Behind the Silk Curtain E-Book

Gulistan Khamzayeva

• Herausgeber: Glagoslav Publications B.V. (N)
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 266

Beschreibung

The book Behind the Silk Curtain is about multiculturalism, adapting to new environments, socializing with people of different cultures, about linguistic integration, gaining experience, and facing challenges, about friends and family, about some of the Kazakh traditions and the country’s mentality, about charity and weddings and many other fascinating contexts she was involved in.

Leseprobe

Behind the Silk Curtain

Gulistan Khamzayeva

Glagoslav Publications

Behind the Silk Curtain

by Gulistan Khamzayeva

© 2022, Gulistan Khamzayeva

© 2022, Glagoslav Publications

Book cover and interior book design by Max Mendor

Cover image: © Aika Alemi (2022)

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 978-1-914337-72-7 (Ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may  be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Beginning

2. Transitory Territory

3. Cutting Cultural Fetters

4. Good People Are Always There

5. On Experiences And Challenges

6. Speaking Of Languages

7. Thinking And Rethinking Education

8. A Sense Of Belonging

9. Veils And Fairytales

10. Charity Begins At Home

Epilogue

Bibliography And Suggested Reading

Notes

Dedicated to Irene Koch, my best friend,

who made my life complete

Foreword

From 2008 to 2011 I have served in Astana as the European Union Ambassador to Kazakhstan, after previous EU postings — out of Brussels — in Vienna, Kiev, and Moscow and before a final posting in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In all these postings I was glad that my wife was ready to join me, supporting me in my function as well as allowing us to have a normal family life.

The author’s family has in many regards had a similar life to our own and many of the aspects described in this book are not unfamiliar to us. Changing place of work and of living more than once is an exciting experience, and we ourselves consider that we have been privileged to have such an experience, as it allowed us to get a more in-depth knowledge of a number of other cultures and to have made many good friends around the world. There are of course also a number of more or less hard challenges that come along with this, especially as regards family life.

Gulistan Khamzayeva has lived abroad with her family for most of the recent 20 years and it appeared immediately to me that she was indeed very well placed to describe what it means to live abroad and to serve abroad in a diplomatic service. Ambassador Khamzayev is among the senior diplomats of his country and Gulistan Khamzayeva has supported him very actively, getting herself involved in numerous activities.

Gulistan very skillfully describes how she, her husband and their daughters organized their lives in the various places, what special obstacles they had to face and how they faced them. It appears clearly that they have used their new life experiences to enrich themselves and to maintain very close links among themselves, probably closer than if they had stayed in their homeland.

The book provides also the opportunity to learn more about Gulistan’s native country, as she refers to Kazakh traditions and as she and her family naturally approach new living environments with their specific cultural background.

Moreover, I would like to underline another aspect that comes to my mind when reading this book: Gulistan and Almaz Khamzayev were diplomats for a country that did not exist when they were born, when they studied, and even when they started their professional career. Indeed, Kazakhstan declared its independence in the context of the disintegration of the Soviet Union only on 16 December 1992. As a new country, Kazakhstan undertook to create all the structures that go along with an independent country. This included the creation of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of a diplomatic service. Under the active leadership of President Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s diplomatic service unfolded gradually over the last 20 years, leading as of now to an impressive network of more than 60 diplomatic missions abroad.

The book at hand is interesting for all those who have lived abroad or who are considering going abroad, as well as for those who are interested in historic elements related to Kazakhstan’s nation building.

Finally, the book gave me the opportunity to renew contact with Central Asia, a region that both myself and my wife enormously appreciate. I would encourage you to use this book as a mean to get to know Kazakhstan and its friendly people before possibly travelling there. I can assure you, you will not be disappointed.

Norbert Jousten

EU Ambassador to Kazakhstan

2008-2011 April 2013

Acknowledgments

When my first book, Leaving a Piece of My Heart Behind, was published in Russian in 2009, my foreign friends, unable to read in Russian, asked me to translate the book. I told them that it was written for my country people, for the Russian-speaking community, for the people with the same background.

