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Lithuania recruits guest workers, leaves identity crisis for later | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW

“I have a wounded foreigner on my balcony! Help me!” The caller to the Lithuanian emergency number sounded hysterical and complained of smoke coming out of the neighboring flat. When police and ambulances arrived, they found an injured man and a dead body inside. Another man with knife wounds was indeed on an adjacent balcony. The flat on the third floor of a nine-story Soviet-era residential building in the city of Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest, was on fire.

The police soon apprehended the suspect — a Ukrainian construction worker. After a party with other Ukrainians, a quarrel over money had erupted, ending in bloodshed and arson — a clumsy attempt to conceal the killing. In this country where murders are rare, the crime focused the public’s attention on the recent phenomenon of guest workers — and the future of Lithuania and its identity.

Read more: How Germany became a country of immigrants

Lithuania’s population was 3.7 million when the country broke free from the Soviet Union in 1991. Today it is closer to 2.8 million — and falling. Since they joined the EU in 2004, Lithuanians — as well as their Baltic neighbors — have been leaving in droves to work in more prosperous countries. The UK, Ireland, Norway and Germany are the favorites. Some sociologists project that by 2050 there will be only two million Lithuanians left in Lithuania.

Local businesses — especially construction, logistics and retail chains — have responded by extending invitations to workers from Ukraine and Belarus. The numbers rose in 2014 when the annexation of the Crimea by Russia and its intervention in Eastern Ukraine led to economic turmoil. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians went to abroad for work.

The building industry in particular recruits workers from abroad

Numerous factors make Lithuania attractive for Ukrainians. It is close, still has many Russian speakers and has been experiencing an economic upswing due to the 2015 introduction of the euro. The Lithuanian government is one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine internationally. Since 2017, Ukrainians have no longer needed a visa to travel to Lithuania or other countries in the Schengen area, and Lithuanian consulates issue work permits without fuss and mostly free of charge.

According to the interior ministry, the number of Ukrainians with temporary residence permits increased in the first half of this year by more than 50 percent compared to 2017. There are also 20 percent more Belarusians and 8 percent more Russians. The absolute numbers are still small — slightly more than 54,000 foreigners live in Lithuania legally — but the impact is more and more visible.

The number of those seeking work without official permission has been gradually increasing in sync with legal immigration.

Thirty-eight-year-old Yaroslav comes to Vilnius from Kyiv regularly as a “‘tourist.” A trained massage therapist, he uses his stays here to earn much more than he would at home. “Look,” he says, “an hour of massage here costs up to 70 euros ($82), depending on the class of the establishment. I can do it for 20, even 10 euros an hour — and it’ll still be very good money.” He says he is responding to a demand that was created by his Lithuanian colleagues leaving for other EU destinations. Eventually Yaroslav would like to come to Lithuania legally and open his own massage center.

Point of no return for Lithuanians?

But most Ukrainians and Belarussians do work legally in Lithuania. Some companies will pay up to 50 percent of their rent for their labor.

“My people are making up to €4.50 an hour and are ready to work for 10 to 12 hours a day,” says Alexander, 42, who stewards a group of Ukrainian construction workers on the outskirts of Vilnius. “They will never get such money in Ukraine.”

For some in Lithuania, this is exactly the problem.

“Guest workers are driving the salaries down. They do work that Lithuanians could do. So our people are leaving for Stavanger or Manchester,” Laurynas Kasciunas, member of parliament from the center-right opposition party Homeland Union — Lithuanian Christian Democrats, told DW. “The Lithuanian state should support the family, make sure the population grows by increasing birth rates, and try to convince those who left to come back.”

Laurynas Kasiunas says the state should do more to keep Lithuanians to look elsewhere for opportunity

“There is no scientific data to support the claim that Ukrainians and Belarussians are stealing Lithuanian jobs,” argues Nerija Putinaite, a Vilnius University philosophy professor and former deputy minister for science and education. She is considered a liberal on immigration by many in the country. “Lithuanians started leaving for other EU countries 15 years ago, right after EU accession,” she points out. “There were no Ukrainians here at the time.”

Read more: Baltics offer ‘budget’ route into the European Union

Putinaite says it is wishful thinking to imagine Lithuanian emigrants returning home anytime soon. “Our government must make stronger efforts to improve integration — increasing language education for foreigners and giving bursaries to Ukrainian and Belarussian students, so they can study in Lithuania.” But, she says, Lithuanians generally do not want too many foreigners to settle here.

This is a mindset Lithuania shares with other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, with their history rich in repression, resistance and survival.

