a chat with stephanie elizondo griest

1. How did a girl from Texas wind up in the Communist Bloc?

My senior year in high school, I attended a journalism conference that featured a keynote by a rockstar CNN correspondent who'd covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. His stories of Revolution marveled me. I mean, the only thing that people take to the streets and shake their fists about in South Texas is football. When he finished, I ran up to the microphone and asked how I could be a foreign correspondent just like him. He looked straight at me and said "Learn Russian." So I did. Although I barely knew enough Spanish to talk to my abuelita, I enrolled in Russian at the University of Texas at Austin that fall and four years later jetted off to Moscow. While there, I grew obsessed with communism. How did such a seemingly utopian ideology go so terribly wrong? Between 1996 and 2000, I visited a dozen countries that experimented with communism in the 20th century, although I only write about the capitols of three -- Russia, China, and Cuba -- in the book.

2. So what did you do in each of those countries?

I ventured to Moscow to study the language and establish a career as a foreign correspondent. Russia had other plans in store for me, however, and I ended up volunteering at a children's shelter and falling in love with an ex-soldier who escaped clean-up duties at Chernobyl by slitting his wrists. I set out for Beijing as a Henry Luce Scholar next, hoping to be censored and oppressed and slip political dissidents dumplings filled with subversive messages through the iron bars of their prison cells. Instead, I fought to run the Spice Girls on the entertainment page of the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, where I worked as an editor. In Havana, I belly danced with rumba queens and hung out with hip-hop artists who rapped about Revolution.

3. Were you ever scared?

Getting chased down a dark alley by a pack of drunk Russian men on the anniversary of my first month in Moscow was pretty terrifying. But my major fear factor was the reoccurring nightmare that one of my friends or colleagues might get in trouble for telling me something they shouldn't. I grew so concerned about this in Beijing, I started self-censoring my phone calls and writing notes in such elaborate codes, I could barely understand them myself. Looking back, I realize this was paranoia: unless you're a diplomat, foreign correspondent from a prestigious paper, or activist from a major organization, most governments could probably care less about you. At the time, though, it gave me a lot of anxiety.

4. It sounds like you had a few culinary adventures on the road. Tell us about one.

You take a certain gastrointestinal risk when you travel, but I ate absolutely everything in Russia and never had a problem. This gave me something of an attitude -- my stomach is made of steel! -- so when I arrived in Beijing, I started snacking on delicacies like chicken feet and yak penis stew, again without a problem. Then a colleague invited me out for Mongolian hotpot, which consists of dangling assorted raw meats into a boiling caldron with a pair of chopsticks until cooked, then dunking them into spicy sauces and eating. The caldron burned the hell out of my fingers, though, so I didn't let my chicken cook long enough. Big mistake. Around 2 a.m., the cramping began: contractions that literally caused me to sit up in bed and scream. Like giving birth. To Satan. That morning, a friend escorted me to the hospital, where I got diagnosed with "Beijing Belly." The doctor told me to drink lots of Sprite and return if the cramping hadn't subsided within 24 hours. Amazingly, at precisely 2 a.m. the following day, it did. Morale of the story: cook your Mongolian hotpot carefully!

5. In the beginning of the book, you lament the political apathy you encountered on your college campus in Texas. Indeed, one of your motivations for traveling to the Communist bloc was to see if any "Revolutionary Spirit" still lingered. Did it?

Concepts like democracy and social justice didn't seem terribly pressing on anyone's mind in Russia or China in the late '90s -- at least, not among the circles I traveled in. The Muscovites I knew were more concerned about their friends and families getting bumped off by the Mafiya, while Beijingers craved economic and social stability. Only in Havana did I meet students and hip-hop artists who wished aloud that they belonged to a time defined by consciousness instead of consumerism.