It is about women who due to their husbands’ job had to leave the home country to follow their husbands, to find their own way in the host country, to adapt, socialize and accept a new environment. I received lots of warm feedback, comments, and messages, and I am still receiving them.

I promised my foreign friends that one day I will write a book for them to know more about us, Kazakhstani people, to get to know about our culture, some of our traditions, way of living, about our perception of the world around us, globalized and fast moving.

I would like to thank, first of all, my family for supporting me with this project. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even start it.

I am grateful to my husband Almaz for still accepting my ideas as I always have lots of ideas and for “pushing” me to take more challenges. Thanks to him I am what

I am. Thirty-six years of marriage help us understand each other in a more profound way, leaving no doubt about the sincerity of our relationship.

My daughters are my friends, my supporters, my counselors. They urged me to write my first book, and they strongly support me in writing this book, giving their contribution, advice, and comments. Mother’s thanks to my daughters!

Special thanks to David for editing my book, for the excellence he brought to the book. Besides his infinite amount of patience with my book, I want to thank him for his wisdom, impeccable sense of humor, and creativity with the book cover.

I want to mention and thank Irina Shestakova (wife of Ambassador of Belarus to the Italian Republic) and Irene Koch for their support, encouragement and invaluable comments on how to improve the book.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Catharina Creysel for igniting the idea of this book in me. At some point of writing, we both realized that two books are better than one, and I look forward to reading her inspiring ideas in a book of her own.

Introduction

We were sitting in the terrace one evening. “It won’t be the same in Belgium,” I said. “I will miss our garden, this big magnolia tree. I’ve made so many photos of its flowers! I even painted one on canvas and gave it to Anar because it is her favorite flower. I’ll miss my plants, my favorite cactus. Remember? We bought it in the mar- ket in a tiny pot and now it has babies around it like our grandchildren. The cactus and the grandchildren grew up together”.

We had come to Italy eight years before, my hus- band and I, with no children. Now there were five of us and the kids were seven years old! Time flies so fast! I worried about them –the new school, new environment, new friends, new languages.

“Our grandchildren will have to switch from speaking Russian to English now,” I said.

“I worry about them too,” replied my husband. “But our grandchildren are different from their mothers, our daughters. They’re mobile, flexible, they’ll adapt to a new environment quickly. You’ll see.”

“I forgot to tell you, Almaz, that Francesco called Arlan “piccolo ambasciatore”. He looks like you –he’s a little ambassador.” I gazed from the terrace. “It is true. Dayana and Arlan are traditional TCKs!”

“What is that?” he asked, peering into the distance.

“Third Culture Kids”, I answered. “You know, the book I read”.

It was a remarkable book, “Third Culture Kids”, written by David C. Pollak and Ruth E. Van Reken, about children growing up in a multi-cultural environment.

The actual term wasn’t new, introduced in the early 1950s by sociologist/anthropologist Ruth Hill Useem, who studied children exposed to different societies. But this recent book (the revised version published in 2009) spoke to me and my situation. Thanks to the book I found an exact definition of what my family goes through, what we, our children and grandchildren, are. According to the book, TCKs are kids who are taken into another society when their parents move for occupational reasons. TCKs are also called, as in our case, “little ambassadors”, or “kids of the future”, brought up, as the book says, in a highly mobile world.

As for me, I am not a TCK, as I left my country, the Republic of Kazakhstan, for the first time for a long-term post abroad when I was thirty-eight years old. Rather, I am a “cross-cultural adult”. This term, according to the book, is for someone who has lived in another society or has had meaningful cross-cultural experiences for an extended time period.