“We as people lived through Polonization after the Grand Duchy of Lithuania united with the Kingdom of Poland in 1596,” explains sociologist Vladas Gaidys, head of the independent Vilmorus polling agency. “Then came the Russian Empire with its Russification policies of the late 19th to early 20th century. Then it was the turn of the Soviets, with mass executions and deportations. It makes Lithuanians very protective of their national identity and statehood.”

Lithuania was the first republic to declare independence from the Soviet Union, in 1990

No nationalists need apply … for now

The 2015-2016 migration crisis that had such a great impact on many European societies barely registered during Lithuania’s most recent parliamentary election, held in 2016. The ultra-right Lithuanian Nationalist Union did not even come close to crossing the mandatory 4 percent threshold. The winners, the mildly euroskeptic Farmers and Greens Union, got to the top by promising better social welfare and salary hikes. In 2015, the Lithuanian government accepted a few hundred refugees, mostly from the Middle East, but they did not stay long.

Conservative MP Kasciunas, liberal philosopher Putinaite and sociologist Gaidys all agree that there would be a massive nationalist backlash should the country experience a significant influx of migrants from countries outside Europe. But there is little chance of such change anytime soon — such is the common view.

Read more: Lithuania: Alcohol loses its ‘coolness’ tag

“People from the Middle East and Africa find life hard in Lithuania,” one interior ministry official said frankly, in a private conversation. “It is cold, welfare payments are small, and there are no communities of people from these regions, no relatives, few restaurants with familiar food. Why stay?”

For now, it means the topic of immigration isn’t divisive in Lithuania. But as the country hemorrhages its citizens to more prosperous European locations, it will eventually become central to the domestic political debate — and force Lithuanians to face issues of migration and identity that don’t appear particularly relevant now.

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years ago

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Zhoushan Island

by Kevin Mei / photo: the author

do i even have a(n) accent, argot, brogue, cant, dialect, enunciation, elocution, idiom, inflection, jargon, language, lexicon, lingo, lingua franca, localism, locution, mother tongue, native tongue, parlance, patter, patois, phraseology, pronunciation, provincialism, regionalism, slang, speech, street talk, talk, terminology, tone, tongue, vernacular, vocabulary, voice

For many travelers, the disorienting experience of going abroad is the encounter with a foreign language. The inability to fluently express yourself diminishes your identity, circumscribes interactions solely to the realm of practicality, of greetings, farewells, and thank yous, of “my name is” and numbers and directions, yes’s and no’s. You understand what it's like to be an immigrant, the guesswork grammar and telltale reproduced pronunciation. More easily reduced to a concept than a person. You feel like you're complex, that the people around you similarly hold multitudes, but if only you could understand and be understood, be islands connected by oceans of words.

I don't think I ever really bothered to interrogate my origins. What can I say? In elementary school, I filled out forms that inquired about ethnicity and language. Asian > Chinese. Primary language > English. Language spoken at home > ... "MOM! Do we speak Chinese?" "Yes." "But what kind of Chinese... I've heard Mandarin; what do we speak?" "Shanghainese." Good enough, until I met enough Shanghainese classmates in high school. "Oh yeah, Shanghainese is just easier to say because everyone knows Shanghai. We actually speak Ningbo." Ningbonese. By the time I had met enough people from Ningbo to know that my words didn't quite sound like Ningbonese, I turned to Google to figure out what I spoke at home. It's the Wu dialect. After I graduated college, my dad wanted to take me on my first trip to China. It was only then, at the cusp of adulthood, it was made clear to me that my parents come from someplace called Zhoushan. Really, I speak some variant of Wu that we can just call Zhoushanese. A city and a suffix make a language and a people.

On the night I fly out for Zhoushan, my mom drives me from Flushing, Queens (2010 U.S. Census: 69.2% Asian, 9.5% White) to Canarsie, Brooklyn (2010 U.S. Census: 81.0% African-American, 2.6% Asian, 5.9% White), and drops me off at a corner a block away. I take my deteriorating suitcase (empty, for the salted eel I would smuggle back) out of the trunk and she watches from the car as I roll up to an indistinguishable red townhouse. She drives away. Uhseh ("the third" of three brothers and my dad), uhnya (“grandma”), and uhya (“grandpa”) are sitting in the living room, China Central Television playing on a small boxy cathode-ray screen. We sit around smiling and appraising each other. The damask pattern on the red-and-gold velvet wallpaper looks to me, at times, like the stares of sinister samurai masks.

