I didn't want to write anything. There's nothing to talk about that anyone would bother reading. But Finnish Girl thinks there is some mysterious, invisible audience out there hooked to our two blogs, waiting with bated breath for the latest writings. So at the urging of Finnish Girl, here is another nonsensical post about something you will read and maybe remember while sitting on the toilet one day. I'm talking to you, that person in Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan who accidentally clicked on my blog and had the misfortune of being logged as a viewer last week.
Finnish Girl sometimes asked me in the past - when was the first time you've heard about Finland? What do people know about Finland in America?
I remember answering politely in the beginning, oh yes, Finland. That's where Helsinki is. Nokia.
But the sad truth is that most Americans never heard of Finland, don't know where it is on the map, don't know what Finns look like, nor what language they speak. If you asked them where is Nokia from, they will probably say Japan or China. They could be sitting in a sauna playing Angry Birds on their smartphone and be blissfully ignorant of anything remotely Finnish in their lives.
So maybe I should have said, "They basically don't know shit about you" and that could have been the end of story.
Easy, but not really true. If I think back a little more, there were times it popped up here and there in random conversations.
Once in college, I was with some friends back at the dorm and we heard Finnish spoken (in a YouTube video? in a news cast?). And somebody remarked, "What a strange sounding language." The Korean of the group drunkenly blurted out, "it sounds like Korean! Finns are basically Koreans" and further claimed the entire country as his own brethren. (The same Korean person was in the habit of also claiming Mongolians and Turks and Kazakhs as "Koreans" as well, although that wasn't too far fetched considering the rather all inclusive "Turkic-Altaic" branch of that language family.)
Determined to prove him wrong, I did some quick internet research on the origins of Finns. A whole lot of contradictory stuff came back, from early Western European racialists classifying Finns as part of "Mongols", to more recent studies challenging all those early classifications, and finally to the other end of the spectrum by current white supremacists heralding Finns as the "last bastion" of blondes. This was back in the day before Wikipedia, when you actually had to read the fucking essays of other academics rather than getting the three sentence summary with the footnote. Being the nerd that I was, I actually read one thing after the other, regardless of veracity. Sort that out later.
From my amateur reading of it, it seemed like everybody was right and wrong. The drunken Korean may have stretched (a bit) claiming Finland as part of a long lost tribe of the Koryo kingdom, but there were some weird Asian origin and migration admixture into modern Finns. The Finno-Ugric language family does include a motley crew of transplants coming from Central Asia (Hungarians) and Siberian peoples in Russia. Have you seen Mansi folks lately? Their language is related to Finnish. Try looking up Ruslan Provodnikov. Besides looking like a fucking maniac with blood coming out of his gums, he has that Eurasian quality to him that you often hear Scandinavians attribute to Finns.
But I think this "Asian" quality is exaggerated. Of course a lot of that came from early racial theories about why Eastern Europeans and non-Germanic speaking folks were different and hence inferior. Nowadays, nobody would blatantly say that as much. But it's still there, especially when you read Swedish literature. They always have this Finnish caricature that gets annoying repetitive too. I can't count the times they describe Finns as have those severe Asian cheekbones, exotic inscrutable look, overly pale blank looks of the East. I have had a Norwegian say to me once, that Finns are so pale the light passes through them. There are some who have that look, but honestly you can't tell the majority of Swedes and Finns apart by looking at them, to the shock and horror of both groups alike. Take it from an outsider.
Why? I've never seen so many blondes in one place. I'm not blonde and I stick out like a sore thumb in Finland.
Which gets back to the problem of the rest of the world not knowing too much about Finland. I joked with Finnish Girl, just tell all the Mediterraneans, North and South Americans there is a hidden land of blondes tucked away between Sweden and Russia. Suddenly there will be hordes of lusty men with hard-ons trying to visit the country. Probably not the type of fame you want though.
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