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Marina Hakkarainen
NARRATING IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE: FRIENDS AND FRIENDSHIP IN THE BIOGRAPHICAL STORIES OF YOUNG RUSSIAN-SPEAKERS IN FINLAND
In this article, I examine narratives about childhood experiences in immigration represented by Russian-speaking young people living in Finland, and I will pay special attention to the conceptualisation of friends and friendships and its use in the construction of immigration and integration experiences. Therefore, I discuss the concepts of friends and friendship in Russian language and culture. Following the conceptualisation of friends and friendship in the immigration narratives of the Russian-speaking young people, I consider three categories configured by means of friendship terms: transnational space, locally organised relations between the natives and immigrants, and agency in immigration. As a result, I conclude that friendship relations, understood as a quintessence of close and equal relationships, are an extremely suitable means for measurement of relatedness and connectedness in the initially strange social environment of immigration.
Key words: immigration narratives, Russian-speaking immigrants, Finland, youth, integration, friendship
Марина Хаккарайнен
НАРРАТИВЫ ИММИГРАНТОВ: ДРУЗЬЯ И ДРУЖБА В БИОГРАФИЧЕСКИХ ИСТОРИЯХ РУССКОГОВОРЯЩИХ МОЛОДЫХ ЛЮДЕЙ В ФИНЛЯНДИИ
В статье анализируются нарративы русскоговорящих молодых людей, в которых они рассказывают о своем детском опыте иммиграции и интеграции в новое общество в Финляндии. Важнейшим способом репрезентации этого опыта оказываются рассказы о друзьях и дружбе, через которые молодые люди определяют пространство миграции и межгрупповые отношения в принимающей стране, а также свой личный успех в отношениях с окружающим их первоначально чужим сообществом. В процессе анализа я обращаюсь к специфике концептуализации дружеских отношений в русском языке и культуре и прихожу к выводу, что в силу этой специфики концепт дружбы как символа близких отношений оказывается для молодых людей весьма эффективным способом измерения интеграционной динамики — отчужденности и близости отношений с изначально чужим сообществом. Ключевые слова: нарративы об иммиграции, русскоязычные иммигранты, Финляндия, молодежь, интеграция, дружба
Marina Hakkarainen — Ph.D., Research Associate, European University at St. Petersburg ([email protected])
Марина Хаккарайнен — Ph.D., ассоциированный научный сотрудник, Европейский Университет в Санкт Петербурге ([email protected])
Introduction
One day, while travelling on the train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, I met a young boy about four or five years old. He was also travelling to St. Petersburg with his elder sister and parents. The boy was sitting in the chair in front of mine and turned to me from time to time, showing his interest for communication. He started a conversation with me in Russian and we talked to each other for a while. I got to know that the boy's family moved to Finland from St. Petersburg, that their first flat in the new country was small, but later they bought a house. The boy also told me that he had his own room in the house, and that he had a friend, Olli,* who played with him there. Suddenly his sister joined the conversation. "Olli beats you," her cheerful voice penetrated the space of the carriage. "No, Olli is my friend," said the boy with conviction. "Olli beats you!" his sister repeated with pleasure. "No, Olli is my friend," answered the boy. He kept on insisting that Olli really was his friend. His sister's persistence did not change his mind. I was really impressed that such a young boy had already had his version of an immigration plot.** The most exciting aspect within his story was his devotion to the relationship with the Finnish boy whom he considered to be a friend.
Several years later, in 2012-2014 I was collecting immigration stories from Russian-speakers in Finland during the research project "Families on the Move Across Borders: Children's Perspectives on Migration in Europe."*** My research was ethnographic and designed to focus on Russian-speaking immigrant children in Finland in the context of their families and local immigrant communities, as well as their interaction with the surrounding host society and the state. Hence, conducting the research in Helsinki area inter alia, I recorded several conversations with two 9-11 and 12-13 year old boys and five interviews with five young adults, two women and three men, between the ages of 21 and 28 who came to Finland as children with their parental families. These interviews and conversations are the data for this article.**** All the participants were representatives of families with higher or special professional education that corresponds with the educational background of the majority of Russian-speakers in Finland (Liebkind et al. 2004, 314; Krutova 2013). I asked the boys to tell me about their current life in Finland and the young people to describe their childhood migration experiences, including their memories of emigration, their journey
* All personal names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the interlocutors.
** About a plot in a narrative (a movement from one equilibrium to another with change of the state of affairs) and emplotment of modern stories see B. Czarniawska (Czarniawska 2004: 19-22; see also Propp 1968).
*** Within the framework of the project "Families on the Move across Borders: Children's Perspectives on Migration in Europe," 2012-2014. The principal investigator was Prof. Laura Assmuth, supported by the Kone Foundation. The topics and members of the team were: Latvians in Great Britain (MSocSc Aija Lulle); Estonians in Finland (Prof. Laura Assmuth and MA Pihla Siim) and Romanian Roma in Finland (PhD Airi Markkanen and MA Anca Enache).
**** More than forty people participated in the research to different degrees of involvement, including four families (each with from one to five children), fourteen parents, three additional child and youth education initiatives workers, six young adults and three teenagers were interviewed about childhood experiences of migration and about the problems of integration into Finnish society. I used snowball method to find participants. Interviews were conducted in the Russian language. Research questions were widely posed within the framework of the project — How do children experience and understand long-term transnational mobility? What is their perspective about themselves and their families in immigration? A short description of the project can be found at [http://familiesacross.blog.com/english/].
and first impressions of the new country, success, difficulties, important people and places, and other matters of interest from their childhood living in the new society. In my opinion, their stories could clarify some aspects of their experiences of immigration and integration into Finnish society, and their understanding of their own position as newcomers in that society. Then I remembered the boy from the train and his friendship with a Finnish boy Olli: the young people I interviewed had a great deal to say about their friends and friendship, often expressing the opinion that making friends was rather difficult in Finland. These results begged the question — why was friendship so unusually stressed in these narratives on immigration by Russian-speakers in Finland? Why did the young people tell me about their difficulties building friendships with the natives in Finland during their childhood, while a little boy did not express any difficulty at all?
