Lemons and plum juice

Adventures in being foreign

Generally this is a space for waxing poetic rather than political. But today I was inspired by this campaign ad video from gubernatorial (that means governor) candidate Tim James, which has been burning up YouTube and the internet. If elected governor, James promises here, he would make sure the state driver’s license exam would be given only in English, not any of the 12 other languages in which it is also currently available. Here’s the line that’s helped him get nearly a million hits: “This is Alabama. We speak English.”

Now, I know the primary is over and that James did not win the Republican nomination, so I’m not trying to sway the vote. I’m not going to scold James for contributing to the stereotype that Southerners are a bunch of xenophobes. I do think that anyone who lives here should do so legally, but I’m not going to fly to either extreme of a states’ rights / border control / immigration and naturalization frenzy.

The most important thing I have to confess is that, on a personal, emotional, experiential level, I get pretty scrunchy when people assume that anyone who doesn’t speak English is an idiot.

You see, once upon a couple of times, I myself was an idiot-seeming foreigner, a stranger in a strange land, occasionally unable to ask for even the simplest things. The strange land where I spent the most time was the former Soviet republic of Ukraine. I moved to Kyiv, the capital, about a week after my college graduation and stayed for a year, teaching English and working with a missionary named Chris and his oh-so-wonderful outreach project, the Ukrainian Education Center.

Ukraine is not one of those places like the Netherlands or India or Sweden or Nigeria where most people speak at least a little English. Sure, they’re largely bilingual – but the two languages are Russian and Ukrainian. When I was there, only the most frequented tourist spots had any kind of sign in English. My attempts to learn and communicate in Russian were more than enough to make me feel like an idiot. Frequently.

Lemon shopping and…cross-dressing?

One afternoon fairly early in my stay, for example, I found myself in a supermarket with a shopping list that included 10 lemons. I don’t remember exactly why I needed that many – lemonade, perhaps? – but I remember that getting enough was important. Following in the footsteps of Chris’s “food ministry,” I helped with/did a lot of cooking for the groups I worked with and generally shopped in bulk.

Supermarkets were a fairly new concept in Ukraine at the time. They were quite different from the old Soviet-style shops, where all the goods were kept behind thick counters and customers had to request their products (assuming they were available) one at a time. The owners of this particular supermarket, called Furschet, were bold enough to bring their products out from behind the forbidding counters into one giant shopping space – but they were not quite bold enough to let people just pick up food themselves and walk around with it before paying. Especially not in the produce aisle.

When the store first opened, several women were stationed among the cabbages and apples and potatoes in their trademark “I work here” vests, insistent on bagging and weighing customers’ produce for them. Their presence had grown more intermittent as the store gained business and started to resemble Saturday at a small southern town Wal-Mart all the time. And, presumably, as the owners realized customers would not run out the front doors with armloads of beets just because no scowling woman in a vest had been there to weigh the purchase.

So there I was, in the produce aisle of a brand new foreign supermarket, standing over the lemons and trying to remember why I thought I needed 10. I was berating myself for wavering and being indecisive in my shopping. Ukrainians don’t even go IN a store unless they know exactly what they’re going to buy. Just standing and thinking – that’s a little weird.

Just then, another customer, a slim 40-ish woman with short, light brown hair, made a bee line for the lemons and almost disjointed my hip with a stray elbow. “Be more decisive,” I ordered myself, “or you’re going to lose a leg.” All business at last, I flicked open the plastic produce bag.

And felt two lemons drop straight into it. That woman had dropped them in, and she was going back for more. I thought for a split second that she was scolding me for being too slow, showing me how to shop Ukrainian style, but she didn’t look angry. Instead, she was smiling slightly, vaguely, not even thinking about me. She added another two lemons and just stood there staring at me, like she was waiting for me to make the next move.

“Um,” I mumbled and then stopped. How do you say in Russian, “Why are you dropping lemons in my produce bag? Do you, like, work here or something?” But then it hit me: she thought I was a produce aisle lady. She was waiting for me to scowl at her and weigh her produce.

I’d only had weekly Russian lessons back in Nashville, from an enthusiastic Pentecostal girl from Moscow who cleaned houses and gave Russian lessons in her spare time. She’d refused to teach me anything other than vocabulary. Grammar, she’d said, was hard and I wasn’t ready for it yet. When I ran into the lemon lady, I still had no clear idea how much I didn’t know. So I was cocky enough to martial my limited skills and try to set her straight. I cleared my throat and said: “Ya” (I) “ne” (not)… and then things got a little dicey.

I had been out to eat with my host missionary, Chris, and other English-speakers a few times. Always the savvy traveler, I had picked up on the fact that they said the word “devushka” whenever they wanted the check or a refill.

Putting two and four together, I boldly told that woman expecting me to weigh her lemons – which were really my lemons – “Ya ne devushka.”

She looked at me in stunned but not unpleasant confusion for a few seconds, like she wasn’t sure she’d heard me right. Then she doubled over and laughed like I had told the best joke since the wall came down. She waved a dismissing hand over the lemons and went back to her cart, abandoning the produce aisle altogether, still giggling and looking over her shoulder as she turned the corner at the end of the aisle.

