STUDENT LIFE
WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY MASHA ZHDANOVA
omething about valuing my heritage and culture feels backward and wrong, while at the same time forgetting that heritage feels shameful and worse. I was born in Moscow, Russia. My family moved to the United States when I was 2 years old. I think in English, but at home, I speak Russian. The majority of my relatives still live in Russia. When I was a child, we would visit every summer vacation.
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SCAN MAGAZINE // FALL 2018
I’d always rather fit in than stand out. I want to belong to a group, but I will always be too Russian to be fully American. Yet, I am too American to be fully Russian. I want to be normal and feel part of a community, but as someone who grew up with influences and values from two very different cultures, I don’t really fit into either. When I was a child, my mother would seriously talk about sending me back to Russia for a few years to go to school. “They’re stricter in Russia, you’ll learn
better discipline,” she’d say, “and get better at math.” The knowledge that my place in this country is not and never will be permanently assured is terrifying. Particularly now, as new immigration laws could mean naturalized citizens like me are at risk of losing citizenship status. My last trip to Russia was for two weeks when I was 16. The overwhelming feeling then was that I was too American to be able to live comfortably in Russia ever again. I’d lived in the same suburban New Jersey