Roots I

I tend to take some exception to the notion of American exceptionalism.  Or at least the way it’s sometimes used to rally folks around a certain jingoistic view of the US.  The belief that America is exceptional – uniquely different from any other country in the world – is an article of faith among the majority of my countrymen.  It’s a staple of many politicians’ talking points and not something to be hidden under a bushel if you aspire to higher office.  For example, because Barack Obama doesn’t talk about the concept as much as some of his conservative critics think he should, they have questioned whether the President believes sufficiently in the exceptionalism of the country he leads. 

Germans immigrants arriving in America, 1874.

Many Americans interpret “exceptionalism” to mean the US is better than any other country in the world.  Whether this is true for every single facet of life in the US is a topic for another day.  (Hint: it ain’t necessarily so.)  But I do feel one part of the American story clearly set the US apart from most other countries, especially those in Europe:  the United States is a nation of immigrants, some fresher off the boat than others, but newcomers all the same.  (Not counting, of course, the some two-and-a-half-million Native Americans who trace their origins back to the continent’s very first human inhabitants, nomads who crossed over from Asia thousands of years ago seeking new lands.) 

The rest of us descended from much more recent nomads who came for much the same purpose – to make a new life in a new home.  It goes without saying that such bouts of restlessness have swept through all peoples around the world at one time or another.  Soon after the Ice Age, the original inhabitants of Finland migrated from an ancestral homeland, much further east in present-day Russia, to relocate in this cold corner of Europe, while their distant ethnic cousins settled in the warm, arid plains of Hungary.  I’ll leave it to the Finns to decide whether they took the right turn in that move. 

Europe has undergone many such migrations in a dizzying game of geopolitical musical chairs, with different tribes and peoples constantly changing places over the centuries as they pushed themselves or were pushed by others or otherwise just drifted onto new real estate.  Compared to the days when the likes of the Huns and the Vikings were stirring things up all over Europe, the continent has been mostly static for some time now – despite all the redrawing of maps kicked off by the fall of the Iron Curtain.  This is why most modern European nations have tended to identify themselves along ethnic lines in a way that America does not.  Except for some spots where a minority group spills across a national border, France is the land of the French, England is the home of the English, and so on. 

Such national identities can make for rigid attitudes towards newcomers.  Until about ten years ago, Germany did not grant citizenship to second- or third-generation Turkish residents who had lived all their lives in the country.  I’ve had British friends tell me that England is not an immigrant country, meaning the growing population of citizens of Pakistani or West Indian descent doesn’t really seem to fit in there. 

America is different – if you will, even exceptional – in that there is no such thing as an “ethnic American” (again, except for Native Americans).  You can’t distinguish an American from a Nigerian or Nepalese just by their physical appearance.  And no wonder.  Unlike almost any other country, the US is made up of people from every corner of the globe who, despite sometimes facing prejudice and hostility, have found a new home in America.  This includes Finns. 

Little Italy, New York City, 1903. Photo by Debivort.

On a dresser in the apartment of my wife’s almost 100-year-old aunt in Turku, in southwestern Finland, sits a gilded mantel clock, a family heirloom that belonged to her late husband.  He was born in New York City in the early 1900s, a child of one of those emigrant families that crowded into the five boroughs in a period immortalized by many a Hollywood film.  This young New Yorker’s parents, however, eventually decided to return to Finland, which shows that not all the huddled masses who came to America necessarily found it to their liking. 

Of course, many transplanted Finns did.  Some years ago in Yellowstone National Park, we were walking among some hot springs and smelly fumaroles when a couple of elderly women overheard my wife and kids speaking Finnish.  Excitedly, the pair approached us to introduce themselves as third-generation Finnish-Americans and to try out the fractured (and quite old-fashioned) Finnish they had, more or less, learned as children. 

Like these two delightful ladies, most Americans are proud of their roots and happy to claim the different nationalities or ethnic groups that make up their heritage.  I know Americans who are Greek-Irish or German-Irish or Dutch-Indonesian or Japanese-Finnish.  Such ethnic mashups aren’t at all unusual, especially in certain parts of the country like the Northeast, where the pots of New York and Boston have been melting for centuries.  By contrast, the southeastern US where I’m from has always seemed a much less diverse place, populated mostly by only two hyphened forms of Americans, Anglo and African. 

