La preface prétentieuse - or - Voici mon blogue

(Written Wednesday 19AUG09, posted later)

Welcome, one and all, to my web-journal (or “bjournal”, as some like to call them) on my upcoming trip to Novosibirsk, third biggest city by population in the Russian Federation, and self-proclaimed Capital of Siberia. For anyone who is just joining us, I’m going because I got a Fulbright grant to teach English there for a full academic year, with Russian lessons (for me) and some research about civics education on the side.

Among my horde of loyal friends who will be swarming to read this, a few of you followed the last bjournal I kept, in Argentina in 2007, at Annie Burke’s urging. (The link is on facebook, and no, parents, you don’t get to see it.) First of all, I’m sorry to have bailed halfway through… as some of you know I ran into some pretty severe academic problems at UCA in the second half of the semester. Secondly, although I don’t want to disappoint you, I’m not going to write much about moaning lionesses, dog-piles, deadly miasmas in foreign cities, or “changüiches [sic] a la chicчona” in this one. If you were hoping for a sequel to that stuff, I hope you won’t be bored.

But…

I’m on a shorter leash now, because the State Department is footing the bill, and even a humble grant-recipient represents them in some modest capacity. With pointer fingers wagging and brows frowning, they told us to refrain from publicly expressing any opinions that might be deemed offensive by a general readership, or construed as denigrating to our host country or its citizens. Maybe this is all to the good; I hope nothing I said last time would have offended an Argentine reader or anyone else. But this time I have to be extra sure, so I’ll save my, um, stronger feelings on sensitive subjects for private correspondence.

I’m also not supposed to cuss. Hmm… I’ll do my damnedest.

As you come in, take a moment to glance up at the unique URL, painstakingly selected from among literally infinite possibilities by… the author himself. I’m using “longitude83” because tracing that line is the best way of finding Novosibirsk on the prodigious breadth of steppe, taiga, and boreal forest that is Siberia. When I tell Americans where I’m going, the best I can do is say, “Yeah it’s not too far from Mongolia. A little closer to Kazakhstan. But it’s not really that close to anything [that you’d recognize by name].”

For people who know more about Russian geography, Novosibirsk is where the Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the Ob’ River, a landmark to which that title at the top of this page, “Eight Months on the Ob’” makes reference.

Calling this bjournal “Eight Months on the Ob’” is also blatant plagiarism: As part of my preparation for this sure-to-be-epic undertaking, I read a book by someone who had done something like this already: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler. It’s about his experience teaching English in Fuling, Sichuan Province, China as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late ’90’s.

Here’s one of the best things about having read River Town: It was a valuable emotional boost to know my process of adjustment would probably be easier than Hessler’s. That’s not to make light of the inevitable spells of culture shock, loneliness, frustration, and homesickness I’ll undergo over the course of this year, but I think I’ll have some significant advantages over Hessler. He only learned Chinese after arriving, and being white in China marked him as a foreigner (making him a target for cat-calls, prejudiced insults, and condescension) the whole time he was there.

I’m nervous, but Russian culture will feel more familiar to me than Chinese culture was for Hessler. As Hessler described it, the most visible aspects of Fuling’s culture were Party propaganda, lockstep conformity to government/establishment ideology with few voices of dissent, naive optimism about industrial modernization, and reverence for Mao and his successors, all in a strange mix with centuries-old attitudes about gender, family, and the individual that had somehow survived the Cultural Revolution.

Novosibirsk, by contrast, is long since industrialized, no longer communist, and home to people who look European like me. None of my students are likely to be “peasants” (the word is still in common use in China, but in Russia it probably sounds nearly as archaic as in the U.S.) or peasants’ children. They’ll have lived most of their lives in a consumer culture, and they won’t have needed to demonstrate their understanding and acceptance of Marxist ideas to reach university level.

Hessler would sometimes make major gaffes even after becoming relatively comfortable in China. As late as two weeks before the end of his stay, he got in serious trouble for filming people on the street and attracting a crowd, which reminded him how much of an alien he still was. It may be too much to hope for, but I think it may be easier to avoid a similar eventuality in Russia.

Of course there will be challenges, and not knowing what they’ll be makes this all the more nerve-wracking, but there’s no point in trying to predict them, and less point in worrying about them. There’s also no point in making this bjournal entry any longer now that I’ve started spouting platitudes, so I’ll just finish it…

…here. Пока.