“Allies”
Sofia Chang

The tombstones were white granite slashed with red. I stepped gently across the pools of symbolic blood and examined the markers, arranged from oldest (84 years) to youngest (6 years). Seventeen years ago, Serb forces staged an attack against Kosovar resistance fighter Adem Jashari. Beside the battle site, a monument commemorated him and the 58 Jasharis who’d fought and died by his side.

We absorbed the gravesite, ten silent and solemn-faced Americans. A month into our peace and conflict studies program, we were no longer strangers to tragedy, but this was one of the heavier days.

Before we continued on to the next excursion site, our program director, Orli, called for a bathroom break. A handful of us descended the ramp into the Jashari museum’s crypt-like basement. Scarlett and I were the last two in line, and on our way out we passed a group of young women kicking back on the lawn, talking in chirpy tones. They looked and sounded like locals; I made an effort to smile.

As soon as the women noticed us, they began pointing and staring. Peals of laughter. Chinos!

“Do you speak English?” They shouted, and several of them cackled. Their giggles followed us as we hurried the short distance back to the van, where Orli waited.

Scarlett said nothing and slipped into her seat. I paused and cast a glance at Orli, searching for any sign of acknowledgment. She chatted away to the driver, oblivious.

I climbed into the van.

Just the day before I had finally broken and asked Orli to speak in private. She was shocked to hear about the jeers and howls that had followed me through Belgrade and exploded onto the glinting streets of Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Orli squinted at me and demanded, “Has Scarlett had these experiences, too?”

Of course she’d had these experiences. Scarlett met strangers at the bus stop who made ching-chong noises and pulled up their eyes to imitate slanty Asian eyes. I figured Orli only asked about Scarlett because she couldn’t wrap her head around the scope of the problem. But her disbelief hurt. Did she think I had imagined the voices, just because Orli had never witnessed them herself? Either way, I thought—it wasn’t Scarlett who’d stood in front of her; it was me. I couldn’t speak for Scarlett, or for any of the Asians who’d visited or lived in the Balkans. And wasn’t it Orli’s job to know about this stuff? What had she been doing here for the past twelve years? She’d accumulated degrees in ethnic conflict, pontificated about “difference,” and completely ignored the racial dimension of Balkan society, because she’d never looked for it.

Back in the van, the windows had fogged up, and the fabric seats reeked of greasy potato chips. From the last row I listened to the others recover their loud voices and high spirits, totally unaware of what had just occurred. I thought about our first evening in Pristina, when I’d told a group of sneering young men on the street to go fuck themselves. They’d started following us, but nobody had noticed or reacted except Lindsey and Rowan. The two had ushered Scarlett and me back to the hotel, an eye to our backs. Lindsey and Rowan reassured us they didn’t mind turning in early; they didn’t need another opportunity to blow more money on mediocre company. The others had stayed out bar-hopping. I felt the anger rise in my throat.

“So, Scarlett,” I said in my loudest announcer voice. “Was that a situation where you would assume best intentions?”

One time I’d cornered Scarlett to ask how she seemed so impervious to everything. She had shrugged—“I try to assume the best.” Now she flinched. In the back of the van Lindsey and Rowan fell silent.

Scarlett made some noncommittal, I’m-too-nice-to-accuse-them noises about not being sure if they were talking to us.

From the front, Jack and his booming voice intercepted. “Are you talking about those girls?”

My heart leaped—someone had noticed! It was Jack, the rakish Texan with the mop of reddish curls, whose biggest ambition seemed to be to find a Kosovar girlfriend.

“Yeah, I saw that,” Jack said, wiping the condensation off his window to peer at the group of women. He sighed dramatically. “I wish they’d been shouting at me!”

I turned and threw my gaze blindly against the window. Three days before, on our drive from Serbia to Kosovo, I’d spent half an hour sketching Jack while he slept. As his drowsing face had pressed into the windowpane, his mouth softening, I’d thought I had recognized something sweet about him.

I slipped on my headphones to block out the rest of the van. Clearly Scarlett wasn’t going to back me up in this fight. The other day, when I’d suggested taking something up with the program staff, she’d hesitated. “I don’t think this is my battle,” she’d mumbled. I wasn’t surprised. Scarlett was infuriatingly passive; she agreed with everyone and clung to Katie, the pretty blonde girl. In the privacy of my mind I called Scarlett “Katie’s Asian sidekick.” No sidekick would rock the boat. It would go against her job description.

The van pulled away from the Jashari memorial, and we were on our way to an ethnically divided town in northern Kosovo. Lindsey and Rowan were casting me puzzled looks, but they didn’t say anything. I didn’t feel like trying to explain myself. It would reveal the ugliness of my thoughts.

Scarlett had returned to laughing and munching chips with Katie and Jack. The thing was, I couldn’t actually resent her for avoiding the issue. When pressed, Scarlett would confirm that the harassment occurred, though she resisted talking to anyone but me about it. I think I understood why. For as long as I could remember, harassment had seemed like it was our problem—something to be dealt with amongst ourselves. And perverse as it was, there was something shameful about being harassed. After so long, a tiny, tiny part of me nearly believed that I deserved it.