That is rapidly changing.  Alabama, South Carolina and other southern states that haven’t traditionally been home to large Hispanic populations have, over the last ten years, seen a doubling of Latino residents.  Georgia now ranks 10^th nationally in terms of the number of Hispanics living there. 

These statistics only confirm what anyone has been able to see for themselves in my small hometown in the Georgia mountains over the past 10-15 years.  Every time we have visited in recent years, we’ve noticed more and more short, dark-skinned men, often walking along the highways into town.  These newest arrivals to the county are Central Americans, mainly Guatemalan, who originally came to work in the local chicken-processing plant and apple orchards.  It’s quite different from my childhood, when practically the only Hispanics living there were professionals – including our only surgeon and veterinarian – who had fled Castro’s Cuba. 

Today, the Latino migrants to my hometown are willing to do less-desirable manual labor to make a better life for themselves.  Like my own ancestors, they are reliving that classic – and, let’s be honest, not always easy – story of folks looking for new opportunities and putting down roots in a new land.  

Conan, God of the Finns

One of the weirder places where American and Finnish pop cultures have met – and there aren’t really that many to begin with – is a TV studio at Rockefeller Center in New York City.  It was here, the home of the late great “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”, that a beautiful friendship began in 2006. 

In a gag typically quirky for the show, Conan decided to insult every country on earth, alphabetically, a few nations at a time, all for the purpose of eliciting hate mail from the more obscure corners of the world where his show was broadcast.  (This is not unlike what some bloggers do.) 

Finnish fans didn’t wait for their insult.  They jumped the gun by flooding Conan with love/hate mail even before Finland’s turn came.  Now, queue jumping isn’t in the Finnish character.  Far from it.  Neither is anything that smacks of calling too much attention to yourself, so I can only take this outpouring of mail as a sign of how genuinely popular the redheaded Irish-American comedian is among Finns. 

While I would personally chalk this popularity up to Finns’ own quirky sense of humor, Conan quickly came up with a different interpretation after he realized the uncanny (some might call it “cosmic”) resemblance he bears to Finland’s president, Tarja Halonen. 

The freakish similarity between the two has provided plenty of fodder for Conan’s writers, with Conan convincing himself that his resemblance to Halonen had made him a “Golden God” in the eyes of the Finnish people.  He even meddled in Finnish presidential politics to ensure Halonen’s reelection by airing on her behalf some amazingly tough-minded campaign ads.  No, make that simple-minded.  Anyway, it was all in good fun.  (I wasn't able to upload the ads, but you can view some of them by searching "Conan supports Tarja Halonen" on YouTube.)

For a victory lap following the epic success of his campaign, Conan actually visited the land of his people to bask in the love, or just very strong enthusiasm, of adoring fans and to meet personally with a grateful, or at least bemused, Halonen.  She’s a good sport, it seems. 

Alas, Finland hasn’t seen much of Conan since he was unceremoniously ousted from the “The Tonight Show” last year.  His new show, “Conan” is not carried by any of the Finnish TV channels, and even worse, in this age of Internet, full episodes of the show cannot be streamed from Conan’s website due to some mysterious legalities.  For Conan fans, this is a hugely unhappy situation, maybe even unjust.  And Conan himself is obviously starting to feel the strain of separation from his most loyal fans on earth, or at least the most loyal fans who have a president who looks like him. 

Last week, he finagled a way to break down – if for only one week – the legal barriers that deprived Finland of its Conan fix, allowing Finns to stream the show and enjoy a series of Finland-themed gags.  I was only able to catch a couple of these sketches, the best of which was his whacky setup of the hit video game “Angry Birds”, where players use a slingshot to propel flightless birds against enemy pigs.  On the show, Conan played a giant-sized version of this Finnish creation, with the twist of disguising the evil pigs with masks of Snooki and other “stars” from “Jersey Shore”, making their destruction even sweeter.  Only a pop culture icon, and self-appointed God of the Finns, like Conan O’Brien could dream up a way to bring bits of Finland and America together like that.  

Women

Yesterday was the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s Day, a fitting time for a few words about the state of sexual relations in Finland.  As a man, I’m obviously not in a position to say whether Finnish women should be satisfied with their lot in life.  I wouldn’t presume (or dare) to speak for them.  On the surface, however, it would seem that women here have enjoyed some considerable successes. 

Back in 1997, Hillary Clinton paid a visit to Helsinki as the American First Lady, a full decade before her campaign to be the first woman to occupy the White House in her own right.  She came closer to that elusive goal than anyone yet, and eventually was picked for the still-powerful position of Secretary of State (the third female to hold that post). 

Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi
(photo: Sebastian Derungs)

But in 1997, she was merely the First Lady, and still a year away from the public humiliation her husband would force her to endure.  During that June visit to Helsinki, Clinton met with three top Finnish government officials at the US Embassy:  the foreign minister, the defense minister and the head of the Finnish central bank – the Finnish counterparts to Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates 

and Ben Bernanke today. 

All three of these high-level Finnish officials were women.  This obviously impressed the First Lady, who publicly speculated at the time about how long it would be before women were similarly represented at the highest echelons of the US government.  One of the women she met was Elisabeth Rehn, Finland’s first (and so far only) female Minister of Defense, who had three years earlier 

almost won her own presidential bid.  Another was Tarja Halonen, then Foreign Minister, who did succeed to become Finland’s first female president in 2000. 

While Halonen’s two-term presidency undoubtedly has had huge symbolic value for women’s rights, the truth is that in Finland’s parliamentary system, the president holds relatively little power compared to the Prime Minister, who – as of June of last year – now also happens to be a woman.  Mari Kiviniemi is the second of her gender to hold that office.  The first, elected in 2003, resigned after only 69 days in office due to improperly leaked documents her campaign had used to discredit the opposition.  (Apparently, political dirty tricks have no gender bias.)  Together, Halonen and Kiviniemi today form the public – and decidedly feminine – face of Finland in world affairs. 

The prominence of women in government reflects Finnish national politics generally and is likely rooted in this country’s long history of progressive gender politics.  While still an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russian, Finland became the first European state to grant women the right to vote, in 1906, coming in third behind the apparently even-more-egalitarian New Zealand and Australia. 

The same year, women also won the right to run for Finland’s nascent parliament, giving them more complete political rights at the time than anywhere outside of Australia.  Nineteen women were promptly elected as the world’s first female members of a national legislature.  Currently, 79 women are parliament members, which amounts to just under 40% of the 200-member body.  Compared that to 17% for the current US Congress. 

World's first women parliament members, 1907
(courtesy: Ministry for Foreign
Affairs of Finland)

Not everything revolves around politics, though, and women here may feel that other aspects of their lives fall short of true equality.  (There again, it’s not my place to say for certain).  With some notable exceptions, business in Finland is still dominated by men at the higher-management levels, and salaries are probably still far from being equal.  But I think the social-welfare system here, which offers paid parental leave of up to ten months (seven of which can be taken by the father, which I did when our second child was born), a guaranteed job afterward, and guaranteed daycare, does go a long way toward giving women decent options for balancing family life with a career outside the home. 

Still, no country is perfect, and it seems that even here women can be held to a somewhat different standard than men, no matter how impressive their accomplishments might be.  The US ambassador to Finland who had arranged Clinton’s meeting with the trio of Finnish leaders in 1997 later recounted in the Huffington Post how they had discussed with Clinton the kinds of bias they still faced as women. 

They told the First Lady about not being able to join their male colleagues in sauna (the steam-filled backroom where the real wheeling and dealing was said to be done in those days).  Probably even more frustrating was the fact that, unlike the men, they also had to put up with a local media that sometimes paid far too much attention not to the political positions they were espousing, or the policies they were implementing, but rather the styles of dresses they were wearing. 

So, what else is new?

Cold

For much of this month, Helsinki has been sitting at the bottom of a high-pressure cell of air so cold that it had begun to feel oppressive.  We enjoyed two weeks of temperatures around -25 centigrade (-13F) and below, with highs on most days not much above -18C (0F).  Further inland and to the north – far from the moderating effects of the sea (even if it is frozen) the chill has been much deeper.  A seasonal low of almost -42C (-43F) was measured in Lapland on February 18^th, right on the eve of the annual “ski holidays”.  This is when schools in Helsinki close for a week and the city empties out as many families head either south to warm spots not known for their skiing, like the Canary Islands or Thailand, or – against all human reason – northward into the heart of coldness to ski in Lapland. 

The upside of the frigid weather we’ve been experiencing is that for a couple of weeks we've had clear, blue skies.  This, along with days that are getting noticeable longer, gives us an abundance of sunshine that many parts of the world take for granted, but that Finns can usually enjoy only in the dead of winter when it’s “too cold to snow”. 

Local ice-climbing spot in Helsinki.