“Good for her,” I thought. “She can laugh at her own dumb mistakes.” I decisively added 6 more lemons to the bag and finished my shopping, satisfied that I had triumphed in this early cross-cultural communication adventure.

That is, I was satisfied until a few hours later, when at last I remembered that the word “devushka” does not, in fact, mean “waitress” or “server” or “produce aisle lady.” It means, quite simply, “girl.”

Poor lemon lady. There she was, innocently buying produce, when she was accosted by a slow-moving foreigner who had either just confessed that she was a cross-dresser – or, more likely, declared herself irrefutably clueless. If she’d been a little less mirthful, she might have just snatched away my lemons and told me to learn the language.

Give me plum juice, or give me embarrassment

A few months later, my vocabulary had improved, but my pronunciation, apparently, had not.

In Ukraine, fruit and vegetable juices are more popular – and more healthful – beverages than soda. So in the spirit of cultural immersion, I had made a habit of drinking juice and only indulging in the occasional Cola Lite. My favorite juice flavors were pineapple, “multivitamin,” and plum, which was thick and sweet and soothed the stomach almost like a nice, creamy cold soup.

Supermarkets like the scene of the lemon fiasco were the new cool, affluent way to shop, but a lot of daily grocery accumulation still happened in kiosks. What’s a kiosk, you ask? Imagine the look of a gas station in a questionable neighborhood, where the teller stays behind bulletproof glass, and you slide your money through a little tray under the glass. Now imagine the whole store is the size of an NYC newspaper stand or a medium-sized heating / air conditioning closet. Now imagine it’s made out of steel, with bars on the windows. That, my friends, is a kiosk.

The way it works is: you project your voice as loud as you can into the tiny open window to tell the person behind it what you want, and they pass it to you. If they have it. And if you can pay in small enough bills that they won’t break their bank when they give you change. I had heard rumors that, the year before I was there, it was common to give change in bubble gum or chocolate if the drawer didn’t have the right combination of coins.

There was one kiosk close to my apartment building that stayed open later than others. It was a bit bigger than most – the size of TWO hall closets, maybe – and you could actually get people inside it – but the look was the same. And still you had to ask for what you wanted.

On this particular late evening, I was just dying for some plum juice. And I would have to ask for it – out loud – without using any phrases like “on the second shelf” or “third from the left” – because that tutor girl from Moscow was right: prepositions in Russian are hard, and I hadn’t gotten the hang of them yet.

What I did have mastery of at that moment were the word for plum (sliva) and the word for juice (sok). But to say “give me the plum juice” – ah, that was another matter entirely.

I walked into the shop and there was a particularly burly person behind the counter. I don’t recall whether this person was male or female – only that s/he was burly. Since it was the only shop open for several blocks, it was getting heavy traffic. Half a dozen people were in line in front of me, and more came in behind. The line snaked around the ice cream cooler by the door.

Always a little self-conscious about my obviously American accent, I had time to get myself plenty worked up when I realized how big and quiet my audience was. When I reached the front of the line, sure enough, heads whipped around as I slurred out my “daitye mnye pazhaluista” (give to me please).

But what really stopped the burly attendant in his/her tracks was what I wanted dal/a (given). I tried every way I could think of to pronounce the kind of sok I wanted: sliVOCHnyi, SLIvochnyi, slivochNYI. In desperation, I even tried the genitive case: sok slivyi, please. Then I pointed and waved to the second shelf, three boxes from the left. Then I tried to say the price.

Nothing got through. The burly attendant’s glare had quickly gone from bored to actively agitated. The people behind me in line shifted their feet. “Sok. SliVOCHnyi,” I tried. “Pazhaluista.” Finally, I heard a man’s voice from somewhere behind me say, “I think she wants…” And then the magic word. With the magic pronunciation. “Da!” I said. “Yes! Give me that! Daitye mnye!”

I thanked the man – and then promptly forgot the magic pronunciation in my hurry to escape. The tall glass of plum sok I drank when I was locked safely in my apartment had never tasted so sweet. It was only when the juice box was empty that I realized I’d forgotten my pronunciation lesson. SLIvochnyi? SlivochNYI?

A little game I played with myself whenever I went shopping was, “how many words can I get out before this person realizes I’m a foreigner?” Even a year and many hours of study with a most excellent tutor in Kyiv were not enough to help me pass every time. More often than not, people I didn’t know scowled at me like they wished I would just go home whenever I exercised my Russian on them.

So, I’m NOT an idiot?

But, honestly – it doesn’t make sense to conclude that I actually AM an idiot just because I didn’t instantly absorb Russian when first I breathed the Kyiv air. I had to spend time learning it, and I made tons of mistakes. But I was no stupider, intrinsically, when I encountered the lemon lady or couldn’t say “give me plum juice” than I was when I got a good score on the ACT or received my college diploma. The difference was, I was trying to function in a language and culture not my own and doing all kinds of other things (work, cooking, keeping in touch with family, making friends) besides. That stuff is hard.

So, friends, in memory of my Russian-language failures, go easy when you hear someone in our fair homeland struggling with English. Getting comfortable – heck, getting competent – in a foreign language is a lot harder than it looks.

If you get a kick out of reading about wild and crazy English, you might also enjoy Oxford Comma and It’s not cussing if you’re quoting.

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