My Parents’ Country Doesn’t Exist. I Moved There Anyway.

I was enjoying what exists of this place today—be it Croatia or Yugoslavia—without the need for comparison.

I. Mother

Thirty years ago, Yugoslavia disappeared, and so did my mother.

To be clear, my mother is completely fine. But the young woman that left what is now Croatia, right after fighter jets started flying over her Yugoslavian village, is not the woman I know. When she was young, she did not believe in asking for permission. My aunt would quietly ask their parents to go out, but my mother would just waltz into their bedroom; say, “We’re going to the party, don’t wait up”; and leave.

By the time she became my mother, she had to ask my father for permission for everything. He controlled where she worked, who she befriended, even what she wore. My mother hates dresses, but she wore one to my cousin’s wedding anyway, where she sat, lonely and miserable, while my father refused to dance with her.

My mother’s only coping mechanism for her situation was rage. Often, that anger boiled over at my brother and me instead of at my dad. But she protected me when she could. When I was in high school and my own anger was threatening to eat me alive, my mother signed me up for boxing classes and drove me to the gym three times a week, waiting in the car as I punched my frustrations out for an hour. My father wanted my younger brother to sign up with me, but she stopped him. She knew I needed my own space, even though she had so little of that space herself. She understood what it felt like to live in a home that made you so angry you couldn’t breathe.

My mother left my father a few years ago. She’s not as angry anymore.

She has always missed Yugoslavia; Croatia, not so much. When I told her that I was moving to Zagreb, she didn’t want to come with me. My mom’s never been to Zagreb, the capital, but not even the thought of moving to her old village, Belaj, appealed to her.

“I could never go back,” she said. “It’s too different now. You’ll never have it as good as I did.”

The factories that gave my mother’s generation class mobility are gone. The state health insurance and pensions have been dismantled. Our region, which has a proud antifascist tradition, now has fascist graffiti on many bus stops and highway overpasses. Thirty years since the brutal civil war that led to Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia, rampant privatization, corruption, and the empowerment of fascist ideology in Croatia (and our neighboring countries) have made it feel like a hollow victory for some.

My mother does not think even the village parties are the same. My generation drinks more and dances less. Her friends are scattered, and the ones that are left have been broken by interpersonal drama and life itself. It’s a little difficult to be the life of the party when you’re in your fifties and working two jobs to try to make ends meet, something that was incomprehensible in their youth.

My mother and I accidentally switched homes. She put down roots in my birthplace of New York in a way that I never did. But the first time I went to Saint Martin’s Day without her, a celebration of Belaj’s local saint (and the patron saint of wine) that culminates with a party in the basement of the local castle, I realized that I saw her home in a way that she couldn’t. Most of the people that she grew up with were still in our home region of Istria, and they all danced with me since they couldn’t dance with her. We sang along to the same songs that my mother would record from the radio every summer and then play in our New York kitchen until the tape wore out. Surrounded by people that have known me since I was a baby, who were visibly excited to get to know the version of myself I had built now that I was an adult, I felt like I belonged.

Maybe my mother does not need to return because she always had that close-knit community while she was growing up; I never had that as a kid in New York, when half the time my parents were too scared and isolated to build community. Maybe it really was better back then, but I was enjoying what exists of this place today—be it Croatia or Yugoslavia—without the need for comparison.

“It’s too different now. You’ll never have it as good as I did.”

II. Father

Because my parents cannot agree on anything, my father claims he did not like Yugoslavia.

He once had a discussion with me and my brother about why he emigrated. After finishing his mandatory army service and getting a degree from technical school on the government’s dime, he got a job at the shipyard; it was not in the specialty he wanted. Instead of getting a free apartment from the government immediately, he was put on the waiting list; he lived twenty minutes outside of town.

I don’t think he was expecting me and my brother to laugh at his grand story of injustice. But any story that starts with free school and ends with complaints about guaranteed jobs and housing is not going to land with two kids living in twenty-first-century New York City. Yugoslavia was an oppressive system for some people, such as Kosovar Albanians, who were treated like second-class citizens in a country that was dominated by Slav ethnic groups. Even though he left Yugoslavia in 1981, my father, a Croatian Slav whose family experienced upward mobility in the country, was not among the oppressed. His own father, a communist partisan during World War II, loved Yugoslavia and Marshal Josip Broz Tito. My dad, like many emigrants, rejected both.

My dad’s story of Yugoslav injustice is his foundational myth, but the real reason he emigrated was so he could consume. There was no better place to consume than New York in the 1980s. My father had one lucrative job after another, waiting tables at restaurants with dubious Mafia connections. He consumed cars and vacations. When he got tired of consuming things, he moved on to consuming people. He consumed my mother’s independence and my brother’s and my attempts at growing into our unique personalities to fuel his own whims, his own vision of an all-American, all-traditional, middle-class suburban family that we never quite fit into, despite our best efforts. I cannot pinpoint how we failed because my father’s desires were constantly mutating. All I know is that he was always disappointed.

My father might eventually retire to his village in Croatia, but the position of émigré returning every summer suits him. He can continue his role as the big man in the village in a way that he couldn’t if he returned to being a native son. He gets to play at generosity. He dispenses money and advice to people who sometimes welcome it but sometimes resent the arrogance of a man who visits one month a year yet still thinks he knows better.

