Russian/Armenian | South Korean

Photo credit: provided by subject - selfie

I originate from a myriad of cultural backgrounds, which has simultaneously served as a struggle and a privilege throughout my life. I just turned nineteen, I have a younger sister, and I was born in Moscow, Russia to a half Russian, half Armenian mother, and a South Korean father. After living in Moscow for eleven years and attending various British and international schools, my family moved to Amsterdam in The Netherlands, where I’ve lived since. Being immersed in an Anglicised education system and a predominantly Western society and social group for most of my adolescence has definitely helped shaped me into a more liberal, conscious person. It’s allowed me to interact, connect, and emphasize with the people around me, and not let linguistic, religious, or cultural differences be a barrier or a setback. I have found that the examples of cultural relativism I have encountered in my relationships has informed my creative and artistic style and vision: everything that I learn from others, whether I agree with the things they believe in or not, has somehow been incorporated into who I want to be. This myriad of approaches to how to deal with abstracts like life, love, art, pain, and joy has given me the freedom to be observant and empathetic, qualities I will always try to work towards. Oh and I have three passports, which I find pretty cool if I do say so myself.

My Mom was born in Moscow, Russia to a Russian Mother and an Armenian Father, and my Dad was born in a really small town by the sea in the very very south of South Korea, not far from Busan, called JinYeong. My parents met in Moscow, not long after my dad moved there for work from Seoul. They just happened to meet. I’ve heard the story a billion times but am still confused about how it actually happened, because there was no actual reason for them to meet or start talking to each other. My Dad was with his friend in the car near a McDonalds, eating, and he just saw my Mom who was waiting for her sister on the way to uni. I guess she just caught his eye, but he didn’t actually get out of the car to talk to her until a couple hours later when she was going back home from uni and he was still there with his friend for some reason?? That’s when he actually decided to go talk to her.

I think they just decided to accept each other’s differences and learn to deal with them. They made a lot of sacrifices for each other and try to be understanding of the fact that sometimes, they just won’t agree on something and that’s the way they are, and that’s okay. When you have a multicultural partner and family, I think you have to expect clashes and disagreements that a lot of other people just will never have to undergo, so it definitely demands another dimension of patience and compromise. For me, learning to accept that there are some things that my Dad or Mom will never be okay with, just for the sole reason that it’s due to who they are and where they’re from, was really difficult, because that’s an element my friends will never understand or be able to relate to, but gotten better at dealing with it. It’s allowed me to learn more about their cultures and how their ways of thinking and reasoning stems so strongly from their cultures. It’s also made me learn how Western my expectations and views really are compared to my parents, and that I should still respect their views even if they are more subjectively traditional or don’t align with mine, I shouldn’t ask too much of them or insist on them changing their identities. But there were definitely moments where it was difficult for me to reason with my Dad with little things that my friends’ parents so easily allowed them to do, like staying out late, going to sleepovers, boys, that kind of stuff.

My parents have always been very liberal towards interracial relationships with my sister and I. They’d be total hypocrites if they weren’t, because they’re in an interracial relationship themselves, and they’ve also always provided us with an international education, so it’d be really strange if they were close-minded about or only selectively tolerant of certain parts of interracial relationships. Speaking for my Dad and his family’s experience in accepting interracial relationships, it took a lot of getting used to initially, and it definitely created a lot of tension, because my Korean grandparents were at first very against my Dad marrying someone who wasn’t Korean. But they’re very accepting and have no problem with it now, of course, which is a huge contrast to how a lot of Koreans still think today, as they’ve very nationalistic and maintaining a fully Korean identity is very important to them, which of course I respect.

My culture doesn’t affect the way I choose my partners. In fact, I want to defy some of the stereotypes of my own cultures I sometimes feel bestowed by. In Russian society, a lot of heteronormative relationships still rely on the ‘alpha-beta’ dynamic, where you have a super dominant, hypermasculine guy making all the decisions for the couple, and the girl kind of trailing along and being dependent on her partner for all kinds of stability and validation. I think the country is making a lot of progress with that but making such a huge shift in how a whole society is expected to think and behave obviously takes a lot of time, especially since that dynamic has been around Eastern European culture for so long. So before anything, I’ll always want to be self-sufficient, self-assured, and completely and fully dependent on myself, which is something that I hope changes in Russian culture too. Feminine power is so important and is seen as such a taboo in Eastern Europe. Being considered a feminist has really negative connotations, only for the reason that we’ve let men manipulate our society for so long. I’m not saying that Russian culture should conform to Western ideals, but I do think that more women should take initiative, which is something I’ll always want to do.

