![]() She likes that his hair is fair and wispy like fluffy clouds too, not Asian-black and flat like her own. To her mother, Viktor Andropov is that potato-nosed Russian boy, but Antonina likes the shape of his nose. We don't talk of such things.Īntonina isn't afraid of the gwisin word though, and neither is her best friend Viktor. Like some little disaster, it causes grown-ups to purse their lips whenever Antonina asks what it means. Gwisin is one of these words, carried forward from the Hamgyŏng dialect. ![]() Angry, alien words spliced inside Russian sentences that somehow never make sense. The fragments Antonina hears are the ones her mother hurtles in moments of frustration. Only the old people harbour much knowledge of the language, but they refuse to speak it. There aren't many words of the old country that survived the homogenisation of Stalin's collective farms. ![]()
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