The Ghost and Her Homeland 丨The Disappearing "Oriental Laborer" in "She's from Mariupol"

Star Morning

She's from Mariupol, by Natasha Wodin, translated by Qi Qinwen, Nova Press, March 2021.

On October 10, 1956, Evgenia Ivashenko left "home" and never returned. Her clothes were found neatly folded on the banks of the Regnitz River—she had fulfilled her promise, or rather, she had fulfilled her wish and thrown herself into the river.

Born into a fuja family in Mariupol, Ukraine, she was reduced to poverty during the Russian Civil War, and in World War II, she went into exile with her husband as a lowly "Eastern forced laborer" in World War II, where she bore two daughters. She did not die from the previous successive wars and persecutions, but chose to kill herself in the post-war peacetime era.

Evgenia was six years old at the Chinese New Year's Eve, leaving behind two daughters, one eleven and one four. In the decades that followed, her eldest daughter, Natasha Wodin, clumsily searched for clues about her life in the form of a hammer in the east and a stick. The daughters never knew her—in a state of displacement and strain, every family member was like a frightened bird, tired of dealing with the bad things around them. To keep oneself from breaking, one has already spent almost all one's energy, and spiritual communication has become an unbearable burden at this time.

Natasha's obsession with her mother's suicide and her enigmatic origins allowed her to complete her book She Is from Mariupol (originally published in German in 2017, translated in Chinese as Nova Press in 2021). There are two seemingly contradictory lines in the book: "I have long given up looking for her for decades", and , "For a long time I had an idea to write about my mother's life" and "I have long wanted to write about my mother's life." This contradiction was particularly clear as I read the book—"giving up" because the search was too difficult, and the motivation to push a little bit in the stagnation came from her deepest empathy for her mother and that era.

It's a fragmented family history, and its presentation is not very neat. There is no clear main line of characters in the whole book, and the Russian name is dizzying. Natasha gives a detailed account of the stumbling process of data gathering, and all the branch figures that can be found in the family seem to be given pen and ink without screening. The diary of Lydia (Evgenia's own sister) is transcribed to almost a quarter of the book. However, this may be more reflective of the real situation: in the dark slices of time and space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, no one (or archive) can complete themselves, so the material is extremely scarce and precious enough for the writer to cut out any exquisite stylistic structure.

The trajectory of the lives of these three or four generations is messy. We can see another kind of "globalization" in the twentieth century – different from the "era of globalization" that emerged after the Cold War: to see the situation in it, but also to see the concrete and micro people. The exaltation and decline of these people, the triumph and the confusion, are sharp enough to annotate the history of that one hundred and fifty years or so.

"Sie kam aus Mariupol", In German, "She is from Mariupol". The title and content are written in German, and Mariupol is a Ukrainian city. Translation weakens the tension of writing Ukrainian place names in German, but we can still read the sense of foreignness in this text, which seems to transcend the language itself and resounds sadly through the atrium of the human heart. Mariupol was the place where Evgenia grew up to the age of twenty-three. "Mariupol" is the name of the city before 1948 and after 1989. The Soviet Union renamed a large number of the cities under its rule, and Mariupol was not spared. It was renamed Zhdanov – because Andrey Alessandrovich Zhdanov, an official of the United Communist Party (Brazzaville) (who had been an assistant to Stalin), was also born here.

In her old age, Natasha was able to present the story of her ignorant mother and her relatives that she had always wanted to put into writing, thanks to the various accidents in her search for her relatives. One of the most incredible coincidences is the interaction with a "cyber god"-like figure. Had she not met the Greek-Ukrainian man in the virtual world, surnamed Konstantin, her attempt this time would have been as futile as all previous efforts. The Constantine's use of social media and information platforms has been perfected, and all the trivial and fragmented information that can be found on the Internet can be linked and integrated, and then provided to others for free. Natasha called him "the only fan on my search path." His mystery comes not only from his extraordinary ability, but also from his extraordinary generosity. He opened up many running joints for Natasha in the context of digitalization, online and reality. Without him, the vast amount of information would be just a floating 0 and a 1 for Natasha.

For people who grew up in the Internet age, the existence of various people on the Internet is nothing new, and young people have become accustomed to sharing resources across races and countries. Constantine's pleasures, skills, and personality have been multiplied in the age of globalization and the technology of the Internet; his generosity has also been multiplied. This appearance of "generosity" is so close to our impression of "cosmopolitanism" that we no longer regard it as a characteristic of a "zealous man" in the classical literary sense— which is still a fairly rare virtue— but may interpret it as a politically meaningful "consensus of values" in the process of globalization. Paradoxically, however, Constantine was discovered by Natasha because he was active on the "Assyrian Greeks" forum. The content of the forum, as the name suggests, is related to the Greek ethnic group on the coast of the Assyria Sea. If it were not for the Careful Preservation of the Genealogy of the Greeks of Mariupol, and of the genealogies of foreign men and women who were absorbed into their own ethnic groups by marriage, Constantine would not have been able to slowly recover the veins of Natasha and the entire family of three generations and more than one Ukrainian woman married to a Greek. This figure seems to imply that in real life, the "cosmopolitan" virtues of absolute de-national identity and de-regional identity may not exist, and that human empathy needs to be built on something really common. Identification with kinship, nationality, and fellow countrymen may be a conservative premodern concept, but the sense of belonging it evokes is real.