Scarlett’s strategy was to keep her head down and laugh off the humiliation. “They just don’t meet many people like me,” she’d explained in our conversation about best intentions. “I try to explain to each of them who I am and why I’m here. I don’t think there’s really anything else I can do.”

It seemed to help Scarlett cope. Myself, I was too angry to share my story with anyone who even mentioned my race.

What had really irked me about Orli’s question, I realized, was its suggestion that my and Scarlett’s pain wasn’t real unless we felt the same way about it. Yes, it might have been easier for Orli to understand it if we hadn’t been downplaying the harassment so far. But it was our way of protecting ourselves.

Up until then, I had been careful not to tell my host parents in Belgrade about the groups of teenagers who sneered at me along my morning commute. I worried that white authority figures like my parents—or Orli—would have the power to objectively evaluate the realness and wrongness of the incidents. I feared that the pain I felt would be deemed irrational—and therefore invalid.

So it hurt that Orli questioned my emotions when I finally told her what was happening. It hurt that Orli confronted me the day afterward with her careless smile. “No ‘Good morning’ today, Sofia?”

//

We pulled up to crumbling concrete buildings splashed with nationalist graffiti. The bridge separating the two sides of town was guarded by a couple chain-smoking UN peacekeepers, and the locals had planted thorny hedges across it to deter passage. As we traipsed behind the rest of the group, Lindsey and Rowan pointed out that some of the scathing political statements around town were directed at the international authorities. When we were finally given a moment to explore graffiti around the town square, I managed to pull Ethan aside.

Ethan usually kept to himself, but early on in the program we’d bonded over taking the wrong tram together to the very end of the line. And one night, in the park near my house, Ethan and I had stayed up talking long after the others headed home. In the darkness I’d let him put his arm around me. When it started to rain, Ethan walked me back to my host family’s apartment and kissed me goodnight.

I didn’t know what it had meant, and in the days since we’d never quite made eye contact. Now, because of this distance, Ethan didn’t have a clue what was going on. So I told him. I told him what had been happening over the last month in Belgrade and in Pristina, and that I didn’t know how to deal with these things. I asked him what he thought I should do.

Ethan considered me for a while after I finished talking. Through my watery eyes I noticed him chewing his lip. “I don’t know. I guess… I would just say, try to ignore it.”

I turned away. Darkly, I thought of Orli’s final comment from yesterday’s meeting: “Anger isn’t productive, Sofia. Remember, I’m not your enemy here.”

Of course. The enemy wasn’t one person. It was many.

That night back in our hotel in Pristina, I opened up the Word document that contained a log of every incident in the past week. I’d recorded these for myself, but now I wrote a long email to my favorite staff member back in Belgrade. Orli was inadequate. Like the UN peacekeepers, Orli thought she knew the Balkans—she thought she knew racism—but she didn’t know how what either meant for the individuals who lived it.

Maybe this email would make clear to the staff that I wasn’t ready to let things go. I wasn’t asking them to change Balkan culture, or to protect me from strangers on the street. I didn’t have the right to demand either. I just wanted the staff to start talking about racism. I wanted them to start seeing.

After sending the email, I lay in bed, still seething. I could hear Lindsey rustling around in the next bed. It was well after 3am, but neither of us had been able to sleep easily the last few nights. I wondered how much Lindsey knew. Most of the time she kept her thoughts to herself, appearing uncomfortable with the group and disengaged from conversation. Lindsey had told me that she worked five jobs to pay for college, which set her apart from most of us on the program and at her school, who came from comfortable upper-middle-class families. She seemed the kind of person to be aware, to notice my unease, even if she had never openly asked about it.

At last, I spoke into the darkness.

“I’m so angry, Lindsey.”

“I know.” She responded immediately, clearly. “I know. It’s awful. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to talk about it. But it’s terrible.”

For hours we talked about my anger with the other students who seemed so ignorant of everything. I told Lindsey, this shouldn’t be just my problem, or my and Scarlett’s problem. What hurt more than the strangers’ taunts and Orli’s dismissal was the feeling that nobody else cared. While the rest of the people on the program could ignore the issue and go on with their lives, for me it was a constant source of vulnerability. I avoided new situations and social interactions. Most of all, I resented the way Orli had silenced me by invalidating my anger, reinforcing a lifetime of messages that there was nothing I could do to change it.

Eventually we started talking about other kinds of injustice. Lindsey’s financial situation affected so much of her experience being abroad, in ways I hadn’t noticed. It influenced whether she ate out with us or bought lunch at the grocery store; whether she ordered that second drink, or the third; whether she spent her stipend on bus fare or on souvenirs for her friends back home. For the rest of us, class privilege was something we took for granted. I thought about the need for allies in all our struggles.

Exhausted the next morning, I told Rowan. Like Lindsey, Rowan depended on scholarships and would scowl whenever Jack dismissed people as “scrubs” or “plebians.” Rowan was also transgender, and he’d been secluded in a private room for the entirety of the trip because the program staff didn’t know whether to put him with other men or women.

He listened silently and understood immediately. Looking me dead in the eye, Rowan said, “If you want us to bring it up with the staff too, we will.” He and Lindsey promised to support me in telling the rest of the group about what was happening, even if the rest of the group didn’t want to hear it. We would fight for each other.