In any case, my home, Kazakhstan, is a multinational country with over 120 ethnicities, living peacefully with each other. The issue of nationality was never raised in our minds when I grew up there or even today. I remember once in school, when I was fourteen, our Russian-language teacher started the class by naming some of us and asking us to stand up. Even after we stood up we didn’t understand why she had called on us. Then she said: “Please, tell the class what nationality you are, each of you”. It took us half a minute to ponder and then say what nationality we were, as we were not used to saying such a thing, in any situation. Finally the teacher said: “I checked your homework and found that Russians in the class made many more mistakes than non- Russians did”. That was the only case when we were considered different. Even at that, I am sure none of us related that case to our nationality as we were part of the Soviet Union and home for many ethnic groups which at different periods of time settled in our country looking for a refuge, to explore the vast territory and its resources, whether willingly or under duress (e.g. under Stalin’s regime).

Our daughters, Anar, Asel, and Asem and our grandchildren Dayana and Arlan, are all textbook examples of TCKs. Our daughters left Kazakhstan when two of them were fourteen (twins) and one was eight. Two of them as adults remained in a host culture, forming their own families with their non-Kazakhstani husbands. Our grandchildren were born in Kazakhstan, but when they were two and four months old, we took them to Italy. For several years, they didn’t know who they were. Once, when they were asked where they were from, they said they were Italians. When they went to kindergarten at the Russian Embassy, they would say they were Russians. They would even proudly say: “We are Russians, and Russians would die rather than surrender to enemies!” This was a saying they picked up from their Russian playmates. At that point, we realized it was time to talk to our grandchildren and explain who they were.

In our diplomatic circumstance, we lead a nomadic lifestyle moving from one country to another, packing up and settling down in a new place, becoming immersed in a new language, and meeting new challenges. Each country we lived in inspired us to grow in different ways. As for me, I acquired computer skills, and started to drive in the United States. And, most importantly, I gained confidence in my abilities and strength as a person. Great Britain was the shortest posting abroad (less than one year). There, as a teacher of English by profession, I kept myself busy with reading in English and traveling around the beautiful countryside. Spain was the country we all developed a special fondness for. I involved myself in charity and started hobbies. In Madrid, I became a vice president of Damas Diplomaticas (Lady Diplomats), and of the Asian Diplomatic Association. I became an honorary member of an association for disabled children and young adults of Alicante (southeastern Spain) and received an award from the association for my charity work. In Italy I discovered my creative side, painting and writing. And I can definitely say, we left pieces of our hearts everywhere we lived.

Suddenly, we were moving yet again, this time to Belgium. It had been the United States, then Great Britain, then Spain, and then Italy. Our ambassador status has also been accredited for Greece, Malta, San Marino, although we never really lived there, but only visited for business matters. All the postings were for fairly long periods, except for Great Britain. We never considered them to be temporary places to live. When we arrived to each country, we really settled in as though we were staying for good. They say “there is nothing more permanent than the temporary”, and I couldn’t agree more.

This book is about our multicultural life. It is about us, the lives of our children and grandchildren, about our adaptation to new environments, about cultural differences we experienced, about our nomadic way of life, about people we met in different countries and those who left imprints on our lives, about our worries and feelings, about the joys and challenges, about cross-cultural interactions, about living in various cultural worlds, often simultaneously. These situations have moved me to tell our stories in order to sort out the intricacies of who we are, and to help other people in similar situations to come to grips with who they are. We are not alone, as we live in a globalized world with all its challenges and opportunities. How to deal with this situation is what this book is all about.

The Beginning

All travel has its advantages. If the passen- ger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

Samuel Johnson

My husband, Almaz Khamzayev, started his diplomatic career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan after graduating from the University of Foreign Languages in 1977, where we met each other. Later he received his Master’s degree at the Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, Russia. He was among the first diplomats of the independent Kazakhstan who opened the first embassy in the United States of America. He started from scratch as Chargé d’Affaires, minister-counselor of the Embassy of Kazakhstan to the US to face new challenges in one of the biggest democratic countries in the world. There was no embassy, no residence to work or live in, no cars, nothing to start from. It took him and his team of just three people about six months to take care of all logistics related to setting up an embassy, i.e. looking into and dealing with the formalities of establishing an office, finding an embassy residence, renting apartments for personnel, buying cars, etc..