In Finland, Russian-speaking immigrants constitute the largest group among people of foreign origin* and attract a great deal of interest among social scientists (e.g. Jasinskaja-Lahti 2000; Liebkind et al. 2004; Jappinen et al. 2007; Shenshin 2008; Davydova 2009; Tiaynen 2013, and many others). However, few social scientists focus their interest on how people express their immigration experiences and its significance for constructing their immigrant position in the host society. A starting point of my research, in contrast, was articulated as an interest in people's experiences of immigration and their narratives as an expression of those experiences.
Narratives as an expressed form of experience could contribute our understanding of migration as social reality since "narratives... are a version of reality" (Bruner 1991: 4). By narrating their stories about childhood immigration experiences, my interlocutors created meanings and meaningful imaginary fields, and constructed migration as a coherent phenomenon making sense of divers separate events in their lives (e.g. Bruner 1991; De Rivera, Sarbin 1998; De Fina 2003, Ahmed 2013). Narrated expressions constitute and structure experience; they establish the personal interpretation of a narrator's individual experience, and stress the active self rather than delegate it to the researcher (Bruner 1986: 7-9; also Vertovec 2007: 969; Tiaynen 2013).
Narratives are a conventional form of identity creation that is culturally and socially determined and transmitted (e.g. Bruner 1991: 4; cf. Bruner 1986: 6; Ahmed 2013: 235). They are a "version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and 'narrative necessity' rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness" (Bruner 1991: 4-5), and they are an active and creative process (Riessman 1993; 2008; Ahmed 2013). This means that people from a particular cultural background also represent particular narrative conceptualisations of migration (cf. Bruner 1991; De Rivera, Sarbin 1998; De Fina 2003). Here, I understand stories about immigration and friendship as culturally specific narratives.
Narratives express, structure, and interpret in cultural terms, not only personal experience. They extend personal experience far beyond personal space and time, and construct representations of collectively elaborated images of ethnic, national, and transnational communities and relations (e.g. Anderson 2006 [1983]; Bhabha 1990; Bruner 1990; Levitt 2001; de Fina 2003; de Fina et al. 2006; Christou 2006).
* "Finland's population includes 4.8 per cent of people with foreign origin," Statistics Finland, last modified November 30, 2012, are those whose background country is the former Soviet Union or Russia": "There were 67,127 such persons in Finland at the end of 2011, representing 26 % of all people with foreign origin" [http://www.stat.fi/til/vaerak/2011/01/ vaerak_2011_01_2012-11-30_tie_001_en.html].
In this article, I will examine narratives about childhood experiences in immigration represented by Russian-speaking young people living in Finland, and I will pay special attention to the conceptualisation of friends and friendships and its use in the construction of immigration and integration experiences. Therefore, I will also discuss the concepts of friends and friendship in Russian language and culture. Following the conceptualisation of friends and friendship in the immigration narratives of the young people, I will consider three categories configured by means of friendship terms: transnational space, locally organised relations between the natives and immigrants, and agency in immigration. As a result, I will answer the following question: Why do concepts of friends and friendship play such a significant role in the narrativisation of immigration experience?
Friendship Problematised: Setting Language Tools
Friends and friendships have been studied throughout the world as an extremely important kind of relationship beyond family ties (e.g. Paine 1969; Bell and Coleman 1999; Oliker 1999; Killick and Desai 2003; Kon 2005 [1980]; Caine 2009; Hruschka 2010). Although we may imagine that friendship is intuitively understandable, the particular meanings or importance embedded in our conceptions of friendship and friends are culturally variable. From the cross-cultural perspective, the social roles that friends play and the cultural content of friendships differ from society to society, which makes it impossible to use these terms as universal categories with passable definitions (Wierzbicka 1997; Bell and Coleman 1999; Carrier 1999; Killick and Desai 2003, etc.).
In her cross-cultural analysis of the conceptualisation of friendship, A. Wierzbicka stressed that categorisation of human inter-relations in Russian culture is richly developed (Wierbicka 1997: 57). Cultural outsiders in particular recorded that the "social circles [of Russians] are usually narrower than those of Westerners" and "relationships between Russians are usually more intense, more demanding, more enduring, and often more rewarding" (Smith 1976: 108-110 via Wierzbicka 1997: 55). The high importance of the concepts 'friend' and 'friendship' for Russian-speakers can be recognised by simply looking at the linguistic evidence present in the vocabulary of friendship in the Russian language. In a frequency analysis of 1 million running words, the regularity of the term drug is 817 compared with its American English translation, most commonlyfriend, that has a regularity of 298 or 346; the abstract noun druzba is 155 against friendship that was 27 or 8 (Wierzbicka 1997: 59).* The plural druz'ja, suggesting a group of people on whom one can rely for support, is even more common (ibid.). The importance of deep friendship in the Russian hierarchy of values can be seen not only in language and literature, but also in a number of sociological studies from the 1970s and early 1980s that found that in reply to questions about their life goals, Russian young people put friendship in the first place (Shlapentokh 1989:174-176 via Wierzbicka 1997: 57).
