| THE BEGINNING |
Stevan Orescan
Travel has been an integral part of my being since before I was born. I was conceived in Harbin,
China, a large city in Manchuria that was the repository for thousands of White Russian refugees
fleeing the advancing armies of Bolshevism during the revolution if 1917. Wrapped in swaddling
clothes, my mother, at the tender age of two, slipped out of St. Petersburg with her large family in
the dead of night, and with shells bursting overhead and the rattling of machine guns in the
background, managed, with the help of paid accomplices and a combination of lorries, freight trains
and horse drawn wagons, to make it across the border to China, where they settled in the
burgeoning Russian community of Harbin. They were twelve in all; mother, father and ten children,
my mother being the youngest, and the stories of their hair raising escape, terror-stricken
adventures and breath taking close calls were to provide many pounding hearts and sleepless nights
for her children and grandchildren in the years that followed.
Growing up in Harbin was a prosaic affair as the parents had managed to take along with their
children enough cash and valuables that enabled them to live modestly in China’s miserably sub-
standard economy. Little Manya played with her dolls, went to school with her brothers and sisters,
and by the time she was seventeen had grown into a ravishing young woman with cascades of
auburn hair, milky white skin and a shy delicacy of demeanor that belied a strength and resilience of
character in spite of a weak heart due to an adolescent bout of rheumatic fever.
About the same time across the sea in America, a handsome young man in his late twenties was
graduating from the school of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. Of
Serbian extraction he had come to America at the age of ten with his mother, father and small
brother in the steerage hold of a freighter that they shared with cows, goats and other European
immigrants on their way to start a new life in the land of opportunity. Once landed and finished with
the Ellis Island nightmare Big Steve and his family found their way to Gary, Indiana, where Slavs,
Poles, Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans would converge for community and employment in
the labor intensive, smoke belching steel mills of that era. They opened a small boarding house for
steel and railway workers, mother did the laundry and cooked the food and little Dragan and
George went to school to learn their new language and become educated in the ways of the new
world. Father Stevan, or Big Steve, as he was affectionately known by his friends, was a
resourceful and energetic man with many ideas and immediately accepted the challenges of the new
world and set out to make his fortune as a wheeling-dealing businessman. “Money is like fertilizer,
spread it around and things will grow,” was his motto and by judiciously spreading around his hard
earned capital he became, within a few years, the owner of a large old home in a working class
neighborhood, several small hotels, and a respected member of his community.
After finishing high school Dragan, now anglicized to Carl, left Gary to wander his adopted
country, to the mines and badlands of Montana and the Dakotas, to the orange groves of
California, to work for a year on Rudolph Valentino’s sailboat in Santa Monica, then down to
Panama on a banana boat and finally ending up in the nation’s capital where he decided enough, it
was time to go back to school. There followed half a dozen years of study, part time jobs and the
furnished rooms of the poor student. Then at last, a degree in the fabled foreign service. But this
was 1930, the depression was on the way; bread lines, Hitler, dark clouds were gathering, the
world was bracing for turmoil and there were no jobs. What to do? An advertisement in a local
paper, the Texas Oil Company was looking for a recent college graduate to go to South America.
Carl applied, went for the appointment. Sorry, the man said, we just hired someone, too bad, you
seem like a nice young man. But wait, we need someone to go to China. Do you speak Russian?
Serbo-Croatian Carl replied, it’s almost the same thing. You’re hired, the man said, can you leave
in two weeks? I can leave tomorrow, Carl answered.
Shanghai, Harbin, Tien-sien, those were heady places in the early 30s before the Japanese came.
Fortunes were being made overnight in oil, furs, chocolate, tobacco, opium, and ex-pats,
adventurers, opportunists and spies of every stripe were being drawn into it like flies to honey. It
was a restless, ambitious and stimulating time and Carl spent three whirlwind years as a dashing
minor executive signing papers, telexing orders, officiating at company functions and directing
coolies in menial office duties. A spirited social scene was also happening as money, alcohol, fine
food and beautiful women were plentiful, and the rapacious gravity of the coming yellow peril had
not yet fully taken hold. The good times were rolling, cash was flowing, servants managed houses
filled with Ming Dynasty antiques and finely tailored, English tweeds were the uniform of the day.
The intimations of impending doom were ignored, blanked out, denial was the prevailing mind-set
as they counted their Yuan and doubled their investments.
Then one day an English friend, an exporter of mink and sable furs, took Carl to tea at the home
of his Russian girlfriend. There he met Manya and it was love at first sight for both of them. After a
respectable courtship they were married and thus begins my story, for the sperm hit the egg shortly
thereafter and I was on the way.
There was a problem though. Carl’s contract with the oil company specified that he was not to
marry any foreign national and this weighed heavily on his mind for he was an honorable man and
did not want to deceive his employer. A dilemma. But the faint beat of the drums of war could be
heard if one listened closely and was not too caught up in the mad whirl of social and financial
impetuousness and Carl concluded that there was only one thing to do; he must return to America
with his new wife and establish himself on his home territory.