When Almaz told us we would be leaving soon, we got excited but at the same time upset because he had to leave for the US earlier than we could. And we didn’t realize that it would take almost five months to join him there. I was left with three daughters: teenage twins, Anar and Asel, and the youngest, Asem, who was eight years old. How could we start preparing for a journey abroad?

We chose to start by learning the language. I was an English university teacher in Almaty, the biggest city of Kazakhstan, and the kids were learning German just because we lived close to a specialized German school. I informed the dean of the university where I worked about my departure and he asked me to find a substitute, which I had managed to do. Some time before that, I had been notified by the University of Foreign Languages that I was admitted for a PhD program, which I had been awaiting for several years. It was my last chance because of the age limit and I had to make a choice between staying and doing my degree or joining my husband. For me, it was more important to keep the family together. As for the kids, in their mind, they were already in the States and for that reason had stopped taking their local schooling seriously.

What bothered me most was that everybody began asking me when we were leaving and I couldn’t give a definite answer. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was reluctant to send us off. Then I decided to talk to the minister and get a perspective on what we had to do. Instead of clarifying things, he tried to persuade me not to be in a hurry. He recalled his own posting when he was working alone with no family. It didn’t sound convincing to me, though, and I insisted that we should go to the US as soon as possible. It took him two months to consider the issue and finally I was informed that I could take the kids with me, but that the Ministry would pay only for one child.. The dilemma was that we had three children. The twins were inseparable and at the same time I couldn’t leave the youngest one, so we were stymied by the decision. Later after another visit to the Ministry they made an exception – allowing us to take twins and leaving the third one in Kazakhstan.

I arrived home upset with the news and when the girls heard the predicament, they kept silent for a while and then the youngest one, Asem, exclaimed: “Mommy, please take the twins with you, they cannot be separated and I will stay here with our relatives. Besides, it is more important for my sisters to study abroad.” At that moment I thought it was an adult talking to me, as it sounded too mature for an eight-year-old girl. But Asem was always a bit too mature for her age.

The twins didn’t utter a word.

“What are you thinking all about?” I asked. Why don’t you say anything?”

“We don’t know what to say,” they answered. “We want to go, and everybody knows we are leaving. But at the same time we know we can’t leave Asem.” This was looking like a problem for Solomon to solve.

After talking to Almaz, we decided to buy an airline ticket for Asem ourselves. That was a lot of money for us at that time and I didn’t know how to get it. Finally, we managed to borrow money from our friends and we all left together.

Nowadays, young diplomats do not have to choose whether to take their children with them or not. Moreover, they are paid for as many kids as they have. They move with their families from one country to another. Some diplomats take nannies with them to take care of the kids abroad. While the wives can be busy working at the embassy and adapting to the new environment, there is someone else at home to take care of the household and the kids.

There is another tendency emerging in Kazakhstan. Some wives, most often wives of ambassadors, do not accompany their husbands abroad for various reasons: because of the job they have at home, or because they have to take care of elderly parents, or because their grown-up children studying at universities in Kazakhstan need to be looked after. Wives visit their husbands sometimes but usually do not stay with them for long. Each person chooses what is best in that particular case. In this sense, Kazakhstani people are very home and family oriented. Even if the immediate family is small, it is surrounded by the bigger circle of relatives. Besides, interpersonal relationships are more important in our culture. In general, Kazakhs are not as mobile as Americans, for instance.

