Olga Khazan - Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World

T he origin of my weirdness is that I grew up a Russian-Jewish immigrant in a town called Midland in West Texas, in a region whose biggest claims to fame are being the onetime home of George W. Bush and serving as the inspiration for Friday Night Lights. A Chicagoan once asked me what the nearest big city to my childhood home was. When I matter-of-factly responded that it was El Paso, he burst out laughing.

My father, who had been an electrical engineer and black-market TV repairman in Russia, had secured a job at a Midland petroleum engineering company by offering to provide Russian translations for the companys oil deals with Siberians. (Siberia having had, along with the rest of Russia, recently discovered capitalism.) My mom did accounting for a small company, and sometimes she pitched in with the translating. My parents would often take me along to their translating jobs, so I spent much of my childhood asleep on white tablecloths, waiting for the adults to wrap up their schmoozing.

Culture clash implies a bold interplay of contrasting patterns; what we experienced could more accurately be described as a culture transplant. We were sewn into this new place and hoped it took. Almost everyone we met was an evangelical Christian who believed they would live eternally in a celestial paradiseand many felt obligated to let us know about it. My babysitter considered glossolalia to be a fun afternoon activity. The only kids activity at our apartment complex was an improvised Sunday school, whose organizers prayed with me that my parents would become Christians. A boy called me a wetback in the middle of class, and I thought seriously about changing my name. When we watched the Addams Family movies, I developed a strong kinship with pale, dour Wednesday Addams.

Midland was a town mostly populated by white Americans and Mexicans, and both groups largely kept to themselves. Besides us, there were at most a handful of non-Spanish-speaking immigrants in town. (We did not, however, know each other, only of each other. As in, my dad once mentioned that he thought he saw a Ghanaian at the grocery store.)

West Texans exhibit an easy dominance of their inhospitable natural environment, which is something I never did master. They are a group of people who are simply not messed with, whereas I constantly was. Much of the grass there is not grass, but rather stickers that will gouge holes in your skin. Once, my father saw a man shoot a rattlesnake in his front yard with a rifle, then pick it up by the neck and present it to his children with a smile. At a treacherous desert day camp, I was stung by so many fire ants that my feet no longer fit in my shoes. As I cried, the camp counselor scolded me for not being tough.

In fourth grade, I changed schools halfway through the year because my family moved across town. Unsurprisingly, I did not take well to the new environs. A short list of things I had issues with: Going outside on field day. (Due to allergies, which my teachers took as a sign of sneaky insubordination.) In science class, making birth announcements for a baby dinosaur of our choosing. (Birth announcements were not a custom in Russia.) Being in the same math group as the class pretty girl. (Obvious reasons.)

At the new school, lunch was eaten in shifts, like in a Dickensian workhouse. Before lunch, our class would file out of the room and line up outside the cafeteria. We would sit down on the concrete walkway and wait for the first wave of eaters to leave so we could take their still-warm seats.

My parents grew alarmed when they learned about this system. Not the staggered lunchesthe part about the sitting on the concrete.

You do this even in winter? they asked.

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 Dillards?

My exemption raised questions among my classmates, who mashed together my eccentricities to formulate a theory as to why I couldnt sit with them. One day, curiosity got the best of them, and the boldest among them asked, Is it true youre allergic to concrete?

The holidays at my house consist of the fake Soviet Christmas known as New Years Eve. When youre 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) Its 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 Years 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. Thats 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, ones native culture is always going to feel cozier. But I cant 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 didnt 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, its a reclusive, looked-down-upon subculture, but at least its