A. Wierzbicka listed and roughly explained the most common key terms describing human relationships in the Russian language according to the degree of "closeness" and "strength" these terms include: "Drug is someone extremely close to us (much more so than the English friend); podruga refers to a bond less powerful than drug but still stronger than friend; prijatel' (or prijatel'nica) is rather more distant; and znakomyj (or znakomaja) still more distant, although closer than the supposed English equivalent acquaintance, normally offered by Russian-English dictionaries. (Tovarisc, in the relevant sense, may seem either "stronger" or "weaker" than prijatel', depending on context)" (Wierzbicka 1997: 58).
* A. Wierzbicka in her analysis used three sources: (Zasorina 1977; Kucera, Nelson Francis 1967; Carroll, Davies, Richman 1971).
In actual communication, however, the terms are used in social contexts where gender, age, class, collective/individual relationships, etc. are not neutral. The context supplements the words with additional flexible, socially significant meanings. Thus in the narratives taken for this article the words related to friendship vary significantly in their application to particular social situations informing the listener about the relative position of the person in question from the narrator's perspective, even they are defined in dictionaries as having a common meaning of being in friend relationships to each other (with distribution according to grammatical categories of gender, number, and size with reference to value characteristics). For example, podruga (female friend, girl friend) usually presupposes serious and close friendship between women, but could also refer to be a sexual partner for a man. Podruzka (female friend, girl friend, a diminutive form referring to less serious or childhood relationships) also translates as friend, but not so close or valuable as in the former case, while the term drug (male friend), applies to both men and women and expresses the real value of personal and highly individualised links. But its plural form, druz'ja, loses the association with the great value because of the connotations with relationships that have a collective character — "a person's vital support group" (Wierzbicka 1997: 59).* In addition, people use other terms that describe more distant relatedness such as prijatel' (friend), tovarisc (comrade), znakomyj (aacquaintance); **or these referring to a more exact location kollega (colleague), sotrudnik (colleague), odnokursnik (course mate), odnoklassnik(classmate)*** referredtorelationships of varying distance and quality in diverse situations. The verb druzit' (be friends) and its derivatepodruzit's'ja (becomefriends) are used to denote relationships of serious friendship, but often just referred to regularity of communication**** though the connotations with friendship are preserved. Sometimes relationships that could be recognised as friendships are not defined using the special terms druzba (friendship) or druzit' (befriends) at all, but their nature is implicitly understood through a set of described practices and concepts (cf. Spencer and Pahl 2006; Kharkhordin and Kovaleva 2009). Contextualised in the particular situations of migration (cf. Adams and Allan 1999), the terms and conceptual clusters related to friends and friendship were loaded with additional connotations. For example, in descriptions of the reasons for immigration, the phrase "no friends left at home" implied the destruction of social links or even the dissolution of local communities at home after the collapse of the USSR; "friends/ acquaintances in Moscow" indicated possibilities for visiting the metropolitan area by people living on the periphery of the country, their additional possibilities for mobility, made conceivable thanks to the informal networks existing between friends; "friends around the world" implied a widened perception of social space and possibilities for global communication and mobility to distant countries. These contexts modify familiar terms, reshaping them in accordance with migration experience*****, and adding volume to their meanings.
* For example, see The Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language written by D.N. Ushakov. [http://dic.academic.ru/contents.nsf/ushakov].
** These three Russian terms have dozens of translation possibilities, see e.g. Multiran [http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?&l1=1&l2=2&CL=1&a=0].
*** Every one of them could be translated in a number of ways depending on the context.
**** For example, the question "S kem vy druzili v detsvte?" means " With whom did you socialise/communicate/play in your childhood?"
***** a similar observation was made in connection to kin terms: "the meaning that people give to these kin terms changes according to the situation and context of usage. This means that
Embedded in the language and narratives as "a topic with much moral weight" (Bell and Coleman 1999: 1), and often emotionally charged as well, concepts and terms having to do with friendship relations could be regarded as a culturally specific means for a description of the wider social environment: "it is important to remember that friendship is more than just thought and talk, is not just 'an ensemble of texts'... It is more because we act and shape our world in terms of it" (Carrier 1999: 22). Taking this into account, I will approach the narratives about friends and friendship as a specific language: when the young people describe their friendships they reiterate a culturally determined personal understanding of the social environment in relation to their own dispositions and describe their own place in society.
With regard to the emphasized role of friends and friendship in Russian language and culture, two methodological circumstances should be taken into account. The first is the dialogical character of narrative production (Bakhtin 1981). It could be presupposed that my role as a Russian-speaking interlocutor was rather significant in the narration of friendship by the young people I interviewed. I initiated many stories about friends without realizing my role in the beginning of the research because Russian language conceptual apparatus dictated us thematic accents. Friendship vocabulary is also embedded in my own everyday language. Its presence in my questions, as in the narrated immigrant life stories, was almost invisible until I noticed it, and started to ask more focused questions in order to make the conceptualization of friendship more visible. However, these vocabulary 'pitfalls' could have remained invisible and undeveloped if they had not been of importance for the topic.
Another circumstance concerns the age specificity of the people with whom I spoke. Given the fact that my interlocutors were young people, the importance of friends and friendship in their life stories might be attributed to their age and the age they referred to. Friends and friendship are extremely important for the socialisation and maturation of children and young people, notwithstanding cross-cultural differences before adult communication practices would change their focus under influence of important life transitions such as marriage, career development, child rearing, etc. (Hruschka 2010: 129, 134). However, even superficial acquaintance with Russian-speaking immigrants around the world indicates that friendship and communication in general are a topic of an extreme importance for people of a Russian cultural background, and difficulties in making friendship in immigration is a special topic for Russian-speakers living abroad.* Finland is not an exception in this regard. Thus, it can be presupposed that friends and friendships terms used in immigrant narratives are characteristic of vocabulary not only for describing the young people's socialisation experiences, but also for other Russian-speakers in immigration for defining their place; hence their particular problematisation of communication in a new society.
the 'big family' picture of these villages is very misleading if taken in a strictly literal sense" (Santos 2003: 25).
