Do you ever feel that your destiny has been handed to you by your predecessors, whether you agreed with that or not? It’s like when you were a kid and thought veggies were meh, but your mum didn’t listen. So, eat your destiny and shut up!

A good half of my folks were almost emigration professionals. My maternal line: great-great grandmother, grandmother, grandfather and even my mother all ended up between Russia and China – and a few other countries too. Overall, they had lived on three different continents and were even keen to land on a fourth one, but that didn’t work out. So by the time I joined the clan, the horse was saddled and the path cleared. Barely seven years old, I also exchanged one country for another, just like this. Later I did that again, and again. Like Katy Perry goes: “keep it on repeat”. By now, the whole emigration thing is totally a déjà vu and I can relate to three different nationalities. I wouldn’t say this is always relaxing, as behind every nationality there stands a whole cultural world, but it keeps me sharp.

Yet those family members I just wrote a book about were often kind of reluctant wanderers. It’s true that some of them purposely left Russia in the early twentieth century for better economic opportunities in the fast-developing Russian Harbin. However, I don’t believe it was their intention to never return. At the same time, one thing led to another and by the time the Russian Empire stopped existing they were very much rooted in their exotic existence. Going back to a country where the government had changed – both radically and dramatically – seemed like too much too soon. Also, their sympathies weren’t so much with the new government as they had seen enough ruined and desperate refugees inundate Harbin in the 1920s. Besides, their solid peasant common sense told them that one bird in hand was worth two in a bush, so they ought to wait and see. But did they assimilate to China? Well, back in the 1920s in China one was either Chinese or Russian, or whatever. You didn’t mix the two things, just like in a multilayered cocktail where each layer keeps to itself and all of them fit nicely together (I have seen something like this once at a bar in Rome). A Russian fundamentally belonged in (or was it to?) Russia. And if he or she wasn’t in the country of origin, he was an emigrant. This could be both good or bad, depending on from where one looked.

While the economy was good, this kind of distorted living could be accommodated. Besides, they were missing nothing in terms of cultural belonging. They had built a whole Russian sub-world inside China. But then came the Japanese invasion of Manchuria that lasted a whole thirteen years. It brought gradual impoverishment and many other problems. Feeling like second-class people – and often also hunted and closely watched people – in a largely strange country, wasn’t for weak souls.

The last drop came after the party of Mao Tse Tung took power in the early 1950s. In the new emerging China such slowly drifting debris as stateless Russians with strong attachment to the past wasn’t so welcome. Yet, somehow, one still wanted a good, happy and free life. What to do in such a fix? Leave, of course. As quickly and far away as possible. Ah, but then there was another issue: no one wanted people without proper passports. My folks divided into those who went further into the world and those who returned to Russia – to finally get rid of that nasty second-class status, among other things. You may ask: but how did it go for those who returned? Well, that’s another story altogether and not always a happy one.

Nowadays, depending on where you live, you can have more or less freedom to leave your country of birth. Plus, you may not ever return there. Being both born and buried in the same country is becoming a rare thing. Still, as an emigrant you’ll be facing the same old choice: either put assimilation first and your national identity last, or the other way around. The third option is to go for a balanced mix – but life with all its twists isn’t exactly that skilled Italian barman from Rome, and so it doesn’t always have the sense of a right proportion. And then comes the one million dollars’ question: what’s really the wisest option for you and your children, in the long term? How should you position yourself between two or more countries? Two or more cultures? Please note that I’m saying wisest, not easiest.

It strikes me often that, as a thinking species, we seem to be forever conditioned by the binary logic of black or white, yes or no. No, says this logic, you can’t be swimming in different rivers at the same time. You must choose one river or one way. Is this a good thing or not?

To be honest, I really don’t know for sure. And what about you?