A lot of the experiences I’ve had with being mixed-race have actually been positive. Even if it’s just for practical things, like applying for work experience or writing a resumé, I think that being able to showcase that I come from a lot of places, as well as speak quite a few languages, and have in a few different countries has served as an advantage, which sounds almost demeaning or superficial, but it does help! It also calls for a lot of interesting conversations with people.

I have for sure had challenges based on my mixed-race identity. One of them is kind of your classic identity crisis situation that a lot of third culture kids face, but that was more of an issue for me when I was younger. I just didn’t feel comfortable with where I was from, and part of that was due to growing up around Western television and media; I’d watch shows and wouldn’t be able to relate to anyone I’d see on screen, which somehow led me to conclude that there was something wrong with me and not the lack of diversity represented in American or British television. That’s why watching old Soviet films from the 50s and 60s, as well as Studio Ghibli movies, always was a huge comfort to me. A more serious and pressing challenge I continue to face, however, is a lot of the stereotypes that I face, even when they’re meant in a joking context. I can only fake-laugh at a Putin, communism, riding bears, or vodka joke so many times. After a certain point, being asked whether I’m North or South Korean starts getting on my nervous. I think there’s a huge difference between the intent of someone’s comment coming from a place of ignorance or prejudice, though, because while the former could be meaningless, the latter is terrifying. Someone in uni once said that Asian people are ugly and that I was pretty because I was only half-Asian and didn’t have yellow skin or small eyes. I wish I hadn’t chosen to deal with it so calmly, but it’s something I’ll never forget.

I connect with my cultures through Russian film and music, just because I grew up with the movies of Gaidai and Tarkovsky playing in the background, so those things will always be a part of me, and have helped my creative voice immensely, since I want to study filmmaking. Having those distinct cinematic elements of Russian cinema engrained into my system has allowed me to learn more about aspects of Russian film theory and history and the sociocultural context of those socialist times. I’m also ridiculously superstitious, which is all my Mom’s fault, because not being able to cut your nails after the sun sets or washing your hair the day before an exam has been more difficult than you would think. I also love Korean food so much, so growing up eating a lot of it has also contributed to my now love of trying new foods and having an extremely impressive and somewhat concerningly high spice tolerance.

I have visited my native countries. We still live in the same apartment I was born and grew up in in Moscow, so I love to go whenever I can, it’s always a very nostalgic and meaningful time when I go, especially since most of my family still lives there. And my Dad goes there for work really frequently, so I do enjoy going back and reminiscing. Even subconscious parts of my childhood that I’ve partially forgotten about, like the woody smell of my home, or the way the curtains in my room screech make when I draw them, little intricacies like that, are enough to flood back memories and emotions from so long ago. We also visit my Korean grandparents in Seoul every summer for a couple of weeks, which we’ve done without fail my whole life, so we’ve established a pretty comfortable routine there too. I think because of that comfort, it’s given me more freedom to focus on certain unfamiliar elements of my Korean culture that I previously didn’t know too much about.

When I was little, I think I was more ashamed of being mixed-race, especially being East-Asian, because I didn’t have a sense of belonging or familiarity with the people I was around. I attended an American school in Moscow from second to fifth grade, and during that time, I distinctly remember being so upset that I wasn’t American since a lot of my classmates were. I would obsess over American culture and try to mould myself to be more like them. I would be embarrassed of my parents not having perfect American accents, and I recall being so frustrated that I didn’t look like I was from one specific place. It was difficult for me, because I didn’t look fully Russian or Korean or Dutch, so my multiculturalism seemed like a burden to me. After I moved to Amsterdam though, my attitude towards my identity changed completely. I wouldn’t have it any other way now, and both sympathize yet hate myself for once letting myself think in such a shallow way.

I’m definitely more comfortable with sharing my culture here at home in Amsterdam than I was when I lived in the US for a year during my first year of uni, but a lot of the times there I felt really vulnerable because people would be insensitive and try to dissect or question where I was from, which was invasive and degrading at times. I really felt like people made a huge deal about me being from somewhere else, let alone from more than one place that they weren’t familiar with, so I often felt like an outsider, but that was just my experience. Regardless, I thankfully don’t have too many instances where I have felt really really uncomfortable because of my culture, so I’m very lucky, others have it a lot worse, which is really unfortunate.

I don’t really like thinking about being reborn, because I wouldn’t want to change anything about my current life, I feel like that’d almost be insulting to my family and everything that they’ve overcome to give me so much liberty and space for expression. I think the only thing I’d want to ensure would be to be born multi-ethnic again—and it kind of goes both ways actually, since a lot of who I am is due to my background, and my background also helps inform who I am as well.