* There are several examples of discussions about friendship in immigration present, for example, on the Internet: in Canada — Druz'ja v immigratsii [http://zarubegom.com/immi-gratsiya/druz-ya-v-immigratsii/]; O drui.be v immigratsii, [http://tatti75.livejournal.com/ 534500. html]; in France "Druieskie otnosenija v immigracii [http://www.infrance.su/forum/ showthread.php?t=94472]; in Portugal — Rasskazy immigrantov, iivuschih v Portugalii [https:// vk.com/topic-65286234_29327126]; in the USA — Russkie v SSA: osobennosti vzivania, [http:// www.kontinent.org/article_rus_46578794cef70.html]; accessed 28.04.2015.
Narrated Immigration Space and Places among "Friends and Acquaintances": Imagining a Previous Life
For the Russian cultural reality, collective friends and friendship appear to be of real value reproduced in Russian cultural heritage: Russian proverbs describe friends and friendship through mutual help and overcoming difficulties together as the essence both of individual and collective relationships: "real friends are contested in misfortune" or "a real friend does not leave you in trouble," and "it is better to have a hundred friends than a hundred roubles." Such support from friends is not one-way help and it implicitly presupposes a reciprocal exchange of things and services that creates a feeling of "intense social proximity" (cf. Santos-Granero 2007: 10—12) or a "thick" social environment. The collective and instrumental character of these relationships does not make them unimportant* in regard to personal relationships with friends; on the contrary they potentially include it (e.g. Paine 1969: 506; Hruschka 2010: 174-175).
In the analysis of Russian conceptualisation of friendship A. Wierzbicka paid particular attention to a conceptual category druz'ja (friends), which is the plural for a word drug (friend) as a part of an expression "rodnye i druzja," i.e. "family and friends" (Wierzbicka 1997: 59-60) or "relatives and friends." She stressed that "druz'ja are for: seeing one's druz'ja, talking to them, spending a lot of time with them, is one of the most important parts of a Russian's life; and so is helping one's druz'ja when they need it" (Ibid. 60-61). This expression (and its variants) plays a crucial role in the description of transnational space of e/immigration in family and personal stories of the young people.
The expressions friends and acquaintances (druz'ja i znakomye) or friends and relatives (druz'ja i rodstvenniki) have a significant place in the biographical narratives of young Russian-speakers, and above all they were used to describe relationships formed by the parental families before immigration. Friends and acquaintances were understood as actively participating in family life. They were involved in essential family activities such as childcare, they supported the family during difficult times such as unemployment and scarcity, assisting the family and making it possible for them "to survive" (cf. Abrahams 1999), and they participated in decision-making about emigration, both with advice and with physical assistance. Although the phrases referred to close friendship-like relationships, they rather defined the diffuse relations between the family and the immediate social environment that lacks the character of individualised links almost completely. The relationships with friends and acquaintances (druz'ja i znakomye) or friends and relatives (druz'ja i rodstvenniki) could be imagined as a continuum from strong to weak social ties and marked a high degree of density for social connections that were established in the home country before emigration. Within this social environment, only a few friends had names and personal distinctiveness.
The concept offriends and acquaintances also often appeared in the biographical narratives when emigration demanded a strong explanation. The existence of friends and acquaintances in the place of residence was used as an argument pro or contra migration, or as its justification. People did not usually want to leave their friends and acquaintances to go abroad. They did not see a reason to stay in their hometowns if "there were no friends [left]
* One could doubt that collective relationships could be attributed to 'friendship' due to their collective and instrumental character. For example, R. Paine insisted that within solidary structure (he took under consideration voluntary associations) "there exists only something 'less than' friendship for the reason that the members of the group or institution have a relationship to each other only in terms of their dedication to it ... This might be termed 'inalienable group friendship'." (Paine 1969: 518).
there," and they had a good reason to leave and follow their friends who had 'scattered around the world.' Friends who were left behind, tempted a person to return: "the more relatives and friends we had there [in Russia], the more reasons we had to go [back] there, and we felt that we had left some part of ourselves" (M 27/4)*.
Children were included in the networks of the friends and acquaintances of their parental families too:
"You asked me about acquaintances and friends, ** I think that the majority of my closer friends were the children of my parents' acquaintances or my grandmother and grandfather's acquaintances, their grandchildren. We socialised with them in the country and in our spare time" (W 27/8).
Children's relationships with their own friends were characterised by a strong sense of solidarity within a defined group, and they were a part of this continuum of social links left behind. The localisation of these networks was defined vaguely — in the neighbourhood, in the country, and also at school. Having no specific locality made it possible to imagine the group offriends and acquaintances as being present everywhere.
Relationships formed by the parental families after immigration also play a significant role in the biographies and family stories narrated by these young Russian-speakers. It seems that the presence of friends and acquaintances is the most important condition for a sense of communicative fulfilment and solidarity with the local community beyond family links. The presence of friends, acquaintances, and relatives reproduces a "comfort zone" as one of my interlocutors defined the immediate social surroundings of his family in immigration. He also emphasised the territorial embeddedness of such links:
"My cousin has just married. And they communicate with each other... her partner is also Russian ... and their family and our family, and three times a year they celebrate birthdays or something else. They all gather, and their social circle consists of[people] who left in the same boat, let's say. His parents here — they do not have anybody to communicate with [NB! — M.H.]. They are Russians. They do not take root. And my cousins' grandmother and grandfather, they communicate with them. They discuss things that Russians discuss; they... do things like Russians do. They are as they were in Russia, in such a bubble, not in Finland. Finland forthem just surrounds them, but it is not where they are. They have relationships among themselves as they were in Russia, they watch Russian TV, and they act like they have never ever left it.... This choice is easier, more comfortable. To learn Finnish and to do something [new] they need to leave the comfort zone. To learn a new language at the age of sixty they need to leave the comfort zone" (M 27/4).
