On the outskirts of Novosibirsk's business complex, there is an average-looking apartment house. Three or four stories tall, painted, dreary walls, the many windows like the multifaceted eyes of a bluebottle fly, a low hedge of rampant and vividly green garden flowers and weeds along the edges of the walls. An average-looking apartment house.
On the side of it hangs a plaque. It reads, in Russian: “In this house, from 1957 to 1982, the poet Vassili Michaelovich Pouhnatchev lived and worked.”
That man is my great-grandfather.

“I could hear the trains from my room at night, when I came here,” my mother reminisced, and added that she used to play outside behind the house. A rare moment of nostalgia for her. Behind the house: cracking, crumbling asphalt, more weeds or flowers (honestly there's no difference) in curbed-away patches, the road a few feet away and empty.
Academgorodok, distanced from Novosibirsk but ostensibly a part of it, where my mother and father lived. It impressed me by turns with its gradually decaying and peeling houses and the fresh greenness, so startling after golden, dried-up hills and fading trees here. Damp, humid air. A constant, lonely, high screech of swallows outside the window, swooping to capture clouds of gnats. Here was the path my mother took going home from school; there was the building my dad would climb to the roof of, to see what he could see; that was the school that they went to (ominously, inside the doors, hung a poster explaining how to put on a gas mask). We walked thousands of times from my grandmother's house to the Torgoviy Center, the modest mall-complex or department store with the faded banners proclaiming “Live life here unhurriedly.” Criss-crossing the paths of our family history. Small fruit stands everywhere, with many-hued raspberries, currants, gooseberries, all those other fruits that looked less than perfect but are much sweeter than the ones here. Mushrooms, coppery toned and large, firm, arranged in piles for sale. We paused to admire them, and then continued on with our walk.
There is a geometric symmetry between the way we spent our time there, and our time at home, because evening walks are a facet of our normal lives as well. I will often tell them about my school day. A pause. And then, more often than not, I ask - “And how was it at your school?” Cut to me listening, all rapt attention, about how my father's biology teacher wasn't that good, but would talk passionately for hours about genetics, because that was her professional field. And then, more personal stories about growing up. My mother's beloved collie, Jusya, with thick, soft fur: fearful of thunder, once left behind at the store, once run away after a storm, dragging my mother and her sister through the snow on a sled. My mother and father both going on long backpacking trips in boisterous companies, traversing rocky, icy chasms, roped to the person in front of them. Visiting dachas in the summer, among dust and bothersome flies, getting away from the city.
In my own summer, moved by some urge or other and a slew of online advertisements, I signed up for a trial on Ancestry. Genealogy. Families branching back, stories, histories. Of course nothing showed up; nothing - “Of course nothing showed up,” my mother says, “we're from Russia, not the U.S. They don't have access to that sort of information.”
Of course not.
In return, my grandmother sends me a document from her own endeavors, detailing our family's more recent splits. Short comments for the people she didn't know so well, a whole page devoted to the life of her grandmother and her own mother. I read and re-read the blueprint, charting out the relatives in my mind, trying to piece them together.
Why all this? Even this present contemplation consumes me, makes me thoughtful. Even when I'm not aware of it. A book my father read to me once describes the main character as standing with his ancestors surrounding him, for he knows their stories so well that they are his own. I, on the other hand: I feel severed, rootless.
Rootless – the first person in my close family born in America, which I say with pride, because at least it's easier than moving away.
Rootless – I know the language, I can read it, I can write it, but still I wonder what would have been different if I'd been born here, not there.
Rootless – my only connection for long spans of years between the costly trips shall be the computer screen, Skype, pixellated images and garbled audio.
Rootless – my mother is still recognized by her last name for her grandfather's achievements, and yet I do not know what he looked like, have never read his poetry.
Rootless.
My parents left their home for a job; I respect that, of course. I'm anything but ungrateful for that decision, made before I was born. I respect the opportunity of growing up in America, and acknowledge and embrace the fact that this is arguably one of the best places start out in. But that cannot change the fact that I feel myself to be -
- rootless, when I think about it.
Torn from my growing medium;
starved for history.
Searching for a guide.

The camera's shutter clicked; we left the plaque and continued to wander a short way down the street, filled with innumerable other memorials and statues. I didn't know it yet, but in an hour or two it would rain, the rain that's called blind rain because it falls, brilliantly, not realizing that the sun is shining, and I would get gloriously wet. Our time in Novosibirsk was almost up. I was savoring, filling myself with the presence of relatives that were so distant otherwise, the humid northern air, the multi-layered history of my surroundings. As we walked past the building, I wondered to myself which of the doors he... great-grandfather... used and might I not be walking along the same streets that he did. I wasn't thinking about it then, but I knew that I wouldn't be back there for another four or five years, and I probably wouldn't ever be back there for as long as I had four years ago. Despite all my fantasies of living there for a short while when I got older, maybe a year or two, I knew that it would be at best difficult to realize them. But I was filled with strong impressions from the trip, from meeting family members and encountering everyday life.
If I am rootless, then I am forced to plant myself, and I will do so. For if I'm the first born in America, then I will be the first to grow here, and the very first plants are always the ones that open new land for all the next ones to come.