Our wordless reverie is interrupted by a Pakistani driver from some unknown and quasi-professional car service come to pick us up for the airport. Uhseh tries to cajole our driver with wildly misinformed assumptions about the Middle East. His voice crescendos with each expression, as if building up to something, but there’s nothing at all. In the backseat, Uhnya, who doesn't speak or understand any English, also gets the sense that Uhseh is acting daft, and tells him, "Shut up, you imbecile." (Aside to me: "Sick in the head, amirite?") Uhseh doesn't handle embarrassment or shame well. He blusters at our driver and tries to haggle the price down. The driver can't take the nonsense. "Listen, I also drive for Uber. Why didn't you just call an Uber? Like everyone else does! I could've driven you for a third of the price." The same scene recurred throughout my maiden journey to the motherland. Uhseh likes to flex his poor social-animal faculties. At the airport for our return flight, he "strikes up" conversation with some Ukrainian workers who were in China for employment on oil tankers.

—Ukraine? Excellent country, right?

—My man, we are being invaded by Russia.

—Oh, Russia! Russia is so strong! So powerful. You don't want to mess with Russia. If I were you, I wouldn't mess with Russia.

[...]

—You guys make excellent yogurt! Yes! You guys! Very popular, very famous for it. Good job!

[...]

—Me? I'm from America. Yes, I love America.

I don't like the way Uhseh talks… halting gravelly stuttering and stalling words tripping, falling down, treading over each other, slurrrrrring loud intimidating covering up nothing-words… not speaking… properly… Mandarin. I can't believe I never noticed this inability. Of course, he can make himself understood, but what came out of his vocal organ was still the mish-mash of someone confused between his patois and putonghua. It came across whenever I asked: What does that character mean? How do you say this word properly? What's the tone? What's the pinyin? And unable to admit his ignorance, he'd ply me with palaver and circumlocution. What does that sign mean? Rumble ramble power of tigers fighting against mountain fires. All the sign expressed was: "No smoking."

We landed in Shanghai, when it was too early for airport shuttles, so we overpaid to take a taxi to a bus station. The sky was overcast. The city covered in murk. Was this pollution or just a foggy morning? It rains. My dad is irritated and getting into arguments, feeling as if he is being constantly cheated. ("Why didn't the taxi driver let us off exactly in front of the bus station?! TA MA DE!"). I have my iPhone stolen at the bus station. I'm disappointed that, not one day in, I won’t be able to take any photos of my month-long stay. Everyone else expresses more upset about it than I do. The drive to Zhoushan is full of soupy loops of white vapor, at times lifting their ponderous loads so I catch glimpses of cranes and partially-started construction. Amazing how much construction is happening in China. My dad decides to sit next to me at one point and impress me with the landscape. Look over there, he points at a spot in the thick opaqueness. Your [disreputable family member] taught there (like Trump praising dictators, it irks me Uhseh is so enamored of this person). It's beautiful and one of the most well-regarded schools in this region. Cool.

Hours later, we happen upon a red sea. I always imagined that my parents came from some poor rural village in the hinterlands of West China, deep in central Asia. Instead, they come from some poor rural village in an archipelago in the East China Sea. Zhoushan consists of more than a thousand islands, and before the investment of billions of yuan in the twenty-first century and the construction of cross-sea bridges, was only accessible by boat. Our bus takes us across the second longest bridge (G9211 Ningbo-Zhoushan Expressway) in the world, over water the color of ochre, clay that formed my ancestry.

Wikipedia on Zhoushan: Sixth National Population Census of the People's Republic of China in 2010 gives a population of 1,121,261, with 1,109,813 Han Chinese. I did the division: 98.98% Han Chinese. I long to speak English. To meet someone else and have a conversation in English. People didn't know who I was here. I couldn't make jokes. I hang around a shopping center most days. I read Moby Dick at Starbucks. The unfortunate thing about wanting to meet another foreigner is that I don't look like a foreigner myself. Before I open my mouth, no one would know my background, but the moment I try to order a pork bun: "What?! Putonghua please. I don't come from this part of China. Xiaodi, are you aboriginal?" Once, I see a hipster in KFC. An American hipster. I couldn't square myself up to say hi. He takes his ironic graphic tee and beat-up Herschel bookbag, hops on a skateboard, and glides away. I walk after him, but he gets farther and farther until he's turned a corner and gone. Another time, I see a group of Slavic laborers with a Chinese translator and lingered near them, taking in their rough inflected declarations for coffee and chicken. I send desperate emails to friends at night, but it doesn't make up for a verbal lack, a desire for complex portrayal, here.

My mom told me to seek out her childhood friend Le Jun, who foresaw that automobiles would one day populate Zhoushan Island, apprenticed in the niche trade of auto repair, and is now a successful business owner. He invited me often to extravagant meals at his resort restaurant and to his family's New Year's dinner, where I entertained people through my Zhoushanese. For all that I benefitted from his hospitality, he gained by making me his novelty item, showing me off to business guests and political patrons. I was always introduced as that American who can't speak a lick of putonghua but is fluent in Zhoushanese.