So he quit his job and returned to the United States, alone, in order to make arrangements for his
impending family. First, to Washington, D.C., where old fraternity friends in the government helped
him with the bureaucratic red tape and to arrange passage for, by now, his very pregnant wife.
Then back to Gary to live with parents and get a job in the steel mills, for nothing was available for
him at the time in the government, and he could not be too choosy. It was 1933 and the depression
was in full swing and even a back breaking job in the mills was considered good fortune.
So Manya left Harbin for Shanghai where she set sail for America with me in her belly, a daunting
experience for a pregnant young woman of eighteen who had lived a very sheltered life and spoke
no English whatsoever. It was a long and arduous crossing on a clanking, peeling German freighter
fraught with turbulent seas, rough and rude seaman, and bad food. When San Francisco was finally
reached there was the usual gauntlet of immigration procedures to go through but thanks, once
again, to Carl’s Foreign Service friends who eased the way, Manya was soon chugging along by
rail across the vast continent which was to be her home for the rest of her life.
She arrived in Chicago amidst the all pervading stink of the slaughter houses and cattle pens and
was repelled by the thick necked, red flushed faces of the residents of the city who went about their
business in an abrupt and unkindly manner, unsmiling and unfriendly. !My God! she thought, what
have I done? How her heart ached at that moment for her mother and father, her brothers and
sisters, the warmth of that close Russian family that had survived so much adversity together. And
now she was so far away from them, in a strange and ugly land filled with red faced barbarians,
white devils as the Chinese called them, unrefined, coarse and uncultured and even more
treacherous looking than any slant eyed Asiatic with a pigtail and a dagger between his teeth. How
she yearned to go back, to return to the warmth of her home with the books and music and the
laughter of the people that she knew and loved. But now there was no going back, she had taken
the leap, and it was too late to change her mind.
Carl and his brother George met her at the station and took her home to Gary, another town more
ugly and depressing than Chicago, to a large, cavernous old house that smelled of cabbage and
potatoes and old shoes, to mother Stannitca, a sturdy, old country, peasant woman who spoke no
English as well. Manya went into her room and the muffled weeping of her sad and lonely heart
could be heard until that day when her waters broke.
And so it was that on the 4th day of March, in this grimy and gloomy setting as spring
approached, this singular person, myself, fell out of infinity into consciousness once again.
China, a large city in Manchuria that was the repository for thousands of White Russian refugees
fleeing the advancing armies of Bolshevism during the revolution if 1917. Wrapped in swaddling
clothes, my mother, at the tender age of two, slipped out of St. Petersburg with her large family in
the dead of night, and with shells bursting overhead and the rattling of machine guns in the
background, managed, with the help of paid accomplices and a combination of lorries, freight trains
and horse drawn wagons, to make it across the border to China, where they settled in the
burgeoning Russian community of Harbin. They were twelve in all; mother, father and ten children,
my mother being the youngest, and the stories of their hair raising escape, terror-stricken
adventures and breath taking close calls were to provide many pounding hearts and sleepless nights
for her children and grandchildren in the years that followed.
Growing up in Harbin was a prosaic affair as the parents had managed to take along with their
children enough cash and valuables that enabled them to live modestly in China’s miserably sub-
standard economy. Little Manya played with her dolls, went to school with her brothers and sisters,
and by the time she was seventeen had grown into a ravishing young woman with cascades of
auburn hair, milky white skin and a shy delicacy of demeanor that belied a strength and resilience of
character in spite of a weak heart due to an adolescent bout of rheumatic fever.
About the same time across the sea in America, a handsome young man in his late twenties was
graduating from the school of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. Of
Serbian extraction he had come to America at the age of ten with his mother, father and small
brother in the steerage hold of a freighter that they shared with cows, goats and other European
immigrants on their way to start a new life in the land of opportunity. Once landed and finished with
the Ellis Island nightmare Big Steve and his family found their way to Gary, Indiana, where Slavs,
Poles, Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans would converge for community and employment in
the labor intensive, smoke belching steel mills of that era. They opened a small boarding house for
steel and railway workers, mother did the laundry and cooked the food and little Dragan and
George went to school to learn their new language and become educated in the ways of the new
world. Father Stevan, or Big Steve, as he was affectionately known by his friends, was a
resourceful and energetic man with many ideas and immediately accepted the challenges of the new
world and set out to make his fortune as a wheeling-dealing businessman. “Money is like fertilizer,
spread it around and things will grow,” was his motto and by judiciously spreading around his hard
earned capital he became, within a few years, the owner of a large old home in a working class
neighborhood, several small hotels, and a respected member of his community.