Soon after I returned home from the Bloc, though, I discovered that the political activity I had sought overseas had taken root in my backyard, with the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Two weeks after September 11, I joined the movement at a peace rally in Arizona (where I, ironically enough, got called a "fucking Commie" by a man in a truck for holding a peace sign). I've since grown involved with organizations like the National Coalition Against Censorship (where I run a youth activist group) and MoveOn.org and have realized that demonstrations are not -- as I once thought -- romantic acts of passion. It takes a pretty dire situation to rile millions of everyday citizens out of bed to march in the cold for world peace. For example, starting an unjust war in which thousands senselessly die because of weapons that never actually existed.

Rather than lament the fact my student body was so apathetic in the early 1990s, I should have been grateful that we didn't have quite so many heinous reasons to demonstrate.

6. You write a lot about the loss of cultural identity in both the Communist Bloc and the United States. Can you tell us what this realization meant for you as a biracial (Mexican/gringo) American?

Stalin, Mao, and Fidel tried to vanquish centuries of religion, tradition, and ritual by forcing their people to conform to socialist culture, but hundreds of thousands of citizens around the Bloc defied them. Non-ethnic Russians risked the Gulag to distribute underground samizdat printed in their native language during the Soviet regime; Uighurs and Tibetans prostrated before their gods in their officially atheist "Autonomous Provinces." Meanwhile, back in the United States, those of us who haven't needed to fight for our culture have often deserted it. In some ways, capitalism has done an even better job of dissolving cultures than Communism. My travels in the Bloc really forced me to question why I had never invested time or energy in my Mexican heritage. By the end of the book, I conclude that a knowledge of Spanish would gain me a greater intimacy of my people, my family, and of myself.

7. What conclusions did you draw about the "Evil Empire"?

That writing off an entire nation of people as "evil" is morally reprehensible. Corrupt individuals within it -- yes. But never an entire population. My greatest fear is that the Red Scare that terrorized our nation for half a century has been replaced by the Green Scare of Islam. I cannot believe that we have learned so little from the mistakes of our past. How many people must die before the leaders of this world realize the insanity of branding entire populations "Evil"?

8. How did your travels transform your perceptions about the United States?

Having realized the devastating ways propaganda had clouded their nation's concept of reality for so many decades, my Bloc friends were constantly challenging me to do the same, about my own. So I did -- and found some pretty disconcerting similarities between our respective ideological frameworks. The Soviets revered mass murderers; we honor presidents who kept slaves, sent indigenous people on death marches, and waged brutal wars on developing nations. China's news gets filtered through the State; ours through mega-media conglomerates. Cuba may not hold democratic elections, but can we really claim to after our disastrous 2000 presidential election? And what about our USA Patriot Act, or our clampdown on immigrants from Muslim nations, or our stifling of civil liberties, or George W. Bush's warning to the world: "You're either with us or against us"? Rather than point out the holes in others' truths, I realized that I should be investigating the ones in my own.

9. You strongly advocate traveling sola for single young women. What did it teach you about yourself?

Mother Road changes each of us in profound ways. I found that as I traveled, all of the identities I spent my entire college career cultivating began to peel off one by one. My vegetarianism drowned in a bowl of yak penis soup; I compromised my feminism by putting up with men who did me wrong. I never felt less Chicana than I did in my mother's homeland Mexico, where my Tex-Mex Spanish was barely intelligible to the people with whom I so badly wanted to connect. Traveling built within me a foundation that allows me to stroll the world's passageways with confidence. It taught me the difference between being alone and being lonely, and made me ever selective of my company. I have become such a self-sustained, self-contained unit, I'm expecting to self-pollinate any day now.

10. What is next for Stephanie Elizondo Griest?

I'll be spending much of 2004 traveling cross-country on my "Bloc Party" book tour and, I hope, conquering my fear of driving. (Note: if anyone sees me hyperventilating on the side of the road, please hop in and take over the wheel!) 2005 will be my year of "moving on." If you start counting from the day I enrolled in that Russian class, I've been working on "Around The Bloc" for 11 years -- a third of my life. I'd like to focus my future travels in Spanish-speaking nations -- in particular Mexico -- and attempt to regain some of what has been lost in my mother's family's migration to the United States. That will likely be the subject of my next book.