Deana felt, far more poignantly than I ever did, the inability to live free from your ethnic identity. When neighbors would come over to the house, she remembers that Raymond would say, “This is my Russian wife and her kids.” Deana wasn’t Deana anymore; she was the Town Russian.

“Is it cold over there?” people would ask Deana. “Do your people drink a lot of vodka?”  In communications research, these are called “accommodative dilemmas,”297 or the struggle to correct people’s misconceptions about your identity group without hurting their feelings. (One paper298 suggests using humor to defuse such situations, which is difficult to do when you don’t speak the language.)

The local high school wouldn’t enroll Deana, so she found herself stuck in limbo: too old to be a typical American teen, yet with too little English to start college. She spent her days helping Raymond out in his business, and was otherwise stranded at home without a car.

She also had no knowledge of American social norms. Once, her stepbrother invited Deana along to hang out with his friends. As Deana sat on the couch, the group chatted among themselves, making no attempt to include her in the conversation.

Then something happened that sounds minor, but to me sounded so uncomfortable that my skin crawled when I heard Deana describe it. In the middle of the conversation, everyone but Deana got up and walked to the kitchen. Deana wasn’t sure what to do. She was not part of their conversation in any way. Did they expect her to come with them? Or just to keep sitting there? Was she in the way? This was before iPhones, the “Oh look, I’m doing something too” escape hatch. Instead, she just sat there, staring off into space as everyone else ignored her.

Given the mail-order mom, the language barrier, the dying grandma back in Belarus, and all the other minor tortures Deana had endured, this couch-or-kitchen conundrum might sound like the least of her problems. But there are times when the world forces you to confront the fact that you fit in so poorly you literally don’t know what to do with yourself. And for Deana, this was one of those times.

Deana kept her pain bottled up. She cried a lot and read books, doing her best to learn English. She realized college was her only escape. She began volunteering at the library, got a tutor, and made a plan to apply to local universities. Her tutor handed her the freshman-English canon—Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and so forth. Locked in her own little world, Deana had something to focus on besides her problems. She became absorbed in the books and the insights about human nature they revealed.