However, people are indeed always on the move, and their bloodlines are becoming more and more mixed and they are going farther and farther. If there is any main line in this fragmented family history, then "flow" is its main line. The flow accompanies the beginning and end of the family's narrative, and it takes different forms in different family members: some people's movement is risky, some people are exiled, some people are actively fleeing, and some people are forced to migrate. Flow itself has no negative or positive value, and its impact on people depends entirely on the order of time and space.

After the Enlightenment, individual courage and ability were greatly praised. The prototype of the modern nation-state gradually took shape in Europe, and more developed technological means made exploration and expansion the main theme. Mobility brings the flow of wealth with foreign lands, making "foreigners" a title full of beautiful imagination. Born in the West Indies in 1887, the French poet Saint-John Perse was particularly adept at showing the dream of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European countries were the first to modernize. His famous work "Expedition" places the "foreigner" in a mysterious and magnificent atmosphere:

"Under the bronze flakes, young horses were born, and a man put sour berries on our hands. That's a foreigner. He disappeared. At this moment, the bronze shaft made a loud noise. Asphalt and roses, a gift of songs! There was thunder and flute in the room! yes! Our journey is so convenient! yes! Years so many anecdotes! Foreigners are free to follow the path! 'Good daughter, I salute you, under the most beautiful robe of old age'. (Translation from Selected Essays of Nobel Laureates in Literature, China Workers Publishing House, 1990)

The ancestors of the three generations of Evgenia originated in that era, and their identities are all related to shipping. The "foreigners" flowed with the water to a place with a unique geographical location and married the "locals". As a port city in southeastern Ukraine, Mariupol is located at the mouth of the Kalmius River into the Sea of Azov – the Sea of Azov is connected to the Black Sea – meaning it has access to Greece, Italy, Turkey, and by the eighteenth century had a large number of settled settlers. These mixed people present a complex but orderly level of life. However, it is not only people who are flowing, but also ideas. This complex but orderly hierarchy of life is disrupted by the influx of ideas. Evgenia's father (Natasha's maternal grandfather), though also from the nobility, became close to the revolutionary faith and began to complain about the underclass; he participated in the civil war and worked to overthrow the class in which he lived. He was exiled by the Tsarist regime for this reason, and I am afraid that he strengthened his ideals even more. But he did not know that the ideal of purity would be exploited by the tyranny of reality. When his ideals turned into reality in unpredictable ways, nothing could go back.

Evgenia Ivashenko is in this "can't go back" and gradually becomes a ghost, and it can even be said that when she is alive, she has slowly left this world. It was not the final death that turned her into a ghost. "She is not a person whose roots have been cut off at all, she has been rootless from the beginning and displaced from birth." She clings to everyone in her family, her parents and siblings in the turmoil of civil strife and war, and then loses them one by one, yin and yang or life and death. At the age of twenty-one, she was left alone in her hometown without her family, the only attachment she had left, and soon she had lost even her hometown—she voluntarily, or rather, this voluntariness was also forced to go to Germany—and staying in her hometown was afraid that the Soviet army that had retaken German-occupied Ukraine would be punished as a traitor, and there might be a glimmer of life in Germany for compulsory labor.

As Duan Yifu pointed out in "Love Complex" (Commercial Press, 2018 edition), people develop attachment to the place where they have grown or become accustomed, because it stores memories and becomes part of their personality. When people are forced to leave the environment in which they have poured their feelings, they lose the protective layer between themselves and the disordered world, and are in a state of rather insecurity. What makes people attached is not those empires whose territories are too large to be physically perceived, but only a geographical unit with clear boundaries. Duan Yifu uses the French word pays, which translates as "homeland" quite well. People can only "settle down" within this small range with clear boundaries, and the extent of the attachment to "home" is also specific and limited. Strangers flowed to this place, and the business life here blossomed, and this place became the homeland.

Although people are mobile, although they migrate, although their bloodlines are becoming more and more mixed, but in addition to mobile migration and mixed blood, they may indeed need something unchanged as an anchor of subjectivity.

At a time when "globalization" is not a good news, this little book allows us to re-examine "mobility". It is not to deny the flow itself– because it has never been interrupted in human history, but its breadth and depth have intensified since modern times – but more attention has been paid to the details and processes of the flow. Ask yourself, is our understanding of the concept of "globalization" really as familiar as we think we are? If more than two decades ago there were still concerns about the "trap of globalization", today it is becoming increasingly inappropriate to give a negative evaluation of globalization. We seem to be repeating the mistakes of europeans in the mid-nineteenth century: when the "International Industries Exposition" was held in 1851 at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, who did not think they were in the golden age? Who doesn't recognize the development of technology and the flow of global wealth as the general trend? Who doesn't look ahead to the vision of cultural inclusion through this pathway for all mankind?

