Fantiki Memories
The origin story of my obsession with cute trash
My mom likes to tell me this story of how she waited two hours in line for one banana. She wanted to bring one home so she could show my toddler sister what one tasted like. When she got to the front of the line and actually got her hands on one, she guiltily ate it herself. She was pregnant with me and the craving was too strong. Who knew when the next shipment of fruit — fruit! — would be. This was because in the Soviet Union, especially in the severe north where I was raised, there was an absence of material goods, purchasable or otherwise.
Growing up in this materially-deprived environment, my tiny hands learned to grab onto anything shiny or pretty as soon as I saw it, because such things were rare, no matter how small or cheap. This is probably why my favorite memories in this environment revolve around indoor crafts: my grandma teaching me and my sister how to make a pom-pom out of yarn, or my mom and I delicately blowing the yoke out of a raw egg so as to paint and decorate the preserved shell into, oddly enough, a little chick.
It wasn’t just me, either. In this space, an entire cultural phenomenon developed for Soviet children called fantiki collections, which were the preserved bits of paper from the debris of everyday boring life, and they were an imagination minefield for kids like me.
Fantiki was everything: currency, potential, status, art. The term translates specifically to “candy wrappers,” but it encompassed so much more than that. Shiny bits of paper, pilfered cards, even a particularly cool stamp were all collected, traded, hoarded, and shared — like baseball cards made out of cut-up cereal boxes, the featured player being the cartoon rabbit from the front.
Russian candy wrappers were indeed a sight to see (the success of mass produced art in the USSR is another drum to bang on), but to a young child with the need for something beautiful, they were salvation. Sometimes an ad would find its way into the horde of paper goods — something beautiful or exotic, like a carefully cut-out photo of a woman in a bathing suit. This signified something outside of the USSR, and it was carefully traded and revered. (For Russian children, the concept of warm sunlight was not an easy one to understand.)
For me personally, there’s yet another layer to it. As a Siberian child with chubby handfuls of fantiki, I was suddenly plucked from the dissolving Soviet Union and plopped down into Washington, DC, at the age of 7. This America place was the very inverse of Russia — and America knew this and flaunted it. Everything, I mean everything — from the trees to the clothes to the magazines — glittered. Since I was so little when I moved to the States, I had little embarrassment about being a gawking immigrant. My little Soviet brain was color-struck, culture-shocked, and whatever other social diagnosis you can throw in there. There was color everywhere. There were squirrels everywhere. Movement and life like I had never known were right before me, competing with different toys, different currencies, different rules.
It was here that I was introduced to stickers. Stickers! Glorious, beautiful pictures and dots and colored bits to keep my hands busy and to trade with similar enthralled little girls. At my elementary school, a sticker explosion developed in the way that only a child-centered trend can: uproarious and mystifying. There were fuzzy stickers, there were shiny stickers, there were sparkly stickers. And then there was the holy grail: oilies. Oilies were $1 or even $3, so it was a hard sell to have your parents buy you one. They were more special than the other stickers, and often resided in their very own oily sticker album. They were always a big, beautiful mystery in the shape of a big wizard or a mystic ball. When you pressed your index finger on them, the dense shiny liquid in them would move and rearrange into a kaleidoscopic oil-spill of rainbow color.
After a brief state in middle school where kids decorated their binders with cut-outs from magazines, it seems that in general, people left stickers and cut-out images in their childhood. (For some reason.) But I could never grow out of it. Even talking about candy wrappers or oily stickers makes my heart beat a little quicker.
And I wanted to preserve these beats of joy from my childhood: the loveliness of stickers, of images, of the detritus that is meant to be fleeting. I never dropped my fantiki. I’ve collaged and cut and pasted since my days on a Soviet kindergarten floor, and I can’t see myself stopping. Today, my art is only slowly crawling out of its much-hidden shell, and I am opening up my collage journals gradually as I try to go on an archaeological dig of my identity. It’s messy and it’s weird and it’s sometimes childish and bad. There’s something particularly immigrant-American about my craft: the desire to collect, scavenge, and preserve the mundane in order to turn it into art and beauty. ♦