Of course, strictly speaking, it can never be too cold to snow.  But for practical purposes, once the air here gets much below -20, it usually can’t hold enough moisture to form snow or even clouds, allowing us – for a few weeks at least – to live under a dome of blue winter sky, instead of a low ceiling of monotonous gray vapor.  The aridity of the cold air also has a downside for someone like me.  Such extreme lack of humidity turns me into a walking static-electricity generator.  I electrify everything and everyone I touch.  Also, the cold air quickly dries out skin left exposed too long, resulting in me going around most winters with my hands bleeding from countless small cracks.   I managed to avoid that this year -- that is, until a week ago when I shed my gloves for twenty minutes to help someone jump his car off.  

When I first contemplated moving to Finland, I dug out a world map to check the location of my future home.  Upon seeing how far north Finland really lies, my first thought was:  “How in the world does anyone live up there?”  It was a perfectly logical reaction for someone who grew up in the temperate climate of Georgia. 

While my home state does share the same latitude with such scorching places as Morocco, it doesn’t mean we’re unfamiliar with cold weather.  The “Siberian Express” cold fronts that barrel down through the US from Canada almost always reach the northern part of Georgia, giving us a short-lived taste of real winter.  My family’s fishpond would freeze over most winters for a few days, though with ice strong enough to bear the weight of nothing heavier than a cat – a fact that inquisitive minds couldn’t help verifying by luring an unsuspecting pet out onto the ice to test it. 

Very occasionally, temperatures even dipped briefly to zero Fahrenheit, which always was a big deal and could have been a real hardship for us in Georgia if it had ever lasted more than a day or so.  I recall my father getting frostbite once from trying to loosen the frozen water pipes at his dry-cleaning store to keep them from bursting.  In ordinary winters, we managed well enough though, even if our house, like most in the South, was admittedly not built for prolonged cold spells.  We made up for the lack of effective heating (or even any real insulation) by sleeping under thick quilts and electric blankets. 

Still, we could take comfort during the coldest part of winter by looking at the weather map and thinking it could be worse.  We could be those poor bastards in Fargo, North Dakota, which was point-blank in the path of the Arctic blasts coming down from Canada.  There, they had to contend with mind-blending temperatures like 40 below. 

With temperatures like that (and Canada to the north only a mysterious terra incognita on the weather map), it was easy to think that Fargo was at the very northern edge of human habitation.  And, the fact is that when you look at a map of population density in North American, it seems most Canadians live in a band of territory just north of the US border, almost as if huddling next to the US for warmth.  I doubt the Canadians would see it that way, however.

With such preconceptions, we were naturally skeptical of the possibility of life anywhere more than a day’s drive north of the desolate Dakota plains.  By comparison, Helsinki is practically the North Pole.  It’s almost as far north as Whitehorse or Yellowknife or some other forgotten (but apparently colorful) outpost of civilization, where I imagined the few people who somehow ended up there must have struggled to cling to life. 

View from Helsinki's frozen Töölö Bay.

But, that’s continental North America.  Europe is different, thanks to the redistribution of warmth by the Gulf Stream, which begins in the sun-baked straits between Florida and Cuba.  By transporting warm Caribbean water to the far northern Atlantic, the Gulf Stream helps moderate winter weather that would otherwise be as bitter as Saskatoon’s.  This is partly why Portugal, at about the same latitude as Boston, has a pretty enviable climate in January instead of one that gives New England its well-deserved reputation for winter sports.

It’s always been nice to think that warmth from the part of the world where I grew up was helping to make my new home livable.  There have been some worries of late, however, that this flow of heat to Europe might not be as unrelenting as it seems.  Some studies have suggested that the Gulf Stream has slowed in the last couple of years by as much as half.  In October, a meteorologist in Poland predicted that this slowdown would trigger the coldest winter in Europe for a thousand years.  That is truly a frightening thought, raising the specter of a second “Little Ice Age” like the one that disrupted life in Europe beginning in the 1300s. 

The last couple of days have now been near freezing and, despite the two feet of snow still on the ground and the serious deep-freeze we had the last two weeks, there’s a real sense that winter is about to break and the slow change toward spring has started.  Unless things get very ugly very quickly, we can safely say that – at least for this year – the threat of being hit by a frost not seen in a millennium was just very, very bad weather forecasting.  

