There is a grey area between being foreign and not, being of a place
and not. My Grossmama spent most of her life in countries that were
not her own. When she was a child, her father’s work kept the family
in St Petersburg each winter and in Vladivostok each summer, only
occasionally allowing them to visit uncles and aunts on the family estate
in today’s Lithuania. After the fall of Imperial Russia, my Grossmama spent
close to a decade in Shanghai with tens of thousands of other White
Russian émigrés.
Bio:
Cecile Popp Mangtay is a Canadian educator and contributor to the 2019 anthology Expat Sofra (Alfa). Her essays have appeared in Pangyrus, the Globe and Mail, and other publications. With her husband and three sons, she is now acclimatizing to life in Peterborough, Ontario, where she is teaching at Trent University and writing a memoir about her family’s history of migration and exile and its impact on her life.