Although I was born in Russia, I would not be cast in the most iconic stories of Russian culture. No one in “The Nutcracker” or “Swan Lake” looks like me. Unlike these characters, and unlike most Russian adoptees, I don’t have a pointy nose, blue eyes, or blond hair. My skin isn’t white. My eyes are shaped like almonds. My hair is straight and black. My face tells a different story.
When people ask where I am from, I have always answered, “Russia.” I have been loyal to the little information I was given about myself. Saratov, Russia, is my birthplace. My beginning. But answering “Russia” is always followed by a guessing game. People guess that I am “really” Chinese, Filipino, Latina, Indigenous American, and more. “Russia” is a sufficient answer for no one, including me.
At 18, through a drop of spittle, I was able to break down exactly how much more than “Russian” I am, from knowing nothing to having almost every percent of my genetic breakdown lain before me: 57% Northern Asian, 13% Central and South Asian, 10% European, and 8% Western Asian/North African. For the first time, this breakdown gave me confidence to make a substantiated statement about my race. I am Asian. I am mostly Mongolian and Manchurian, but I also have genes from Indigenous America, Egypt, Anatolia, Kazakhstan, and Scandinavia. My genes follow the expansion of the Mongol Empire.
It’s hard to hold the strength and power of my genetic story in one hand and a total lack of knowledge about that story or my culture in the other. There is a profound loss that, although I carry the genes of all these places with me, I will only ever know them as a tourist. I wonder if, in some multiverse, there is a version of me who has ridden horses across a Siberian steppe like my ancestors did, or a version who speaks Tatar or Kazakh. A “me” who has grown up with racial mirrors and stories that are older than I will ever be, of ancestors who bent the future to their will….
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