After finishing high school Dragan, now anglicized to Carl, left Gary to wander his adopted
country, to the mines and badlands of Montana and the Dakotas, to the orange groves of
California, to work for a year on Rudolph Valentino’s sailboat in Santa Monica, then down to
Panama on a banana boat and finally ending up in the nation’s capital where he decided enough, it
was time to go back to school. There followed half a dozen years of study, part time jobs and the
furnished rooms of the poor student. Then at last, a degree in the fabled foreign service. But this
was 1930, the depression was on the way; bread lines, Hitler, dark clouds were gathering, the
world was bracing for turmoil and there were no jobs. What to do? An advertisement in a local
paper, the Texas Oil Company was looking for a recent college graduate to go to South America.
Carl applied, went for the appointment. Sorry, the man said, we just hired someone, too bad, you
seem like a nice young man. But wait, we need someone to go to China. Do you speak Russian?
Serbo-Croatian Carl replied, it’s almost the same thing. You’re hired, the man said, can you leave
in two weeks? I can leave tomorrow, Carl answered.
Shanghai, Harbin, Tien-sien, those were heady places in the early 30s before the Japanese came.
Fortunes were being made overnight in oil, furs, chocolate, tobacco, opium, and ex-pats,
adventurers, opportunists and spies of every stripe were being drawn into it like flies to honey. It
was a restless, ambitious and stimulating time and Carl spent three whirlwind years as a dashing
minor executive signing papers, telexing orders, officiating at company functions and directing
coolies in menial office duties. A spirited social scene was also happening as money, alcohol, fine
food and beautiful women were plentiful, and the rapacious gravity of the coming yellow peril had
not yet fully taken hold. The good times were rolling, cash was flowing, servants managed houses
filled with Ming Dynasty antiques and finely tailored, English tweeds were the uniform of the day.
The intimations of impending doom were ignored, blanked out, denial was the prevailing mind-set
as they counted their Yuan and doubled their investments.
Then one day an English friend, an exporter of mink and sable furs, took Carl to tea at the home
of his Russian girlfriend. There he met Manya and it was love at first sight for both of them. After a
respectable courtship they were married and thus begins my story, for the sperm hit the egg shortly
thereafter and I was on the way.
There was a problem though. Carl’s contract with the oil company specified that he was not to
marry any foreign national and this weighed heavily on his mind for he was an honorable man and
did not want to deceive his employer. A dilemma. But the faint beat of the drums of war could be
heard if one listened closely and was not too caught up in the mad whirl of social and financial
impetuousness and Carl concluded that there was only one thing to do; he must return to America
with his new wife and establish himself on his home territory.
So he quit his job and returned to the United States, alone, in order to make arrangements for his
impending family. First, to Washington, D.C., where old fraternity friends in the government helped
him with the bureaucratic red tape and to arrange passage for, by now, his very pregnant wife.
Then back to Gary to live with parents and get a job in the steel mills, for nothing was available for
him at the time in the government, and he could not be too choosy. It was 1933 and the depression
was in full swing and even a back breaking job in the mills was considered good fortune.
So Manya left Harbin for Shanghai where she set sail for America with me in her belly, a daunting
experience for a pregnant young woman of eighteen who had lived a very sheltered life and spoke
no English whatsoever. It was a long and arduous crossing on a clanking, peeling German freighter
fraught with turbulent seas, rough and rude seaman, and bad food. When San Francisco was finally
reached there was the usual gauntlet of immigration procedures to go through but thanks, once
again, to Carl’s Foreign Service friends who eased the way, Manya was soon chugging along by
rail across the vast continent which was to be her home for the rest of her life.
She arrived in Chicago amidst the all pervading stink of the slaughter houses and cattle pens and
was repelled by the thick necked, red flushed faces of the residents of the city who went about their
business in an abrupt and unkindly manner, unsmiling and unfriendly. !My God! she thought, what
have I done? How her heart ached at that moment for her mother and father, her brothers and
sisters, the warmth of that close Russian family that had survived so much adversity together. And
now she was so far away from them, in a strange and ugly land filled with red faced barbarians,
white devils as the Chinese called them, unrefined, coarse and uncultured and even more
treacherous looking than any slant eyed Asiatic with a pigtail and a dagger between his teeth. How
she yearned to go back, to return to the warmth of her home with the books and music and the
laughter of the people that she knew and loved. But now there was no going back, she had taken
the leap, and it was too late to change her mind.
Carl and his brother George met her at the station and took her home to Gary, another town more
ugly and depressing than Chicago, to a large, cavernous old house that smelled of cabbage and
potatoes and old shoes, to mother Stannitca, a sturdy, old country, peasant woman who spoke no
English as well. Manya went into her room and the muffled weeping of her sad and lonely heart
could be heard until that day when her waters broke.
And so it was that on the 4th day of March, in this grimy and gloomy setting as spring
approached, this singular person, myself, fell out of infinity into consciousness once again.
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