain on the margins, they’ll watch the locals only from afar, secretly and furtively, it’ll feel as if they were spying on them, and they’ll long to be a part of it all. Yet gradually they’ll begin to understand, they’ll see things in a different light, and in their minds a sense of normality will diffuse for the unfamiliar, which will become familiar with time, and so the boundaries will become narrower and narrower, maybe even disappear –
In the beginning it wasn’t clear who was staring at whom: me at Minsk or Minsk at me. In the beginning Minsk was an aquarium for me, because it was impossible to experience the city and the way it works without a dictionary and Russian, so I was glad at the temperatures of minus fifteen because I could finally build up a connection to the city and no longer had the feeling of being an observer. Saint-Nazaire was easier to understand; this was my third trip to France, and yet even here, in the apartment high up on the Boulevard René Coty, I was pursued by the idea that this town with its industrial harbour and World War II bunkers existed only as a pretty view from the tenth floor. That this kind of existence as a visiting writer is so utterly artificial that you begin to question yourself and your knowledge is the whole objective of the grant programme, with the result that you understand more and more (or should I say: find more precise questions?). And when you head for the airport after a month, a period too long for a vacation but too short to settle in, the differences that are so often on the agenda will seem exaggerated, because they conceal something decisive: the many more things we have in common – like the embarrassments that happen to all of us.