A Few Things I Never Knew

Can pats the chair next to him as Shokan enters the room. "Sit with us, brother!" Furkan quickly pulls his legs back so Shokan can get past him. Shokan sits down next to Can, but I see his eyes flicker over to where Dania is sitting.

This isn't a rare thing: in my classes, boys almost always sit with other boys and girls with other girls. During the break, however, Shokan gets up and joins Dania after a quick, brotherly smoke with Can and Furkan outside. And the two remain together for the second half of the class. That is rare.

Dania and Shokan are very different in appearance. Dania is petite, stylishly slim, blonde and blue-eyed; Shokan is tall and sturdy, with black hair and brown eyes. If you were casting Dania for a Hollywood movie, she'd be a Russian ballerina; with his great physique and Asian looks, Shokan could be an extra in a Jackie Chan film. Dania and Shokan aren't an item: she's got a boyfriend and I know Shokan is looking for a girlfriend. But Dania and Shokan share a common language (Russian) and a culture: they are Kazakhs. In my class, they are almost always together.

No one else will talk to Dania. This is partly because Dania has distanced herself from everyone (the boys were a little too eager to get to know her, the girls a little too shy), but there is also a language barrier. While Dania's English is probably the best in the class, she doesn't speak Kazakh, which means she doesn't understand Turkish either. Shokan does.

Before I got here, my knowledge of the Near East was sadly lacking, but I've made up for lost time. Since my arrival, I have met and talked to people from every single -stan country there is, with the exception of Afghanistan. (And I've learned that we've got at least half a dozen Afghan students at the university, so it's only a matter of time.) I can't get over how much I've learned about Turks, people who speak Turkic-based languages, and the countries they come from. This is not to say that I am very knowledgeable now, but I'm pleased with the progress I've made. I always tell my students that as long as they're trying to learn, that's all that matters to me. I'm not proud that I knew so little to begin with, but I know I'm trying. And I'd far rather confess to ignorance than stay ignorant.

When I first got here, I was thrilled to have Kazakhs, Azeris and Uzbeks in my classes. I sat them next to my Turkish students and foolishly imagined that this would force them to use English. I had no idea that people from Azerbaijan practically are Turkish, that they certainly understand Turkish and can communicate almost perfectly with Turks.

Kazakhs can do this to some degree as well. My first week here, I stopped an Asian man to ask him where the administration building was. "Sorry, I don't know," he said in excellent English, "I'm new here too." I asked him where he was from and he told me he was Kazakh. "But wait; I'll ask someone where the administration is." I thought to myself that he would find this impossible; I'd asked half a dozen people and none of them knew English. But to my amazement, he stopped a man and asked him in Turkish. And then, more amazingly, he understood the answer. "How do you happen to know Turkish?" I asked, astonished. He shrugged. "I don't know Turkish. Kazakh people and Turkish people --" He clasped his hands together "-- like that. They speak, I understand. I speak, they understand. Same with many countries -- Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, sometimes Kyrgyzstan." He clasped his hands together and smiled.

The Ottoman Empire, my new friend told me, spread the Turkish language far and wide. Over the next few months, I was to find this out firsthand.

Like the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire, the Soviet Empire too has been linguistically influential. Whenever you see Belarussian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Azeri students together, you can hear them speaking Russian, their lingua franca. It always fascinates me. They look Korean, Russian, Chinese, Swedish, Mongolian -- but they all speak Russian. Like Shokan and Dania.

Whether it's part of their Soviet legacy or not, Shokan and Dania are much more studious than their Turkish classmates. On the last day of class, they were the only ones who bothered to show up. We decided to scrap the lesson and chat.

"Nobody knows Kazakhstan," they both insist.

I have to agree with them. Embarrassing though it is, most of what I know about Kazakhstan is what I learned from Sacha Baron Cohen's fictitious Borat Sagdiyev. I'm too much of a wimp to tell Shokan and Dania this, so I simply mention his name. Have they ever heard of Borat Sagdiyev? What do they think of him?

Their eyes flash and their cheeks flush. You bet they've heard of him. "Teacher, he is LIE," Shokan hisses. "Kazakhstan is not that country he says!"

"Our country's people not stupid, not so --" Dania and Shokan confer briefly "--not so ignorant." Dania gives me an aggrieved look. "American people see Borat? They believe Borat is Kazakh?"

"We think he's funny," I have to tell them. "But I think he's more popular in the U.K." Like I say, I'm a wimp.

"We have good schools," Shokan tells me. "Theatres, hospitals, parks, department stores, restaurants..."

"We have churches," Dania insists. "We have--" She confers with Shokan and a Russian-English dictionary is pulled out "--mosques." Shokan nods. "And we have also--" He pulls out a pen and draws a Star of David on the back of his notebook.

"We have everything," they tell me angrily. "Why he make fun Kazakhstan?"

"It's because your country isn't well known," I tell them. "It's because it is so small--"

They both practically jump out of their seats. "NOT SMALL!" Dania cries. Shokan rolls his eyes so expressively it's pure poetry. "Teacher," he says with remarkable patience. "Kazakhstan one of ten largest country in world." (He's right too: I checked. Kazakhstan is number 9, larger even than Sudan. Did you know that? Because I had absolutely no idea.)

"I'm glad you guys speak English so well," I told them. "Or I'd never have learned that."

Good thing I don't mind confessing to my ignorance.