This American Life - 238: Lost in Translation

Broadcast on: 30 May 2003

Alex spoke Russian, lived in Russia for a year, worked with Russian refugees in Chicago for two years. And his Russian teacher thought that he only needed one thing to make his life complete. She thought I needed a Russian girlfriend. She thought that only Russians would be able to stand up to me the way that I needed to be stood up to or something. I don't know. Our American women are just too soft. I don't know what to do. I truly don't know. But anyway, that's what, that's the thought she had. So she kept trying to fix them up with Russian women. And this one night she had him come out with a whole bunch of people, including this woman, Elena, who was going to be his date. And so I meet them for dinner and I'm, we're at the sushi restaurant and we're all eating and everybody's telling stories and funny stories. And I'm sitting across from my date and my Russian teacher is turning to me and saying, you know, tell them this story, tell them that story. And so then I tell them this story and that story and everybody's laughing except for my date. And so we leave the sushi restaurant and we go and we go to this club and we're all dancing like my Russian teacher's dancing and all of her friends are dancing and everybody's sort of like, you know, exchanging partners and it's sort of this fun scene and everybody's dancing except for my date is just sitting at the table and sort of nursing a drink and looking and looking bored, really bored. And so, you know, I keep on coming back from the dance floor and trying to, you know, saying I sure you don't want to dance. You want to dance and then she'll, she sort of like, you know, will sort of smile bitterly and just shake her head and so then somebody else will drag me out and so finally I come back and I sit down and, you know, I'm sitting next to her and I'm trying to strike up a conversation and, you know, something about like, I guess you don't like dancing or something like that. And she sort of looks out at the floor and there's like people having, you know, a great time all around and she sort of like nods a chin towards the floor and she's like, this is an American dance, no. And I drove away thinking, well, that was a horrible date, like we neither of us enjoyed each other and that was a disaster pretty much. Like we were not going to be seeing each other again. I get to Russian class the next week and my Russian teacher says, hey, so are you going to call Elena she said she had a great time and I was like, I was like, I was floored by that. I was thinking like I was trying to figure out like what that could possibly have meant. And so I was like sort of mulling it over my head because it really became, it was really fascinating to me and I realized that I have a very sort of like clear and perhaps culturally informed idea of what a great date is and it has to do with the idea of like what it means to fall in love. And I realized that in my in my head, what I think about is a great date is what sort of you see in the movies like sort of the falling in love montage of the movies. You know, you go on a great date, it's often involves a boardwalk, there's a great deal of sort of like throwing your heads back in laughter, you might chase each other around

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