Wishful Emigration

Something to have in mind when you emigrate. 

Sometimes people are forced to emigrate for economic or political reasons, sometimes they just feel their homeland is not the best place for them. So they pick a place on the globe and go there hoping to build a better life without all the problems that bothered them back home.

The problem is your new country is never “your old country minus all the things you hated”. It is a totally different place that has features you may hate, but locals may love them (it’s often called customs, traditions and cuisine). It may have features both you and locals will hate and those things will be different from what annoyed you back home. In short, it is not a home outside your home, it is a new home to be built and experienced from scratch, if you are willing enough to do it.

And at the point when you learn this, you will face several choices:

1. To live in an expat bubble where you will be able to enjoy the company of your compatriots driven outside the homeland for somewhat similar reasons as you. You won’t interact with reality too much for it to bother you and probably will enjoy a very high standard of living, if you can offer some rare skill or service.
2. To go home and repent.
3. To try another place (to end up at square one soon).
4. To try changing your new home (as a minority, you will not prevail).
5. To accept your new home.

Option five is the most difficult one, but I think it is the only viable one too. It takes learning the language, history and culture of the place, its lifestyle outside whatever bubble you first find yourself in. And then you need to accept all of the above. Accepting doesn’t mean loving, it means seeing and judging your new country from the inside, not outside. Think in the local currency, in the local language as much as you can, take into account the history of this country whenever you judge its present. Use right benchmarks (avoid comparing apples to oranges and Russia to Norway).

For example, Russia’s metaphorical glass has been forcefully emptied so many times, that now calling it half-empty would be unfair, it’s more like bottomless, given its amazing ability to refill itself. And this is a metaphor for many aspects one might be inclined to be judgemental about: Russians’ life expectancy, “shitty” Russian province, etc.

Getting back to generalizations, any country is a combination of flaws and advantages. And there is usually some kind of balance, that can be toppled by a war or a natural disaster. But as long as the balance is preserved the mean average level of human happiness and grief is, I believe, the same all over the world. Some countries have better cars, some: better heating. Some countries have average healthcare available to everybody for free, some have great healthcare available to the rich. No country is a heaven on Earth and Peace is something that we need to avoid turning any place into Hell.

That said, as a true internationalist at heart, I welcome everybody to visit my beautiful country and stay here, if you find your heart here.

More by me (in Russian): Dzen (more fiction, some audios), Youtube (audios, new project, terrible sound), TG (half-dead now, it it shows signs for taking off, I’ll put more effort into it). I’m also on VK and Facebook as Maria Kondorskaya/Мария Кондорская.

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Maria Kondorskaya

Linguist, [very] professional Content writer, Russian (and even Soviet), Muscovite, patriot, internationalist. Passive aggressive, vivacious pessimist, optimist with a morbid sense of humor. Made in the USSR in 1982.