Explaining a personal project in Poland, for potential interviewees

An explanation of a Chinese-American’s personal project in Poland. This is intended to be a semi-formal overview with information for potential interviewees.

Introduction

“Hey Falcon, Hey Dragon” is the working title I have for a broad project to learn about and compare 20th-century Polish and Chinese history. My main goal is to collect stories from Polish residents and immigrants (mostly Chinese, but also Polish and/or Eastern European immigrants) to the United States, then synthesize those stories into an analysis. I would particularly like to focus on the impact of difficult historical periods - of war and oppression - on individuals, as well as examine how they affected their relationships (which for now is centered on family).

I am grateful to anyone willing to share their experiences, since this is something meaningful for me.

The important questions

All info subject to change.

What would you like from me?

I would like to conduct recorded interviews for roughly one hour. I would like to conduct interviews with Poles in-person (since I will be traveling around the country in February 2024); due to distance, I will have to conduct interviews with American immigrants online.

The topics covered by the interview may be sensitive topics. I do not expect every person I contact to accept, and I will not require interviewees to answer every question.

What are you planning on doing with the interview material?

Interviews will be recorded, and I will summarize my personal takeaways and reflections in public blog posts. All interviewees will be anonymized. I may separately post transcripts and include direct quotes in writeups, but any identifying information will be concealed.

I’m not intending the results to be particularly formal or academic in nature; the project is not planned or structured enough to be academic. I think my writing will be free-form.

Why are you taking the time to do this?

There’s a few main reasons:

• I deeply value hearing other people’s stories.
• I want to do something with my ETA grant that would otherwise be impossible with my prior background and skillset.
• I think the results will help me contextualize my own ethnic history, both from a general Chinese-American perspective and a family perspective.

I have a more informal overview here which is a bit too personal to serve as an informational piece. Note that the purpose of interviews is to understand interviewees’ experiences and that I will avoid bringing my own; I will eventually reflect on my own experiences as well, but that should be done separately from collecting others’ stories.

Sample interview questions

This is a preview to give an idea of what kinds of questions I would be asking. It is not a complete list of potential questions and the topics of discussion are subject to change.

I’m looking to examine the personal impact of 20th-century historical events in two ways: first, how was it taught? Second, how did it directly impact individuals and the people close to them? For now, I’ll translate “people close to them” to nuclear family.

I do not expect all interviewees to have answers to all questions. This is okay; a lack of answer is still an interesting datapoint.

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• What were you taught in history class growing up, and how does it compare with your current understanding of your nation’s history?
  • What timeframes did your history classwork focus on?
• What are your family’s stories from the Second World War?
• What are your family’s stories from during communist rule?
• How much do you feel your cultural roots have influenced your family overall?
• How much do you feel your familial roots have influenced you overall?
• Do you feel close to your cultural roots?
• Do you feel close to your family?

For immigrants to the United States:

• Compared to when you were growing up…
• …what surprised you the most when you moved here?
• …how do you believe American ideas, values, and/or opinions are different from your origin country?
• What do you think about American views on the world?
• What misconceptions do Americans have about your origin country’s culture and history?

For residents of Poland:

• What are your / your family’s stories from Poland during and after the fall of communism?
• How do you feel Poland has changed since the fall of communism?
• How optimistic or pessimistic are you about Poland’s future?

Other questions

This is the end of the critical content; the rest of this is essentially an FAQ, which I will expand depending on what questions / confusions come up.

What are your qualifications?

I am currently serving as an English Teaching Assistant in Łomza, a city in the Podlaskie voivodeship of Poland, through the US-Polish Fulbright Program. The US Fulbright Program is a non-profit service program dedicated to cultural exchange and international understanding; the Polish branch is sponsored by both the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Minister of Education and Science in Poland. Before coming to Poland, I served two years as a graduate student instructor (GSI) for three different courses in the University of Michigan’s computer science department.

I also have previous experience working on an interview project called Brilliant Little Fires. Due to maintenance issues, the website for this earlier project is not currently visible. If you want to get an idea of that project, you can view the old source files on this GitHub repository; sample content includes the list of questions, the overall interview procedure, and a sample interview transcript. If you’re curious about the rest of the project but aren’t sure how to navigate the site, feel free to contact me using any of the contact methods linked on the side.

Owing to my past experience, my focus is on learning about and communicating other people’s stories in some sort of educational manner rather than publishing something formal in an academic journal. I do not have the same level of qualification as a professional historian / sociologist, and I am not expecting to produce the same level of work as such an individual.

Is this project through Fulbright?

No, this project is independent of my Fulbright grant.

Why do you care about Poland in particular when you’re not Polish?

What follows is my understanding. I am not a scholar of Polish or Eastern European history, so I apologize for any mistakes / misconceptions here.

Poland and its people have been significant players in various historical and social contexts (early practitioners of religious tolerance, the defense of Europe from the Ottomans, establishing the first European constitutional monarchy¹, Solidarity and the fall of the USSR, …). However, in my high school education², Poland is only mentioned first as a member of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, second as the first nation to fall to a military invasion by Nazi Germany. This always seemed weird to me, and I’ve always wanted to dive deeper into this powerful yet overshadowed country’s history.

Additionally, Polish history broadly mirrors Chinese history. Pre-20th century, both were geopolitical giants brought down by opportunists from Western Europe; Poland-Lithuania was broken into three partitions administered by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, while the Qing gradually lost control of their people and lands to Britain and France. In the 20th century, both nations took up new political systems and asserted greater autonomy over their own affairs, but subsequently suffered massively in WW2 and entered communist regimes after that.

Currently, Poland is a democracy and arguably the most economically and politically significant former communist nation of Europe. China, meanwhile, remains communist and is currently facing a period of economic downturn after sharply rising to the position of #2 world power. If you are okay with the argument that the two countries had a similar 20th century, then there’s the question of why things turned out so differently. I also think there’s an interesting hypothetical of how Poles might be different if communism had prevailed in Eastern Europe, and how the Chinese might be different if communism had fallen in China.

In the end, I think there are more differences than similarities, but with time and effort I’d like to believe that learning about one can help provide context on the other. Additionally, I don’t think it’s a parallel that most scholars would want to spend significant time and effort on, so this project will at least be something original. Who knows? Maybe someone with more resources and background knowledge will be inspired to do a more thorough comparison.

Isn’t it supposed to be the Polish eagle?

Not here. The title is inspired by the Polish song Hej sokoły, which translates to “Hey falcon”. There’s not really an equivalent song in Chinese as far as I know, so I just picked “dragon” and kept the parallelism.

1. I went to a good enough high school, but AP World History did not fit into my schedule. Perhaps they discuss Poland more in that class, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more Western Europe-centric. ↩

2. Unsure how big of a deal this. Apparently the document was a significant legal / political milestone generally, but it didn’t do much to change Poland-Lithuania’s deteriorating geopolitical situation. ↩