This citation blames the unwillingness to widen a circle of communication during immigration, restricting communication exclusively to members of a particular family, and to an imagined community that belonged to the previous life in Russia and was represented by TV.
The latter substituted friends and acquaintances while the family was lacking the ties with its immediate social surrounding that were necessary for integration. Here, coming out of the "comfort zone" means personal effort in creating a social environment that includes new friends and acquaintances in a new territory that presupposes a particular immigrant agency. In the host country, the presence of friends and acquaintances makes integration successful and the absence of this category of relationships is seen as a failure. Thus, relationships with friends and acquaintances or friends and relatives are extremely important:
* Here and further M — man, W — woman, no/ no — age during interviewing and age of coming to Finland.
** The question was "S kem vy druzili [v skole]?" "With whom did you socialise [at school]?"
they are markers ofterritorial and national belonging, mapping it in the space oftransnational migration.
A Place of Contested Friendship: Representations of Immigrant Childhood
Conceptualisation of the immediate childhood social environment in terms of friends and friendship was characteristic of storytelling for both the children and the young adults with whom I spoke. Both children and young adults talked about friends (druz'ja) as being an important aspect of their lives. The age of the narrator did not make any difference in this case, because group relationships were significant regardless of age. However, there was a significant difference between children and adult narratives: while the boys spoke about their everyday interactions with their friends as bad or good without reference to their immigrant positions in Finland, the young adults invariably connected their troubles in childhood friendships to their particular immigration plot.
In the immigrant childhood experiences that my interlocutors narrated, coming to a new country was an opportunity to see new things and have exciting adventures. They often narrated their first impressions as miracles coming true: colourful images from the labels of what were import goods in their home country were transformed into real material abundance in Finland (M 28/8). At the same time, in their recollections of the new environment, they stressed the lack of people around them: "Everything was so clean, well ordered, but without people. This was very strange." (M 27/8). The narrated emptiness of the new environment can be seen as a symbolic representation for the social emptiness with which the children's immigration experiences began: communication with friends and relatives that had been left behind was replaced by new consumer goods and new activities (M 28/8, W 27/8), but not by new relations with people.
Once the children began attending daycare or school, social emptiness stopped. These institutions attracted a particular attention in the stories about their immigrant childhood experiences, since they provided intensive social interaction for the newly arrived children with other children, usually peers from the same class or group, and adults, usually teachers. School was the primary place where the immigrant children faced the personal challenge of gaining the acceptance of the new community. In their stories, they often compared school experiences in their home country and in Finland:
"In Russia we communicated with each other all together. Yes, in Russia we were friends (dru ili) with boys. But in Finland — no"(W 28/12);
"We all were close friends (druzili druzno) there [at home]; we had a certain company. Here [in Finland] boys [are friends] only with boys, and girls only with girls" (M 28/8); or
"We had a very good company [of friends] in Samarkand. * We met each other regularly in the yard. I had many friends in Samarkand. But in Finland... Of course, I was a little worried that I did not have Finnish friends" (M 28/8).
The comparison, explicit or implicit, revealed previous childhood experiences and could empower him or her with cross-cultural expertise, agency, and therefore with personal achievement:
"First [my parents] sent me to a Swedish kindergarten... I taught the children to speak Russian [there].**
* It is presupposed that there were people from different ethnic groups. The name of the town was changed.
** Also "Our class is a little bit strange... boys and girls play together. Though, honestly I think that I made the class like that. Earlier boys spoke [only] each other. Then I began communication with girls and they [boys] joined us too" (M 13/5).
However, this story of success was followed by a description of the failure the boy experienced when he entered a Finnish kindergarten later. His own (foreign) language appeared to cause a disturbing and painful sense of otherness among the majority group of Finnish-speakers:
Then I was sent to a Finnish kindergarten where I was for a long time... The most difficult problem was the language. I even had a dream that everybody started to speak Russian [at the kindergarten] — it was a relief. It was really difficult to socialise [there]"(M 27/4).
The immigrant children recalled their lack of Finnish language ability as the first major problem they encountered as they were introduced to their new classmates. They usually remembered their first days in school as characterized by the friendly interest their classmates expressed toward the foreign newcomer. A common element in the narratives was a supportive teacher or a classmate guiding the newly arrived child into the unknown social world of school in Finland. However, further entering the Finnish-speaking peer group and making friendships within it, emphasised a gap in communication because of a deficit of Finnish or English language resources. In the story about the first days at the Finnish school narrated below, native language is not regarded as valuable; the situation was pronouncedly defined as a total absence of language for communication with the Finnish classmates, but not with the English-speaking foreign boy:
"When I came to school... one girl started [assisting me]. However she understood [soon] that I did not have the language, that is was difficult to communicate with me, so I would rather communicate with this [mentioned above] Chinese boy. Although I did not speak English, it was easier to spend time with him. But my Finnish mates, I think that they decided that is was more comfortable to communicate in Finnish with each other rather than with a foreigner who did not speak any language. ... So I began with English, and later learnt Finnish. When I could say some words in English, I started to socialise with Finnish girls..." (W 27/8)
Linguistic otherness was also expressed as a limitation in making friends in terms of the moral obligations towards one's own language group that the young immigrants felt. The implicit expectation that a person should communicate and make friendships within his or her own group was experienced as a difficulty in leaving the boundaries of their social group, and as a lack of choice in personal relationships:
"I made a friend, a girl in my class. But [in this small town]... we had a very restricted circle of contacts. If I wanted to socialise... regardless of the fact that I had friends of my own, I should interact with mates who spoke Russian, and who, so to say, were present. As far as there were not many Russians there, I had no one whom I might consider to be a close soul friend. We just communicated with each other in the first place because there was nobody else" (W 28/12).
