Andi Roselund: An Armenian Composer in Korea

In the year of the Armenian Genocide centennial you joined the “I am a descendant of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide” initiative on Facebook and put the photo of Dr. Armenag Haigazian (1870-1921).

That is a photograph I knew not of until my uncle James Constantian showed it to us at a Haigazian descendants’ reunion in Southern California a few years ago, and it was such a powerful image that is hard to forget after seeing it. You can see Dr. Haigazian’s blue eyes and stern but warm-hearted facial expression, with wife Matilda’s beauty hidden behind the difficulty in their transition from Northern Adana (Hadjin), and it is a look I have seen on pictures of my friends’ relatives as well: their faces speak such sorrow that so many of our grandparents and great grandparents in the Diaspora endured. It was most likely photographed in Konya in 1919 or 1920, before he had sent Matilda and his daughters to America.

You sign your videos as Mihran. Is this your artistic name?

I like to think of it that way, but also as a nod to the survival of our family: I gave myself this nickname because I loved how it sounded and because Mihr sounds very similar to a pure-Korean word for dragon, but the truth is it happens to be my mother’s paternal grandfather’s name. Mihran Constantian was the son of clergyman/bricklayer Avedis Constantian (who also helped translate the Bible into Ottoman Turkish in the late 1800s), who was from the Sisli neighborhood of Bolis. They escaped to America right before when the Hamidian massacres began, and ended up in Seattle, Washington. Mihran married Mary Tashkian in 1906, and my grandfather (another Avedis Constantian) was born in 1910. Like Dr. Haigazian safely sending his family away, I am grateful for my great-grandfather Mihran’s safe passage to America, and want to remember him in a name I can call my own.

It is interesting if you are aware of Armenians and other people of Armenian origin living in Korea. I know there are IT specialists from Armenia; what about culture?

Most Armenians that I know in Korea are fairly recent arrivals, coming here in the last 10 years. And in addition to highly educated IT specialists, there are chemical engineers, mathematicians, and numerous people learning Korean in order to translate and/or work in tourism. Unfortunately though, very little is understood by the local Korean population about Armenia, history, and culture. But thanks to Instagram, many of the Armenians in Korea have been very active to talk about Armenian culture even while basically blogging about local tourism, and we can hope for a greater collective awareness in the future. Among them Narine Haroyan (from AGBU Young Professionals, Seoul) has been a wonderful soul connecting other Armenians in Korea, and instrumental in helping everyone engage in cultural discussion. And all of them are very active on social media regarding the current war on Artsakh, posting extensively in Korean and helping locals understand the geographic and historic plight of Armenians, and our strong will to endure.

What kind of Armenian traditions does your family have?

I grew up as a half-Armenian kid (and equally half-odar, as I became known among more conservative Armenians from the old country!) living in one of smaller Armenian communities in Montebello, opposite Los Angeles from Glendale. Being third-generation and not able to speak the language, however, I tried to study Armenian. In 1995 I visited home and bought some Armenian textbooks from the Pasadena City College bookstore (they had an Armenian course), and brought them back to learn. Unfortunately, I was not able to learn anything more than the alphabet and basic phonetic reading, and with no audio resources to learn Armenian at the time, I lost hope and gave up studying.

The only Armenian tradition we shared at home was really good food. And although I deeply regret that I was not able to learn Armenian, I have no way to fully understand my late grandmother Nelly’s pain and sorrow that led to her and her sisters not wanting to pass on their distinctively Western Armenian culture to my mother’s generation: My great-grandmother Matilda and daughters arrived in Troy, New York in 1921 and had received a few letters from Dr. Haigazian, in which he spoke of getting ready to leave the Jenanian Institute before the Turks would arrive to continue the ethnic cleansing of the Anatolian Plateau, he planning to meet up with them in New York. But later that year when they received news that he had died from typhus after an 800-kilometer march to Kharpert, the family took it as difficultly as one might expect; Nelly was (above all) furious, and ripped up all of his letters, and Matilda apparently conveyed to her daughters something along the lines of “Now in losing your father, we have no home country, no culture. This is your new country; this is your new life.” Decades later, Nelly would speak Armenian with an extensive Turkish vocabulary to my grandfather Avedis (who grew up speaking Armenian at home), but she refused to have my mother and her siblings learn a single word. Sadly that is why food tradition is all that has been passed on to me, and not even church holidays were observed in the family. Nelly made it a priority to forget as much of the past as she could.

This reminded what you have written on your life in LA: “We would regularly drive up to a shop or two in Pasadena for lahmajoon, cheese, grape leaves (from Fresno!) for making sarma and yalanchi dolma at home, and pre-made frozen bulgur kufte (as kids, we called them “hand grenades”) filled with spiced lamb for stews.” I assume you miss such dishes in Korea.

I do miss the taste of home, as have not tasted anything in the world as good as my mother’s lamb sarma. So accordingly, every time I visit home I ask my mother to teach me a new meal to make, since I love cooking here in Korea and regularly make my own yalanchi dolma and lahmajoon, and of course serve it with familiar Middle Eastern sides like hummus, muhammara, and braided cheese with nigella seeds. It is also interesting to hear from my Armenian friends here how different Adana-Armenian cuisine I have learned from my mother can taste when compared to in Armenia, namely that my khorovatz and kuzu tandir-style lamb roasts always mainly rosemary and lemon juice (instead of oregano and pomegranate juice), a very different flavor profile from what they are used to!

Yes, there are slight differences between Armenia and Diaspora cuisines. I think it is time for you to come to your ancestors’ country and test not only that. And in general, it will be great to welcome you in Armenia and get acquainted with your compositions in live performance.

That would be absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to share and I hope to as well! Although the lineage of my mother’s parents were probably in Constantinople and Western Armenia for hundreds of years and likely had no association with Yerevan during the Ottoman era, it is a long-held dream of mine to one day visit Armenia: to first go to Tsitsernakaberd, and then places like Khor Virap, Garni, and of course Lake Sevan, to sit among nature and be still for a while. I am convinced that in just being there, I will hear ancient music and the enduring spirit of our forefathers in the land itself…