I've been in Vladimir for almost two years, and last night was the first time someone gave me flak for not being Russian. We had a party for our adult students at an event hall near the American Home, and then most of the teachers and about ten students went to a nice restaurant with a karaoke bar in the center of town. We ordered some food and drinks and sang a few songs (no mastery from me this time) and were just hanging out. We had been there for a while when the lady at the table in front of us turned around and gave us the one-finger salute. We looked at her incredulously, and I said, "Same to you." She did this a few more times. Her complaint was that we were talking while her husband was singing, but everyone in the place was talking--it's a bar, after all. 

Things escalated pretty fast. Her husband finished his song, threw down the microphone, and stormed over to our table. He said that he shouldn't have to listen to people speaking a foreign language in his country and demanded that we leave. His wife chimed in and claimed that we were being discourteous and exclaimed that our parents didn't raise us right. Well, that was about as much as I was going to listen to. I stayed sitting down, but I challenged them to say what we had done wrong exactly ("Объясните мне--что мы здесь делаем неправильно") and told them if they wanted a quiet concert they should have gone to a theater ("хотели концерт сходили бы в театр"). 

By this time the whole bar was watching us. It looked like things might turn ugly in a hurry: The guy was obviously gearing up for a fight, and he was saying incendiary things like "Россия для русских" (Russia is for Russians). We were sitting at a different table from the main bulk of our group, and so it looked like there were only three of us. Pretty soon, however, the guys--Russian and American--from the other table came up and made their presence known. The two rabble-rousers now saw how outnumbered they were, and the bouncer made it clear that it was time for them to leave. The situation ended without a fight, and we stayed at the bar for a little while longer. 

But that made me so mad. I'm normally a calm person, but there are some things I won't tolerate, and listening to some primped-up 30-something lady say "get the hell out of here Yankees" while her water-heater-build husband spews nationalist garbage is one of those things. The support my Russian friends gave me made me feel better--they said they were embarrassed by those people and that they were with me one hundred percent--but I was still all tense and angry for the rest of the night. 

The situation bothered me so much because it was the first time in my life that I've been accosted not for something I did but simply for who I am. Once I got home, I did some reflecting and realized that last night was an important lesson--it showed another side of the immigrant experience. Immigrants aren't always welcomed with open arms and smiles like we usually are here in Vladimir, and the experience of being a foreigner would be incomplete without seeing the other side of the coin. Also, I reflected on the fact that the Uzbek cabby who drove us home or the Angolan university student who attends the American Home probably face this sort of situation with regularity. As a tall, white male from the United States, I'm not the recipient of much discrimination, and so it's instructive to feel how lousy and aggravating it is. Most people who face discrimination also don't have a whole bar to back them up and usually have to shut up and take it, which must feel incredibly dehumanizing. 

This situation further reinforced my feeling that it's time to go back home. We haven't had any problems related to the situation in Ukraine, but there's been a general upswing in Russian patriotism verging on nationalism, and that has produced an equal and opposite reaction in me. I've been much more on edge and defensive lately, ready to call anyone out on the smallest slight against America. I shouldn't let that sort of stuff affect me, but it does, and for my own sanity and well-being I need to remove myself from the situation. Last night was instructive, and I'm glad that it happened with only a little more than two weeks left in my time here in Russia.