I wasn't fluent. I wrote my college essay on the language barriers that existed in my household. I spoke English with my brother, Zhoushanese with my mom, and she spoke Mandarin to the man cohabitating with her. I imagine this is a problem for many children of immigrants who never fully learned their parent tongues. When my mom got into arguments with that temporary stepdad, I didn't understand. When I got into arguments with my mom, I couldn't express simple concepts like "you're being controlling," never having learned the Zhoushanese for "control." Intimacy is difficult without mutual intelligibility in the diction beyond practicality. I still can't share the things that occupy my mental space, except in English. My Zhoushanese is utterly practical. And unless one becomes a linguist, these provincial "dialects" aren't something one can easily pick up.

Around New Year's is when people my age came back to "rural" Zhoushan for the holidays. I met many of my cousins, who used slang like niubi around me. Because they couldn't communicate well with me, they mostly ignored me, felt me to be a burden or a potential danger ("don't tell my dad that I smoke"), but they reminded me of the joys of fluency, the ease with which they joked and made their personalities felt, with friends at a bar, playing Overwatch at a wangba—what Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia" in the novel, I saw in their languages that expressed their hip millennial culture, their Internet-speak, their negotiations between being "good" twenty-something-year-old sons and with their twenty-something-year-old desires to live. They said no one really speaks Zhoushanese anymore in their generation. You go to school as a kid, you learn putonghua, and that's the language you dream in. Zhoushanese isn't common and therefore isn't useful (although I've always loved that I could always assume that others couldn't understand what my family and I said to each other). As a language, it's functionally defunct. Moreover, my expressions were antiquated, vintage. Zhoushanese had moved on from Zhoushan, had been carried away by my family into the pocket world of our domestic life in Flushing and hardened in the amber of our speech. Le Jun would tell me: "Nobody says that anymore. I haven't heard that phrase since I was a little kid. You speak my grandparents' language, an old dialect." He made fun of my word for fish, "awng," explaining it's what adults might teach children when they're trying to learn "fish," but I had never lost it, never been corrected about it. Perhaps an approximate analogy would be the hypothetical scenario of calling a cow "moomoo" as a kid and ordering a "medium-rare moomoo" as an adult.

Though it's difficult to recall specifics, I have a general sense of constantly trying to explain something, but failing, ideas becoming mangled and warped and all that trying too hard and being incoherent making me appear and feel foolish. Yet despite all this frustration at being unable to communicate, unable to translate what I can express in English to everyone I met in Zhoushan Island, how ironic that I'm unable to adequately express my experience in Asia with English. My friend showed me pictures of her own trip to China, particularly these food stalls in which dung beetles, scorpions, silkworms, starfish, and centipedes are served on skewers. While the scorpions and starfish were recognizable, I asked her what the other critters were, and she had no idea. Zhoushan being an island is famous for its seafood and I can't even describe the variety of aquatic life I saw on display in supermarkets and restaurants. Ribbonfish, cuttlefish, blobfish (my most joyous discovery of something I didn't expect to find in real life and especially as a comestible). I can't describe them because I just don't have the words for all of them, not in Chinese, not in English. I wonder if I knew the words in Chinese, if they would be translatable. Other foods I am very familiar with and have never been able to translate. What does it mean to know the names, in English now, of food items like nilou (Bullacta exarata) or arbutus? Because surely, when my mother serves those tiny salty mollusks packed in reused plastic jars and tells me stories of her childhood picking them out of muddy beaches in Zhoushan, or when the arbutus wine (also in reused jars) is broken out and I'm told I can only have a few of those dark purple berries max, that these experiences have been a part of my identity, experiences I couldn't articulate before without knowing what the hell to call the Korean mud snail.

I have had an inordinately hard time thinking about "self-discoveries" in experiencing China. My sense of identity has not changed. My trip to China was not an experience in how I perceive myself but in how I perceive others, how others perceive me, and how I can communicate my identity, and seeing that all the aforementioned has been for a great part dependent on language. My sense of identity has not changed but my means of talking about it has, though still limited by what I can and can’t express. I feel my relatives in China are stuck with only a vague sense of who I am that I have very little influence over. It’s been a great loss that I’m not fluent in Mandarin or Zhoushanese, not only on the trip but throughout my life, in my familial relations and growing up in a predominantly Asian hometown. And despite my fluency in English, by never learning the vocabulary to talk about my ethnic identity, from not even previously knowing the name "Zhoushan," I have not been able to talk about certain aspects that make up my cultural and ethnic identity. Self-making through language-learning—it will always be a work in progress. Language, in the broad sense of what and how we speak, reveals both indirectly and intentionally so much of ourselves and reminds us what islands we all are.

Kevin Le Mei visited Asia for the first and only time in January of 2017.

#china

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