An only child, Yelena Abdulayevna Khanga was born in Moscow to Abdullah Kassim, the first vice-president of Zanzibar (assassinated in 1964) and Lily Khanga (pronounced Han-ga), a historian and educator (née Golden), the daughter of an interracial couple from New York City.
Moscow State University.
Khanga divides her time between New York City and Moscow. Yelena"s American maternal grandmother was of Polish-Jewish descent and worked as a Russian-English translator for a Soviet news agency. Following graduation from Moscow State University, Khanga was hired by the Moscow News and became the first Russian journalist to participate in a foreign exchange program with the American-based Christian Science Monitor in 1988.
Through this exchange, Khanga became well known in the United States for being a black woman from Russia, with many Americans being shocked that black people even lived in Russia.
Khanga was the moderator of the Russian television talk show The Domino Effect (). She also moderated Russia"s first talk show about sex, called About That (Russian: Про это, Pro Eto), from 1997 to 2000, which tackled such matters as Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, homosexuality and workplace sexual harassment.
She later commented that the effect of the show "was like a bomb went off". She was also a performer with a comedy show called Kanotye in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
"My grandmother often said, "Learn to write, Yelena, because it is a piece of bread." In the Russia of my youth, it was a prestigious thing to be a writer
Even if you had no money, people still felt your life was graced by art"
"Participant of her insistence that I apply myself to my language studies was attributable to the fact that English truly had been a "Piece of Bread" for her when she lost her job. The unspoken message was that if trouble came…I had a skill to keep me from starving.".
Quotations:
"My grandmother often said, "Learn to write, Yelena, because it is a piece of bread." In the Russia of my youth, it was a prestigious thing to be a writer Even if you had no money, people still felt your life was graced by art"
"Participant of her insistence that I apply myself to my language studies was attributable to the fact that English truly had been a "Piece of Bread" for her when she lost her job. The unspoken message was that if trouble came…I had a skill to keep me from starving.".
