In Other Words

How my family and I carved out a place in the supermarkets and classrooms of this new country.

- Nadya Semenova

IT FELT LIKE drowning: my heart was pounding and my head was spinning. Almost 11 years ago, on my second day in Canada, I stood in a Toronto supermarket, my hand outstretched in a beggar’s gesture.

“I’m looking for this, uh, ... white thing. Milk gone bad,” I said. “We eat it with borscht.”

“Is it a buttermilk? Curd?” asked a woman in her 60s, her forehead wrinkled in mild concern.

Her response confused me. What’s with this “curd” thing? Isn’t curd part of sheep’s fat? And how could something simultaneously be a butter and a milk?

“Sorry to ask, dear, where are you from? You don’t look Russian,” the woman said as she flashed me her best “inclusive Canadian” smile.

I blinked once or twice and opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I knew what I wanted to say. Yes, ethnic Russians are 80 per cent of the population of Russia, but the census reports 194 other ethnicities. No, I don’t look Russian. I was born in the Sakha Republic, in Siberia. The territory of my homeland is almost one-third the size of Canada, and the capital, Yakutsk, is the coldest city on earth. I wished I knew enough English to be able to say all of that.

FATE HAS A curious sense of humour. In 1987, long before I moved to Canada with my husband and three kids, I saw a student from Africa in a Russian meat shop. The winter in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) was especially severe that year. The Neva River froze all the way to the bottom. The old-timers compared it to the winter of 1941–42, during the Nazi siege of the city.