The Immigrant Effect
'The stream of her urine was rich and thick, like a miniature waterfall I once saw in Bali.'
On December 31st of 2020, I was queuing for Dacha, a Russian store near Notting Hill. I was there to buy a bottle of Abrau-Durso (cheap Russian champagne) and a couple of ready-made Olivier salads when a middle-aged couple started talking to me.
From their tone, it had been a while since they’d been to Moscow. I, on the other hand, had just come back after a short trip.
After the usual “how long have you been here” and “what brings you to this foggy island,” the man said, “They’ve issued a new law now.” He sounded full of authority, so I nodded. “Anyone who doesn’t already have a Russian passport can’t get a new one.”
He paused for effect. “So if you haven’t been abroad, you can’t go!”
“Uh,” I said. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“No, it’s true,” his wife cut in. “We saw it on the news.”
“Oh, the news,” I said. “Then sure, of course it must be true.”
The couple hadn’t been to Russia since the late 1980s - one of those immigrants who left the Soviet Union and never went back. People with very strong opinions about their home country, even though when they left, it was still the USSR.
I call this the Immigrant Effect.
Live abroad long enough and your view of home warps until you sound like a lunatic to anyone who actually lives there.
A foreigner in your own land.
Growing up on the squeaking-door accents of Russian English teachers (“Repeat after me, class: London is the capital of Great Britain!”) the image of London, for someone who’s never been, is all lords in top hats, elegant ladies, and tea at five.
You imagine taking a black cab straight from Heathrow to a cozy pub, then spending the evening pondering the ponds and ducks of Hyde Park before a horse-led carriage takes you to your castle in Kent.
When my mother finally visited the UK in 2021 - roughly twenty years after my father, her ex-husband, had promised to take her - she was thrilled. That is, until she stepped into the Tube.
No one in our carriage spoke English as a first language. She looked around, horrified.
“What is this?” she said.
A man with saliva on his cheek and a mustard stain on his shirt sat opposite us, staring into space. His hair was wild, like he’d just escaped from a mental asylum.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“This,” she said, pointing at the man without a hint of concern he might notice. “What is this?”
The man looked up and burped.
Later, outside an off-license, a boy with a fresh fade punched another in the face.
A homeless man screamed “Wanker!” at a passing double-decker.
Near Embankment, a half-naked woman with blue circles under her eyes ran up to a man sitting on the pavement and peed on his head. The stream of her urine was rich and thick, like a miniature waterfall I once saw in Bali.
Whatever my mother had expected from London after twenty years, it wasn’t this.
It’s funny how different things look through a screen. Read the news long enough and you might think you know a place even if you’ve never been there.
When anti-immigration protests started in London this September, Masha and I barely noticed. We only found out because her grandmother called, yelling into the receiver: “LOCK THE DOORS AND DON’T GO OUT!”
“Babushka, what’s happening?” Masha asked.
“The protests! They will kill you! Tell Serezha to avoid going to work for a week! Better yet, leave the country altogether!”
In her mind, fueled by a steady diet of Channel One News, London looked like a war zone - flaming tires, smashed shop windows, people stabbing each other on the streets.
No amount of explanation helped.
“We’re fine, really,” said Masha.
“No, you are not,” her grandmother said. “You don’t understand!!”
This - from a 95-year-old woman who had never been abroad.
A few months earlier, my own grandmother had called.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Good,” I said.
“How can you be good?” she yelled. Her voice suddenly changed, like the question had been a trap. “They say all Russians are being deported from the UK!”
“?!”
“They said so on the news.”
“Well, it’s not true. At least not for me.”
“What, you’re saying they lie on the news?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Don’t be silly, Serezh… you don’t understand…”
A friend who’d moved to Bangkok after the war texted me recently: “Is it true people can just snatch your phone on the street in London?”
I’ve lived here since 2019 and, until this summer, never had a phone stolen. Then it happened twice - the same phone, both times, snatched right out of my hand. The second time was right in front of my apartment building.
Most stereotypes aren’t true.
Until, suddenly, they are.
Once I hit the five-year mark away from Russia, my conversations with my mother started to go like this:
“Mom, it’s because in Russia-”
“Serezh,” she cuts me off. “Maybe don’t tell me what Russia looks like? I’m the one living here.”
That’s when I realized I’d started to sound just like that middle-aged couple in the queue. I live in the UK, watch the news, shop weekly at Dacha, and tell people what Russia looks like without a clue of what I’m talking about.
Just as you are what you eat and who you spend time with, you are where you are. And if your only source of information is a screen, your view of reality will become distorted. Especially now, when algorithms feed you only what confirms your beliefs. We are all slowly going insane - in our own unique, content-optimized ways.
As the war drags on, my image of home has turned into one of rot and chaos. Yet whenever my friends visit Moscow and I ask how it was, they all say, “Amazing!”
That doesn’t make sense to me - so I ignore it and explain to myself (and them) that they just don’t understand.
Though what it is they don’t understand (and I do) remains a mystery - one only Masha’s and my grandmothers seem sure of.