Bloody Food

While it wasn't exactly a New Year’s resolution, my family decided to go on a diet of only fish and vegetables for the month of January, mostly as an experiment to see if we can reduce the amount of red meat we eat.  That’s easier for some of us (read my wife) than for others (that would be me).  By the way, this idea is a variation of the practice widely professed by some Finns of swearing off alcohol for at least a month following the festive Christmas season.  There’s even a name for that tea-totaling custom, tipaton tammikuu. 

Our break from meat wasn’t an ironclad prohibition.  My daughter was of course served meat as part of her school lunches, and my son elected to opt out of the whole thing.  That said, for an entire month our family meals – meaning dinner – consisted only of plants and creatures no higher on the evolutionary ladder than a herring. 

Medieval-era herring fishing in neighboring Sweden.

The change of diet wasn’t exactly a huge stretch for us.  Like lots of families in Finland, we already eat fish pretty regularly.  Finns do like their fish, be it fried, baked, boiled, grilled, smoked, raw or even pickled.   (However, they don't seem go for fermenting our gilled, water-breathing friends, as the Swedes do.)  And most grocery stores offer an excellent variety of fish, from large slabs of salmon to  finger-sized muikku.  And, of course, the ubiquitous Baltic herring.  

There’s no prize for guessing the reason the popularity of fish in this country.  Surrounded on two sides by the Baltic Sea and pockmarked with nearly 200,000 freshwater lakes (mostly concentrated in the east where my wife is from), Finland has always enjoyed a bountiful supply of fishy protein close to home. 

Still, my family typically consumes less fish than beef or chicken.  (We’re also not big eaters of the other favorite meat for Finns, pork.)  So it nonetheless took some adjustment to switch temporarily to life without meat.  The biggest hardship for me wasn’t so much being unable to eat the stuff, as it was figuring out what to cook in its place. 

I do most of the cooking in our house during the week, thanks to me currently being a stay-at-home Dad, and sad to say I’m no Jamie Oliver.  I can fry your basic ground beef – essential for our mainstays of pizza, macaroni casserole (makaronilaatikko), burritos, etc. – and chicken for stir-fry dishes.  I can also make a pretty mean hotdog soup, and when it comes to pea soup, I’m able to open a tin can alongside the best of them. 

With meat off the table, however, the limits of my culinary range became as painfully apparent.  I quickly found you can serve fish sticks or salmon soup only so many times during a given month.  And the obvious choice of all-veggie meals – though healthy and appetizing in theory – turned out to be challenging for this accidental chef.  My attempt at a soy and lentil concoction was tasty – well, editable – but its presentation suffered a tab from being indistinguishable from canned cat food.  Cheap canned cat food.  Word of this dish spread even to my daughter’s friends, who had to see for themselves the food so gross that only a cat would consider eating it – if only it contained meat. 

Blood pancakes with lingonberries.

Now that January is behind us, I can breathe a little easier when suppertime approaches, though we’re committed to continue reducing our meat intake and I’m determined to learn how to cook veggie dishes that are not so foul as to make a vegan backslide.  

In the meantime, we’re back to our more normal, easier-to-prepare menu.  Our first meaty meal was my mother-in-law’s meatballs, which I can confidently state are the best in the world.  The other meat-ish dish we allowed ourselves is one we don’t often eat nowadays, verilettu.  This traditional Finnish pancake made with pig blood – that’s right pig’s blood – used to be a staple in our house when the kids were young.  That was back when you could still buy dry blood-pancake mix, which made it easy for busy parents to quickly whip up a batch of verilettu for hungry youngsters.  Just mix with water, fry in a skillet, and serve with lingonberries on top.  Of course, my kids chose to break with traditional and instead smothered the pancakes with, what else, ketchup. 

For some years now, the dried mix has disappeared off the store shelves, why I can’t say.  But, small ready-made blood pancakes, about the size of silver dollars, are still available.  This is what we recently served with supper for the first time in quite a while.  The kids were not enthusiastic.  Obviously, they have lost their taste for this Finnish delicacy, with or without ketchup.  Or, maybe these modern-day mass-produced, overly processed pancakes aren’t quite the same as the ones they remember from their childhood. 

In any case, my wife found them acceptable.  And she remembers a time when verilettu were prepared the old fashion way – that is, with fresh blood.  In those days, people made the pancakes with pig's blood that they bought from the local butcher shop and brought home in buckets.  Buckets of blood.  Picture that for a moment.  If that doesn’t nudge you toward taking a little break from meat yourself, then nothing will.