At that time, however, the only real possibility for us was to uproot the entire family to leave. When the paperwork was done, and we had airline tickets in our hands, we started packing. In 1993 we did not have much to pack; we did not even have proper suitcases as we had hardly moved anywhere except on rare trips to Taraz, where my husband’s parents lived. It is five hundred and twenty kilometers from Almaty to Taraz, to the south of the country. We had made another major trip together to Moscow when Almaz graduated from Moscow Diplomatic Academy. We spent five days in Moscow sightseeing. That was a great time spent together before our first posting.

After this, packing became an indispensable part of our life for years. We moved to five countries, making nine major moves from one house to another overseas, and in between we did lots of packing for vacations, business trips, studies, and work, as when Asem moved to Florence after finishing her studies, and Anar went to Brussels to work on her thesis at The Center for European Policy Studies.

When it comes to packing, everybody tries to put it off until the last minute or leave it to the most organized and responsible member of the family (usually this is me) to do it for the whole family. My husband once exclaimed: “I am sick and tired of packing!” In the beginning he did the packing. Actually, he is the best at packing. But he takes a long time because he is so tidy and therefore so slow that it takes all his blood, sweat, and tears to finish the job. So, finally, I decided to take over. Now I can understand him, as I have also gotten fed up with the tiring and boring process of packing. You start putting everything in order, labeling boxes, sorting out things, but finally you put everything into one box and forget to redo the label. Over the years you become overloaded with unnecessary things which later you get rid of, keeping in mind an American proverb: “Someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure”.

Recently, I called my friend Olga Poyarkova, a wife of ambassador of Ukraine to the Italian Republic. She was in the process of packing to leave the country for another posting. Olga was such an easy-goer. She said: “You know, Gulistan, the most unpleasant part of our diplomatic life is packing! But the more problems we have, the younger we are!”

Leaving a familiar environment is always painful, especially when you do it for the first time, so far away. Besides, we did not know what to expect: how long we would be staying, whether we were going to have a vacation, what the weather would be like there, what kind of education our girls could get, etc..

Thanks to Almaz, who left earlier than we did, our adaptation was mercifully smooth. He made our living as comfortable as he could as he chose the apartment with furniture and made a few adjustments inside. We had a car, and we did a lot of travelling as there was so much to see and explore. Besides, Almaz collected half of a year’s salary to spend on us, which we did successfully on the first days of our arrival to Washington, D.C..

Excitement usually starts when a family discusses a future trip. In our case, this meant realizing how long the distance was between Kazakhstan and the US (over 6550 miles from Almaty to Washington D.C., or about thirteen and a half flight hours), determining what airline to take, deciding what to be busy with during the flight (a very long-distance flight), and so forth. Such discussions, especially for children, are very important. We adults do not treasure the details, and they are not always the same and maybe not as important for us as for children, and I am sure they will do the same thing when they have their own kids. On the eve of our departure to Brussels, our seven-year-old grandchildren didn’t sleep well, they were so excited! They had their own little trolleys with lots of “handy” things inside. And all the way to our destination they were asking us nonstop questions about a new place. Kids remember selectively but this trip our grandchildren will never forget.

Pre-departure excitement overwhelmed us. The talks were only about the future trip to that far-away part of the world. Our neighbors, relatives, school teachers, and classmates paid visits to say good-bye.

The last night before leaving was a sleepless one for all of us: Anar, Asel, and Asem, and me. Of course, we did not know that we would come back in four years with no vacation in between.

We moved to the US in February 1993. We made the transit stop in Moscow covered with snow, where we stayed for one night at the hotel and then took a flight to Ireland and finally to Washington, D.C.. That was the first long-distance trip we had ever made and that’s why we remember it in detail. Now I can imagine what first impression Americans, people used to a high quality of life and options to choose from, had when they moved to Kazakhstan. The word “choice” impressed us greatly in the USA. We have never realized before what it could mean. Actually we were not given choices during Soviet times. This new situation engulfed us: You have a choice to make! Sounds great! When you are given a choice, you are given freedom.

