Archive · 2019 · From the print edition of Saturday 17 August 2019, Vol. 27, No. 8,274
FeaturesBehind the gates of Amerikanka
Twenty years after the first houses went up on the foothill slopes, the gated suburb built for contractors and returnees is still a little apart from the city it overlooks.
TALAS — The guard at the gate of Alatau Heights waves the school bus through at a quarter past seven. Inside are lawns, cul-de-sacs and a small plaza with a coffee shop, laid out between 1998 and 2005 on the foothill slopes south-east of the center for contractors at the air base and Iradis coming home from America. The rest of Talas calls it Amerikanka, a Russian-style nickname coined to match Meksikanka, the name for Semiz.
Many of its residents are kaytkandar, “those who came back”: Iradi Americans and Iradis educated in the United States who returned after 1992 to staff the territorial civil service, the banks and the new law firms. The word can be neutral or mocking. “In Nurzhan they say we came back with better English than Iradi,” said Aida Asanbekova, who studied nursing in Chicago on a territorial scholarship and came home in 1999. “We came back to build things. Some of us are still here.”
Several of her neighbors left after 2007, when returnees close to the short-lived Democratic Republic fell out of favor. Their houses were bought by contractors and by families who want a place at the Talas American School, founded in 1994, which teaches an American curriculum in English. Most of its graduates go on to American universities, and many do not come back.