The day before I moved to Zagreb, my father came to say goodbye. He told me that I would never make rent, that I would inevitably catch Covid and die despite being vaccinated, and that I wouldn’t even make it there because I was too stupid to figure out what masks and tests I needed to bring to the airport.

My maternal grandmother, always charitable in her opinions of men, thinks that my father was just worried about me moving back to a country he had left with the hope of a better life. But I’d heard versions of this monologue before I went away to college, before I studied abroad, and before I started my first job. My father is uneasy when I wander too far away from his control.

I did not move to Croatia to look for the version of my father that my mom fell in love with, but I found him anyway. My mother’s family has remained close with him, and he continues to visit them years after the divorce. They tell me about how generous he’s always been, sending money and packages from America. My grandmother often asks me why my mother would divorce such a kind man and why I barely talk to him. Maybe if we got to see that side of him more often, things would have turned out differently.

I did not move to Croatia to look for the version of my father that my mom fell in love with, but I found him anyway.

III. Me

The center of Croatian life in Queens, New York, is a church with the ominous name of Most Precious Blood. Although now we’ve been promoted to the main hall, when I was a kid, the Croatian community held mass in the basement. At one point, the church stored its extra statues in the hallway by the bathroom. This meant that sometimes the lights would flicker on, and all of a sudden Jesus would be watching you piss.

I went to mass with my mother, sometimes multiple times a week. Occasionally, we went to church parties where the women organized a potluck and the children’s folklore group provided entertainment. Back then, the church’s flag had a checkerboard starting with a white square. The Croatian government changed the official checkerboard to start with red because the other version was used by the fascist regime during World War II, but my church took a few decades to replace their flag. We’re a relatively moderate community; other diaspora churches wear their fascist affiliations more explicitly.

Growing up in this community always felt like wearing ill-fitting pants. After years as a church kid, I assumed Croatia would never have space for queer leftists such as myself. I assumed Croatia was full of men like my father.

When I went away to college, I was so isolated from my culture that I began looking for other Balkan people anywhere that I could find them, including online. I met people through Tumblr and Twitter that navigated being Croatian in a way that showed me there were roles beyond the ones my traditional community wanted me to occupy. I met other diaspora children that had moved back. When I moved to Zagreb, some of those people I met through Twitter became my closest friends.

Croatians living in Croatia often laugh at émigré Croats. Many members of the diaspora ignore twenty-first-century Croatia in favor of a pastoral idyll that never existed. This vision is sometimes outright dangerous as the Croats outside of Croatia wield considerable political power in this country. They have their own representatives in the parliament, they can vote in major elections, and donations from communities abroad fuel the most conservative elements in Croatian politics. Although their influence in politics has diminished since 2000 and many politicians no longer court émigré votes or wallets as aggressively, many people in Croatia still resent the sway they hold. The reactionary nostalgia of citizens who aren’t even living in the country is a potent political force, but it’s also pretty goofy; conservatives abroad had a collective meltdown in the Facebook comments of a news article announcing a new Chinese restaurant.

My friends in Zagreb and I have carved out a new way of existing in our new-old home, but I’ve also had to let go of some of my own misplaced nostalgia. I joked about the people who would post in the expat Facebook group about moving to Croatia in search of “family values,” but wasn’t I trying to use the country to hunt for my own family? I was obsessed with finding out more about the strong mother that existed before she met my father, but I realize now that her strength never went away.

My mother had the strength to protect me from the worst of my father’s attempts to control my life. She had the strength to rebuild her life in New York City, a city she only moved to so that she could be with a man that brought her so much pain. She’s become such a New Yorker that she yells “I know more about this city than you” at tour-bus scammers whenever we have to venture into Midtown Manhattan.

As for my father, since moving, I have not come to revelations that have magically repaired our relationship, besides the fact that we get along quite well when there is an ocean between us. Maybe that is enough.

Most of us who belong to diasporas, regardless of our countries of origin, have an unhealthy habit of projecting our own desires onto our home countries. We desperately need those homes to be places where we magically fit in. We want them to serve as playgrounds for self-discovery. But the old country moves on. The old country discovers new things and births new people and experiences new pains. It does not wait, hermetically sealed, for us to visit. We can try to force a whole country to reflect our vision, or we can accept the pain that comes with being a side character, one of many, and approach our home with an open mind.

We can try to force a whole country to reflect our vision, or we can accept the pain that comes with being a side character, one of many, and approach our home with an open mind.

My friends in Zagreb do not listen to the rural Istrian folk-pop I grew up with. At parties, they’re more likely to play Charli XCX and, as a joke, Balkan trap. I grew up hearing about the village halls that were the centers of my mother’s social life. However, since I moved, I spend more time in independent cinemas, in art galleries, and at Pride festivals. My extended family lives a few hours away by bus and I visit often, but I am too far away for the legacy of my parents to reach me. I am free to wander streets they’ve never seen, go for leisurely runs along the Sava, and write in cafés they might never visit. I am free to spend hours talking to new friends who make me feel as if I’ve known them forever, without concerned family members wanting to know where I’ve been.

This is a country that has a long way to go toward shaking off the ghosts of its past, but ironically, the ghosts of my own recent past have been quiet since I moved. Croatia may never have been my parents’ country. But it is mine.