Language difference was not the only reason mentioned for the communication gap. The marginalisation, or even exclusion,* of newcomers might be explained by the foreign-ness embedded in their names and body appearance:
"I was bullied at school: I had a strange name, and spoke oddly... I discussed it with my girlfriend and she told me that she was also bullied for similar reasons. . Then [another boy] who spent his childhood in Africa joined our class ... and the attention shifted to him. I was forgotten. They forgot to bully me... and began bullying him. ... Yes, I also participated [in bullying]" (M 27/4).
* About racism at the Finnish school see: (Souto 2011).
Economic inequalities could be remembered as a specific immigrant experience of own distinctions from classmates too:
"It was difficult for him [my brother], in my opinion, to be integrated into this school. Because precisely those children who study in such English-language schools in Finland are, let's say, wealthier. And he had the feeling that our parents couldn't buy him some things ... All his classmates wore particular clothes. All his classmates could speak Finnish. But he is Russian.
He is a newcomer. And he lives in such a poor family......I think that I had the same problems
as my brother — to join this life, to look like my classmates" (W 27/8).
Friendship with particular people was a mark of social and economic position: "During the break it is visible at once who your friends are, who you socialise with" (W 27/8).
These narratives about childhood friendships during immigration do not only have a dialogic character, as it has been mentioned above, but they are also multi-layered and polyphonic representations (see Bakhtin 1981). The young people have several different levels and perspectives* on their relationships with the immediate social environment in their narratives of immigration. On the one hand, life stories represent factual texture, including memories of people, events and their own and others' agency. They inform their listeners that teachers and schoolmates were an important bridge into the new society; they helped the immigrant children to acquire the knowledge necessary for them to function socially. They also gave their listeners the impression that relationships between children seemed to be rather friendly, classmates were ready to help, newcomers learned the Finnish language quickly, and as a result there were no lack of friends at school quite early on. Moreover, the young people remembered that even during their first years of primary school, they were able to read, write, and solve mathematical problems better than their Finnish classmates, who hadn't yet been taught these skills: "I learned to read in Finnish sooner than my Finnish classmate," confessed one of my interlocutors (M 28/8).
On the other hand, a narrative line of difficulties that could be experienced at the home country or anywhere else, is also present in the narratives: a deficit of money, things, and social ties with people; a lack of understanding and possibilities for communication; and helplessness against bullying. Within the framework of immigration, the earlier cultural experiences, with few exceptions, are seen in terms of deficiency rather than advantage. The difficulties the children faced were represented as a lack of necessary competence, and therefore an immigrant position, emphasizing inequalities in immigration. The absence of reciprocity in relationships with classmates, when immigrant children were the receivers but not the providers of language, knowledge, or help, reinforced this impression.
One more perspective was represented in the evaluation of comments about the narrators' immediate social environment that was articulated in terms of friendship among peers. Constructing a positive image of their child relationships with their schoolmates as a whole, they contested the integrity of their 'peer group' at their new Finnish schools in contrast with their pre-immigration experiences at home. They called their childhood social relations into question from their adult perspective: "[At school] everybody socialised with everybody, but did not create friendships, I think" (M 28/8). By questioning their childhood friendships, they negated the value of the friendly relationships they had within the classmate community, and destroyed its imagined solidarity.
* About different perspectives in the text see Y. Lotman (Lotman 1997).
Making Personal Friendships and Individual Friends: Agency in Immigration
Loss of their immediate social surrounding of friends, acquaintances and relatives left behind at the home, unavailability of friends among children in the new country of residence, and inequality in communication with them, are characteristics of the immigrant biographies narrated by my interlocutors. For immigrants, a lack of friendships marks a turning point in the course of their life stories, as if they had to start their lives from the very beginning. The continuity of having friends and acquaintances connected to their birthplace was broken:
"I did not have Finnish friends. My first Finnish friend appeared in the 7th class. That means that I grew up as a foreigner here. I was not taken into Finnish society on the intimate ground. As a matter of fact it appears that I came here when I was a child, and everybody was smiling at me. As I have mentioned, everybody was greeting and smiling. At school everything might have been OK. But I did not have closer [social] ties for a long time... [If I had been born here] I would have grown up here, I'd have started kindergarten here, my first friends and acquaintances would have emerged in my life, and I'd know them. I would have been easier to make [friends] and communicate with people without starting my [social] life all over again, but continuing it from birth......I think that everything would have been different' (M 28/8).
The young people I interviewed used the concept of friendship to describe their relationships before and after immigration and reinterpreted their childhood experiences in immigration by these means. Describing their new relationships in terms of negated friendships in Finland they spoke of multiple ruptures and borders between genders, classes, generations, ethnic groups, and nations located in the new society, and indicated the divisions between the natives and newcomers, stressing a breach in the solidarity of the host community.
Ethnic borders and boundaries (Barth 1969; Brubaker 2004) hold a particular significance in the narration of childhood friendships within a group of peers. Their descriptions of making different kinds of ties during the whole narrated life course both in childhood and adulthood in space and time had repetitions and commonalities. The narrated ethnic boundaries between the groups had different qualities, and were described as weak and strong depending on how easily they were crossed. The borders between groups of foreigners and ethnic others were more transparent. The borders between the native Finns and foreigners were much more difficult to overcome for making friendships: "It is very difficult... especially with Finns; it is very difficult to create close relationships. They do not allow a closer approach" (M 28/8).
