Pursuing her graduate degree wasn’t easy for Deana. She has ADHD, and people had always told her she was dumb. It didn’t help that many of those people didn’t speak the same language she did, and therefore couldn’t tell how smart she was. But Deana’s mother died just before she had to decide whether to pursue her PhD, and she figured, “Well, my mom is dead, what else do I have to lose?”

Meanwhile, Deana’s connections with Russian culture grew more tenuous. At one point, Deana met another Russian woman at a university she attended during her training. She tried to speak to her in their mother tongue, but the woman told Deana, with a look of judgment on her face, that she had an American accent. Deana felt a little bit offended.

Later, Deana’s half sister found her through a Russian social network called Odnoklasniki, or “Classmates,” and through her, Deana got connected with her birth father. The man told Deana he wanted to Skype with her nearly every day, and that he wanted her to come visit him for a month. When Deana said she was too busy to do that and, besides, she didn’t feel comfortable enough speaking Russian anymore, he grew upset. Then he started lobbying her to move back to Russia and get married. “He didn’t seem to understand that education is how women empower themselves,” she explained. It was all too much. She told him she needed space, and they lost contact.

After she graduated, Deana decided to stay in Wichita Falls, since her husband and brothers are all nearby. With her mom gone, she feels like the matriarch of the family. The place is more diverse than the tiny town she originally landed in, at least. She still describes herself as a Russian-Jewish woman living in Texas. Not a Texan.

Throughout all this, I was struck by how functional she seemed, despite all the things that made her weird. Dead mom? PhD in a second language? Living deep in Trump country as a strong feminist? Deana seemed unbothered by it all.

If there are any scars left from the ordeal, it’s that she can be, at times, a little hypervigilant. Once, she was leaving a grocery store wearing shorts (it was hot; it’s always hot), and came upon three men hanging out by their truck. They ogled her pretty openly, so Deana turned to her husband and said, “Why would they gawk?!” loud enough so they could hear.

“I’m not just some piece of meat,” she told me, indignantly. “I’m not a T-bone.”

It can seem, if you don’t know her, like a little bit of an overreaction.