Once, in Spain, I was asked by a Canadian friend to talk to a young American woman who was going to go to Kazakhstan because of her husband’s job as a diplomat. We met in the Spanish cafeteria called “Embassy” (we didn’t choose the name of the cafeteria on purpose; it was one of the popular places in Madrid to meet people). She brought a thick folder given by her embassy and compiled by the US State Department. I asked her if I could quickly look through it. Now I regret I couldn’t ask her to lend it to me for a couple of days so that I could read through it, since, on the basis of this folder we could have compiled our own manual to be used by our people — a task I later accomplished using other sources in Madrid. In any case, since she had read the manual and knew the general information about Ka- zakhstan, I asked her if she had specific questions for me. The first question struck me: “Is it safe to jog in Kazakhstan?” I was surprised by her question, because I would have asked, let’s say, about the trans- port, weather, supermarkets and stores, dry cleaning or money changing. But her question was about jog- ging. Later I thought that perhaps she knew everything there was to know about Kazakhstan, except about the first vital thing she would do after settling down in my country: jogging. I am sure Kazakhstan was considered to be a hardship posting, especially at the beginning of our independence. On the other hand, I understand how helpful it might be for a foreigner to go to a new place with adequate knowledge about the country.

Entry always takes time. Newcomers, whether they are prepared for the move or not, need time to adjust, to sniff out the country, so to speak. After the first days of excitement pass, and we need to get on with reality: open a new bank account, wait for an ID card to be issued, fill in the papers for medical insurance, and other paper work.

I remembered one incident we had in Madrid: our driver had trouble getting money from a cash machine. In Kazakhstan they had only just started installing cash machines when we left. Before, people used to get their salary in cash, and there were no credit or debit cards at first. Besides, cash machines in Spain were operated in Spanish, except in the very center of Madrid. On this occasion, the driver couldn’t read Spanish and was too shy to ask for help from the people of our embassy. When I realized what the problem was, I willingly showed him how to use a cash machine.

Years later, I myself had a trouble getting money from a cash machine the first days in Rome. I couldn’t recognize the word “cash withdrawal”. All instructions were given in Italian. That term had no English cognate: “prelievo”. I entered a bank and addressed people there in English, but nobody knew English, except one client who just came in. In a foreign country, sometimes the simplest things are the ones that give you the most trouble.

At that time, I realized we needed to compile our own manual for the newcomers and I did it with the help of the embassy personnel. In London I also composed a detailed manual for our people with prices and timetables, sightseeing routes, and practical vocabulary. There were lots of manuals that other embassies had prepared for their own people but we needed our own version, written in our language to help our people understand the new ways and adjust to the new surroundings.

I also worked as a receptionist at our embassy in London and my workday usually started with sorting out and dealing with daily situations, such as calling schools or kindergartens and speaking to principles or teachers at the request of our mothers who spoke no English, talking to doctors to get appointments, calling pharmacies to ask for particular drops or tablets.

Now, reflecting on our first trip to the United States, I can definitely say that we were completely unprepared for the first posting. The same thing happened when we moved to Spain in 1999. No information, no embassy, no people to help with adjusting to the new environment. That’s why they were the toughest of all the postings we had over the last nineteen years abroad.

Now I know what to expect. I now view our postings as another adjustment to the Italian, or Belgian system–thinking local and getting things done as efficiently as possible. My experiences have informed my views on life outside my country.

Transitory Territory

...the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

Bill Bryson

Transition is different for everyone. If you move overseas for the first time, it is one thing, but if you make constant moves, it is another kind of experience. You can get used to the nomadic way of living, where every territory is transitory. Everyone in the family makes the transition at different stages and paces. The settling-in stage can also last differently, ranging from a few weeks to a few months.

Practically all parents seek the same kind of information on arriving in a new country: what school to place your kids in, what doctors to see, where to go shopping, what places of interest to visit first, where to get a haircut, where to get a manicure-pedicure, what language courses to sign up for, where to meet a friend for a drink, etc..