It is possible to observe several strategies for regulating friendship that the young people adhered to on the discursive level, by examining the stories told by three my interlocutors, Vladimir, Elena, and Irina. They all came to Finland as school-aged children of Ingrian Finnish repatriates in 1990s.
The first case of overcoming ethnic boundaries was represented by Vladimir (M 28/8), who identified himself as a person of Russian or Soviet cultural background and regarded himself as a very communicative person who enjoys the company of friends:
"I like to spend my time with my friends, with people whom I fully trust. They too — they trust me completely. They allowed me to enter to their life; so, we share well... some stories, some secrets. We meet each other often."
His communication ability was an important resource in the beginning of his professional career — then he attracted many Russian clients to the shop where he served them in Russian. Recently he has worked in the media industry and remembered his first working experience with great satisfaction:
"I liked it very much. I miss it sometimes. It was a very cheerful time — I learned a great deal during those four years in the shop. I learned to deal with people, to understand their moods and such things. I miss it. As an office worker now I can say that I miss communication with people, with different people I don't know."
In his opinion it was not easy for foreigners to make friends in Finland for many reasons. One reason was the common features of the character of the local people:
"People in Finland like peace and quiet. They have their own space, and one is not allowed to trespass. When you are speaking to a [Finnish]person, he has... it is necessary to keep your distance..."
Or:
"In Finland people prefer to be left in peace and silence. They protect their [personal] space, and you can't cross its borders. If you want to speak to somebody, you always need to maintain a distance."
Another reason was that the opportunities for friendship are disrupted due to specific Finnish attitudes toward foreigners:
"Here [in the Finnish society] there are discussions about racism. The Finns talk about people from different nations (nacii). They are trying, well... to communicate with them or to help them, or to include them in their society. But in reality it does not happen. The Finns have a strong opinion about different nations. Well. It is very difficult to overcome, I think."
In order to overcome these cultural borders he re-interpreted the ethnic and national identities of his intimate Finnish friends as 'deviant Finnishness,' as in the following quotations:
"Practically all the Finns who are my friends do non-typical things for the Finns in principle. ... I think that they have a different character... Perhaps, they like a more joyous, happier life [than the Finns usually do]. ... I know that my [former] boss was a hooligan in his childhood. Perhaps this explains things in some sense? That everything was interesting for him, well..."
Vladimir's relationships with friends are based on reciprocity where he gives his otherness to people who are ready to take it in exchange for their friendship:
"I think that I communicate with people in different way than the Finns normally communicate with each other. I am always bringing something new to the Finnish culture or. to the lives of my Finnish friends. I bring something that they could not find among their Finnish friends. I think so. I think that I have even been told so many times."
Thus, Vladimir's way offorming friendships presumed a reinterpretation of Finnishness, which changed the boundaries and borders between him and his friends from strong to weak in order to make reciprocity possible between groups in a form of 'cultural exchange.'
Another strategy for making friends was to avoid borders and boundaries between the natives and newcomers and enter into a transnational territory instead. This strategy was more or less present in every one of the interviews. Elena's (W 27/8) words provide the best illustration:
"[In Britain I attended] an international university. So... I didn't really have many friends who were just pure English people.... The easiest communication was not with Finns, Russians, or Englishmen, but with people who were non-native. not like from the Russian group or the Finnish group."
My question "How do you see your place in Finland?" seemed too open to Elena, so I suggested that she discuss the Russian community as a minority in Finland. However the political issue did not appear to be as important as the private one. She responded:
"If one asks people about, let's say, somebody's mother is of one ethnicity and their father is of another. What do you feel more — being a Finn or Russian? This is a classical question.
I do not have answers to these questions. I have such mixed feelings. In my head I am thinking in Russian, English, and Finnish. It depends. ... How do I feel in Finland? I feel myself to be a person independent of ethnicity. ... I speak Russian [to my parents]. It is definitely another feeling than when I go out with my Finnish friends — we speak Finnish. Finns have different attitudes if they hear Russian or Finnish in the street: [one either feels] as if one could be one of them or foreign person. It depends where I am, in Russian-speaking or Finnish-speaking [company]."
Elena was denying that ethnicity was an important part of her life; she was resisting ethnic borders. However, it seemed that immigration as the topic of our talk presupposed ethnic grouping, hence ethnicity and ethnic borders were implicitly present in our conversation:
"I have the feeling that you are asking me [questions] from the ethnicity perspective. [But] I feel myself first of all to be a student, a person who has certain hobbies, learns certain subjects. I feel that my identity is dependent on my character, but not on the languages I speak or my ethnicity."
Finally, Irina's (W 28/12) story represents the strategy of avoiding close friends. She stressed her relatedness to the Finnish culture and saw it in terms of belonging to Lutheranism. In her opinion, a good Lutheran is a person who works a great deal and does not necessarily get anything for it, though God can reward the effort. The story of her life is a good illustration of this principle: she was not afraid of challenges and worked very hard to become successful in her professional career. However, the question of religion seemed to be more about her ethnic identity than her religious views: she constructed her biography in accordance with her understanding of Finnishness.
"Just like all the other children who came to Finland when they were small, I have thought a great deal about my personal identity — Who am I? A Finn or Russian? I think that I understand Finns easily. Many things that surprise Russians do not seem strange to me. For example, that the Finns are not talkative."
In this instance Finnish communication culture posed no difficulty for her, she insisted. She illustrated it with a joke about choosing a place of residence where there are no friends, acquaintances and relatives nearby.* Avoiding close relationships is a feature of the Finnish culture with which she identifies.
