Only later did I realize he was saying the Americanized version of the word Russians pronounce Ahn-TOHN, like a big, radioactive kick drum.

Anton and I learned we had both come over as children. We both had Jewish fathers and shiksa moms—all the guilt and none of the praise. We both had siblings that were ten years younger and born in the U.S. We both grew up with few other Russians around.

A few weeks after the concert, Anton invited me to happy hour, and all we talked about was being Russian in the U.S. Anton had made Russian friends before, but for me, he was like a gulp of cold water after a life of wandering in the desert.w

I couldn’t help but compare notes with him. “Does your dad think there are no gay people in Russia?” I asked.

“Yes!” he said. “Did you ever pretend you were from some other country because pretty much anywhere sounds better to Americans than Russia?”

“Oh my god yes,” I said. We carried on this way, as though on an especially strange Tinder date, for hours. The process was so emotionally overwhelming that when we left the bar, he forgot his briefcase.

For a while, I thought my rapport with Anton meant it was time to make more Russian-American friends, and to try to become more Russian, in general. There are now nearly a million of us here in America, after all. I thought maybe that together, we could sift through all the baggage of our lives and make sense of what it means to be “us.” I wanted to determine whether I should try to fight my way back into the Russian tribe or just accept the fact that I was just like any other American, and would probably remain that way forever.

But when I met up with other Russians, I was surprised at how little we had in common. When I first moved to L.A., I lived next to a house full of recent Eastern European immigrants who all clung together in a cologne-drenched gang. But because my Russian is so rusty and they didn’t obsessively listen to Slate podcasts, I didn’t have much to talk with them about.

Years later, I had dinner with one woman—ironically also named Olga—who was extremely nice and smart. But she grew up in L.A., which has a large Russian population. When I dropped hints about my fish-out-of-water trauma, she didn’t pick them up. To her, being Russian was cool, being “Olga” was cool. She seemed to consider the topic as banal as a long discussion about oatmeal varietals. When the waitress came to collect our check, she looked at the names on our credit cards and asked if we were playing a prank on her.