When mobility brings wealth and cultural prosperity, people only look at the beauty of mobility. In a sense, the description of "globalization" in the context of the current mainstream economic liberal discourse reinforces this aspect of mobility . If "globalization" as a concept had been invented in the last and last centuries, the expansion of Nazi Germany (and even Japan in World War II) could have been glorified by their own propaganda machines in the name of "globalization." After such a substitution, we can realize that "globalization" itself does not exclude the tendency to polarization, it is no longer even a descriptive neutral word, but has both positive and negative content. The beneficiaries of "globalization" so far remain as they were before World War I, expecting the flow of wealth and culture to bring only good, but not to create large-scale conflicts as tragic as World War I and World War II. This assumes that globalization can only be established in the context of balanced multipolar political and cultural diversity. But is the world political and economic system after World War II and even after the Cold War multipolar enough? Isn't the trend of cultural homogenization brought about by globalization a kind of destruction of local culture? We seem to have forgotten the rich historical representations that "globalization" in the modern sense of the word provided in its inception, including not only co-prosperity, but also human tragedy.

Evgenia simply completed a metaphor in her life, a metaphor for the wealth of her ancestors: the grandparents and grandparents who brought her the blood of Italy, the Baltic German three countries, and Ukraine, while crystallizing beautiful offspring, accumulated the wealth of the countries on the sea route; when they were beautiful, did they ever think that the wealth would not end well?

This little book doesn't stop at condemning nazi Germany's dehumanization. It shows all kinds of evil forms. Evgenia in this context is like a tragic figure written by Sophocles—born with a golden spoon and religiously revered, a person who is not guilty of moral or religious terms, but who is clumsy and obedient, and is treated like a sinner until death. She "fell into the shredders of two dictators...". The wealth and prestige accumulated by her ancestors in the old order became her original sin in the new order of her homeland; after leaving her homeland, she was spurned as a remnant of the victorious country in the defeated enemy country. Many of the "Eastern laborers" (or "Eastern forced laborers") hoped to emigrate to the United States after the war, but were disappointed to find that at present, the United States only welcomes people who are physically strong (or skilled and wealthy), but most of the Eastern laborers have been deprived of everything and really have little use value. So the government that took over temporarily had to send them back to their places of origin or stay in germany, the defeated country.

In contrast to those who are remembered as clear ethnic identities, people with vague faces such as "Eastern laborers" can only crawl in the dust of history. The Third Reich pretended to be legitimate in exchanging labor with them and that their population sources were indeed complex, so they were slow to receive international attention. As a problem group, they are absolutely present, yet "in the decades after the war, the experience of six to twenty-seven million forced laborers— of varying sources and in large numbers — appeared only occasionally in a separate and brief report in a church or local Sunday newspaper." And most of them are mentioned only in passing with the Jews, becoming a footnote to the Holocaust." The reason why the Jews were able to be given targeted sympathy as the most visible victims of the catastrophe of war has to do with the terrible grievances they suffered, but also with the influence of their ancient peoples on the world political and economic stage. When the "naked eye" victims of the Jewish community were comforted materially and morally, all seemed relieved; the victims, who wandered between identities and were illegible, left to fend for themselves. Such negligence cannot be condemned merely as a kind of political laziness utilitarianism, or rather, modern politics has such a lazy utilitarian side. As an individual, it is difficult to recognize the flaws of modern politics, and it is even more impossible to choose a better way of survival in the cracks of the political game.

The book is also an easy connection to the suffering of the present world. Natasha's description of her teenage years in the book immediately reminded me of the 2019 word-of-mouth movie Les Misérables. Named after Hugo's Les Misérables, it is a portrait of the current immigrant community in Paris. Many of these ecologies, such as Natasha's Warka Camp (a post-war U.S.-run refugee camp in Nuremberg), which is home to "four thousand displaced people from thirty countries" is "probably the worst-known sin city in the world," Natasha says. Penniless, defenseless, and unable to integrate into any proper occupation, these displaced people can only do unsightly livelihoods. The Germans demonized the Eastern Europeans, and in turn, the actions of the refugees "confirmed all the prejudices of the Germans." Refugee Natasha, refugee Evgenia, and the refugees who are now pouring into Europe are all historical sins created by empires and powers in expansion and inversion. Although such "flows" bring trouble to the influx area, and the trouble may not be solved, people should understand and criticize it from a social and historical perspective – if the refugee homeland cannot be rebuilt, it must find a way to turn it into their homeland. This is certainly quite difficult, but it may be the only way to deal with the refugee problem.

The title page of the book has the inscription: Dedicated to My Sister. Therefore, this is undoubtedly a book for the living, not for the sake of forgetting. But "the dead are long gone"? Under the great currents of the times, people's hearts are faint. Dragging the wet skirt, the ghost looked back at his homeland through his daughter's pen.

Editor-in-Charge: Huang Xiaofeng

Proofreader: Ding Xiao