However in her life story, Irina attempted to find additional explanations for her attitudes toward friends and friendship and does so with the help of her immigrant experience:
" When I was twelve I wanted to have a friend, a girl who I would call every day, we'd go shopping, chat about boys, etc. But such relationships with Finns never developed despite my feeling that they'd like to have them in some way. They even made attempts, but I felt that I did not speak Finnish well enough. My Finnish improved over time and at some point I recognised that it had become good enough for communication with the Finns. However I decided that they were too different and I did not want to communicate with them. ... Later I found Russian friends. In the mean time my Finnish advanced more and I found many Finnish acquaintances. Today I have both Finnish and Russian acquaintances. But the Russian friends from my teenage years disappeared. Well, they just transformed into acquaintances."
* A version of a widespread Finnish joke about timber floating in the river. This metaphor symbolises the common perception that the Finns do not like to live in close proximity to their neighbours, preferring detached households far from each other.
And:
"I still have no Finnish friends. But I have had many very good Finnish acquaintances. Now I can't say exactly if I would like to have Finnish friends ... I think that I don't have such close Russian friends either."
Thus, in immigration narratives, ethnic boundaries and borders between different ethnic groups were represented explicitly or implicitly, and played a significant role. Their quality — weak or strong — changed in connection with other characteristics of ethnicities represented in the narratives, for example, whether they were immigrant or native ones, normative or deviated. They also could be crossed, avoided, or resisted according to the personal ethnic position my interlocutors chose.
R. Brubaker stressed, "Social life is pervasively, though unevenly, structured along ethnic lines, and ethnicity 'happens' in a variety of everyday settings. Ethnicity is embodied and expressed not only in political projects and nationalist rhetoric but in everyday encounters, practical categories, commonsense knowledge, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, interactional cues, discursive frames, organizational routines, social networks, and institutional forms" (Brubaker 2004: 2). So, ethnicity should be conceptualised in "relational, processual, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated terms. This means thinking of ethnicity, race, and nation not in terms of substantial groups or entities but in terms of practical categories, situated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events" (Brubaker2004: 11). The Russian cultural discursive framework offriendship in immigration stresses ethnic boundaries and borders in the impossibility of child friendship in Finland. However, in the narratives, ethnicity is represented as fluid and manipulative in regard to friendships in adult life. Dependence between ethnicities and friendships became a personal choice. The young adults overcome difficulties embedded in ethnic borders, "liquidate lack"* of friends or friends and acquaintances, and discursively appropriate the space of immigration in terms of friendship.
Conclusion
In this article I have analysed a number of immigration narratives related to me by young Russian-speaking people who came to Finland with their parental families. It was discovered that the theme of friends and friendship occupied a significant place in each of the narratives.
It should be mentioned that relationships with friends are an important issue for people of a Russian cultural background; the importance of friends and friendship is stressed in Russian culture and language. In the immigration narratives these concepts are particularly relevant. Friendship as a quintessence of close, intimate, equal, relationships of mutual trust between people who are not kin and in this sense a priori strangers to each other is a means of measuring relatedness and connectedness (Killick and Desai 2010: 5) to the initially strange social environment. In this way, friendship as a matter of concern is widely represented all over the Russian cultural landscape in transnational space, since immigrant stories about friends and friendships are not specific only for Russian-speakers in Finland.
An analysis of the narratives revealed a continuum in types of relationships from collective friendship-like relationships with friends, acquaintances and relatives to highly individualised personal friendships with close "soulfriends." Friends and friendship-like
* In my opinion, here the terms of V. Propp match for description of the narrated trajectories of immigrant biographies (Propp 1968: 35).
relationships were heterogeneously distributed in time and space. Before emigration, social space-and-time was narrated as a space of "intense social proximity" full of possibilities for communication with friends and acquaintances, while after immigration social space-and-time was empty or filled with people who were friendly without friendship. The young Russian-speakers pointed this out in their narratives by drawing symbolic borders for gender, class, generations, and ethnicity. Ethnic borders were experienced as difficult to overcome, but national borders were the hardest to cross. The reality of immigration was characterised as being filled with ruptures (cf. Boehm and al. 2011) and corrupted social relationships, where close friendships demanded conscious effort and individual solutions (see Allan 1999: 73). Friend relationships, closely connected with the dynamism of their immigrant plot, were embedded into the life trajectories of the young immigrants. Each one of them created strategies for overcoming ethnic and national borders in friendship, and overcoming these social borders was represented as a matter of individual choice. Propelled by a powerful motivation to be included in the new society, the young immigrants shaped their subjectivities and identities through the ways in which they chose to deal with the problem of making friends. Thus, in the narratives, the conceptualisation of friendship became an instrument for the construction of social reality in immigration and the appropriation of it. Immigration was narrated as a time-and-space where possibilities for friendship were limited and must be individually negotiated. Friendship was a language for the description and negotiation of immigrant experiences, and evaluation of success in immigration.
However, I suggest that the problem with friendships is not essential in immigration, as Russian-speakers often presume it is. Let us return to the boy from the train and his Finnish friend Olli. He did not have any doubt about their friendship. Two 9-11 and 12-13 year old boys who I spoke with during the project did not negate friends and friendships too, and they also did not have narratives about immigration of their own. The young adults, on the contrary, told their immigrant narratives, and the topic of friendship was an inevitable part of those narratives.
One final point is that I discussed immigration experiences with my interlocutors in Russian. It appeared to be an important factor to be considered while understanding and interpretation my results. I am not sure if friendship would have been a central topic in immigration narratives retold in Finnish, English or other languages my interlocutors knew.
Acknowledgement
I want warmly to thank all the participants of the project.
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