Salolampi’s camp song resembled a funeral dirge: no soprano notes, nothing allegro, nothing summery. I’d listened to my grandmother and great-aunts gossip in Finnish, with its blur of vowels, but this was the first time I’d heard people singing in the language. As we stood in a ring in the clearing, encircled by a grove of slender birches and towering pines that kept the weak morning light from warming us, the campers let out one long Finnish wail, a tragic song about a mysterious lake in the woods. I thought we were in mourning. At least, I was in mourning—for summer, for reading books in trees, painting the cat’s portrait, sleeping late in my own bedroom instead of waking at dawn to the wispy breathing of the other campers. I shivered in my sweatshirt and rubbed my nose against the palm of my hand. I couldn’t think of what everyone else might be mourning, except maybe the Finland we’d lost through immigration: our northern home bathed in darkness, drowning in vodka, snug in snow and reindeer herds. I’d never felt less Finnish.

But then that’s why I was here. I’d been given a small scholarship from the Finnish-American Association after I wrote an essay about how I wanted to learn Finnish to discover who I was. My grandmother was the one who’d told me about the essay contest. She wanted me to go, and I wanted to know what I might have known if she hadn’t been crazy for assimilation, if McCarthyism hadn’t terrified her because of the dead communists banging away in our family closet. I wanted to know what I was besides white. Most of the people I knew growing up either weren’t white in the first place, or claimed another identity if they were: Polish, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Catholic. I’d been telling people I was part Finnish, a branch of the family tree that had immigrated most recently and came from a non-English-speaking country, unlike the WASP parts. I was only one-fourth Finnish, a tenuous connection.

When Eino, the camp director, raised the Finnish flag, nobody said a word. Nobody. It was so quiet that I could hear, among the songbirds preening in the trees, mosquitoes buzzing at my ears. I slapped at them. I thought that when the flag reached the top of the pole and the blue cross on the white background waved across the pale Minnesota sky, the campers might cheer. They didn’t. Nobody spoke until Eino announced, “For the next two weeks, Salolampi is Finland.” 

But I couldn’t understand Eino, because he said it in Finnish. Ilse, who was in Kuopio Cabin with me, nonchalantly translated on the way to breakfast. Because Ilse’s real name was Ilse, she didn’t have a Finnish camp name. Her name marked her as 100 percent Finnish, camp royalty. She even spoke Finnish at home. Some kids had Finnish names without being Hundred Percenters, but Ilse was the real deal. Like me, she came from Evanston, outside Chicago, but I knew I shouldn’t think of her as an ally among the Minnesotans. Her long, blond Barbie hair—really more Swedish than Finnish, with its sheer almost-white brightness—made her stand out. Unlike at home, though, where I would let the black girls play with my straight, thin Finnish hair if I could examine their cornrows, bead by bead, at Salolampi the range of differences was small. We all had relatively beady eyes. We tended to be stocky, but more solid than outright fat. 

Ilse whispered to me, “God, I feel sorry for you, Erja. It’s hard to be here without some Finnish. You can borrow Purple Rain as long as you don’t get caught with it.” It was August of 1986, I was fourteen, and since at Salolampi we weren’t allowed to listen to non-Finnish music, Prince had become our most important contraband. Ilse had sized me up as the kind of camper who might somehow let it be confiscated.