“Where are you really from?” is a microaggression that has harassed people of color for decades. For Veronika Petrova, it’s the question that made her go viral.
The answer is simply “Russia.” And where her parents are from? Also, Russia, and so has the answer been for countless generations. Yet, due to her Asian features, it’s something that Americans just can’t seem to process since she first visited the United States.
Petrova is Russian but ethnically Asian. Her family is Yakut, one of the many different Turkic Groups from across Asia and the Middle East that Russia colonized. As she frankly explains in her viral video, “If you understand your geography, you would understand that half of Russia, the biggest country in the world, is in Asia.”
With such a diverse and expansive collection of cultures, Russians are still seen as a monolith, and many of us in the Western world cannot grasp the idea of people from Russia being Asian. So where does this disconnect come from?
Petrova believes it largely stems from our TV screens and the media’s narrative. “Hollywood has a very specific archetype of who a Russian person is. A Russian person is always evil — a bad guy with a crazy accent who is White with blonde hair and blue eyes,” she tells me. That’s why people cannot comprehend the fact that a Russian can also be Asian, she adds.
This lack of nuance led to Petrova being subjected to endless questioning of where she’s from and why she’s Asian. Petrova says that almost every person she first meets in America asks these questions, but she has noticed some change during the past few years thanks to social media.
It’s clear Petrova was very intentional in her content. Following TikTok’s formula at the height of the pandemic, Petrova got to the point in every post and found a way to bridge education with humor. “When the [viral] video was made, I got a lot of love. The video was funny, and people liked my personality because I was…
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