This practice, of course, violated the iron law of Russian medicine: sitting on cold things allows pneumonia to enter the body through its most vulnerable access point, the anus.

They decided to spend their parental-concern capital on making it so that I was no longer allowed to sit on the ground with the other kids. Instead, I spent my pre-lunch minutes loitering by the teachers, attempting to make adult conversation. “Nice brooch. Did you get that at Dillard’s?”

My exemption raised questions among my classmates, who mashed together my eccentricities to formulate a theory as to why I couldn’t sit with them. One day, curiosity got the best of them, and the boldest among them asked, “Is it true you’re allergic to concrete?”

The “holidays” at my house consist of the fake Soviet Christmas known as New Year’s Eve. When you’re a kid, this is the night you meet Soviet Santa, aka Grandfather Frost, who will only give you presents if you recite him some poems. (From each according to his ability…) It’s the night when my mom makes eggs stuffed with caviar and puts on her finest new sweater so that we will be rich in the New Year. Then she turns on the TV and shushes us so she can hear the traditional New Year’s address delivered by Vladimir Putin.

When I was in middle school, we left Midland for the relatively cosmopolitan cul-de-sacs of the Dallas suburbs, about a six-hour drive east.

Neither my parents nor I made many friends. Instead, my parents subscribed to a service that would deliver Russian television to our house. Gradually, it became practically the only TV they watched. That’s still true. They also only eat Russian food, and they almost exclusively read Russian news sites. They essentially live in Russia, in the U.S.

Of course, one’s native culture is always going to feel cozier. But I can’t help but notice that they are missing out on the golden age of American television for a series of increasingly complex Russian ice-skating-based reality shows. I imagine this retreat to their homeland is, in part, a reaction to the alienation we experienced in Texas. In the Dallas suburbs, we had few negative experiences on account of our ethnicity, but we didn’t have many especially positive ones, either. I think this ennui soured my parents on American culture slightly, and prompted them to look elsewhere for connection. You see a similar phenomenon with people who spend all their time LARPing. Yes, it’s a reclusive, looked-down-upon subculture, but at least it’s their subculture. When you find yourself in constant disagreement with the world, you withdraw into yourself. You re-watch old movies, wear your broken-in pajamas. You move back, mentally, to a country you fled. When you are the only one of your kind, you just want to find your kind again.