Taipei, Taiwan: A conversation with Rando (b. 1997)
Rando was born and raised in Tartu.
He has a habit of mixing Mandarin Chinese and English, the result of his studying and living as a university student in Taiwan. He’s a bit of a history buff and admits to being an introvert.
I found my interest in history through video games, and reading independently. In fourth grade, a friend gave me a birthday present. It was a computer game about Vikings — where you can build your own stuff and lead your own people. This was where my interest in Scandinavian mythology began. Then, my mother got me more historic video games — like Civilization III and IV. Since there were leaders in those games, I would remember those leaders. It was my window through history.
After that, I began reading more and more about them. I was really interested in leaders like Julius Caesar, and others.
I think the Livonian War was one of the most interesting episodes in Estonian history, because there were four great powers fighting over Estonia. Almost like in Game of Thrones. In middle school, I researched how different Estonian historians throughout the 20th centuries wrote about the war. I really got to know that period well.
My parents probably wouldn’t know anything about that period, except for one movie that was really widespread during the Soviet period. It’s called The Last Relic. It was a colorized movie made in 1969. It’s sort of a prince/princess fairy tale set during the Livonian War. The Catholic priests were the antagonists. The protagonist would be something of a Russian/Estonian freedom fighter. In the movie, he was fully Estonian. The princess was a Baltic-German daughter of an aristocrat who fell in love with the protagonist.
It’s a really traditional, really classical movie. We would watch it nearly every year. Some people have memorized the lines to this movie. But otherwise, people wouldn’t know much about European history. My grandmother wouldn’t even know where Estonians come from, about our ancient history. During the Soviet times, the teaching was about Russia and the Soviet Union. About their proletariat battles and rebellions through history.
Estonians don’t have a long and glorious history. We’re very self-critical. We have this attitude: if you suffer then you can live longer. Just fix the problems and don’t complain. During the Soviet times, we didn’t rebel because we were so small. There was no point because we would all be killed off. We survived our aggressors through persistence. Frankly, it’s a miracle we still exist.
There isn’t necessarily a unifying event for my generation. We experience the same things you have — well, I’m not a nineties kid, but when I was young the boys would play Yu-gi-Yoh cards. We can relate to this sort of thing. There were computer games, like Grand Theft Auto. Modern Estonian youth are quite good at English. That’s one thing about our generation — we’re really good at English. Anime was very popular, and is getting more and more popular.
People are more interested in Korea and Japan. Japanese is easy to learn for Estonians. There is vowel harmony. Maybe thirty percent of Estonian vocabulary sounds quite similar to Japanese. The words have different meanings, but if I asked my mother to pronounce Japanese words she would have almost no accent. She could pronounce these words pretty accurately.
I remember what my family members have told me. They have nostalgia — in the sense that the 1990s were such a weird time to live in. Now that they think about it, the re-independence was very weird to live through. It was absurd.
I’ve seen arguments that some things were better — for instance, everyone had a job. There was no homelessness. Of course, everyone had jobs but of course the jobs were not that good. And, if you were in an academic setting, there would be brainwashing and censoring if you had a nationalist past.
My mother’s grandfather studied languages. Maybe that’s where I inherited this passion from. He was a Slavic philologist, so he studied Slavic languages. He knew German, English, Latin…and he translated out of Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Russian. During the Second World War, he refused to translate for Nazi Germany. He wasn’t able to find jobs later, because he wouldn’t be accepted into universities despite being a Slavic professor. So he could only find work by writing essays for students studying Russian philology. He had to do it for money. He didn’t live too healthily. His career was ruined. His books couldn’t be published.
His dream was to go abroad and study in a university. I guess I’m carrying on his dream in that sense.
We’re free now, where there was 500 years of serfdom before. It’s because we ourselves rose up and became free, whereas in Russia there are brother and sister tribes — like the Republic of Udmurtia — that remain there and do not have their freedom.
As long as there are elements in Russian-speaking communities that would use opportunities to dominate Estonia — and there are some radical nationalists on the Internet, who think Estonians are actually Russians, and who think that Russia should own Estonia and the other Baltic states — there will be a difference in power.
I want to create more for the Estonian identity. I have friends on both sides of EKRE¹: from people who used to support EKRE and don’t support them anymore. A lot of people are disgusted at what politics look like now, and avoid it.
But it’s only if you really have an independent nation like us, with one official language, that we can really make sure that our language persists. We also need a strong national identity. If we have a stronger national identity, then it cannot be diluted.
Footnotes
¹EKRE, or the Conservative People’s Party, is a far-right nationalist political party. After the 2019 parliamentary election, they hold 19 out of 101 seats in the Estonian parliament.
This is part of a conversation series centered around the country of Estonia. Click here to read the introduction.
