Students from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland were also studying at the Nevsky Institute that summer. During one of our afternoon breaks, we were given the chance to visit the classroom across the hall and meet them. Daniel and I quickly established a rapport with them. We were drawn to their free-spirited and easygoing personalities. Michael was a gay man who towered over six feet, Catherine was a short blonde, and Emily was a long-haired brunette whose natural drawl signaled to me that she partied hard. We agreed to hang out, along with Daniel’s Russian “friend” Anastasiya, at Mishka Bar, which was not too far from Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare in the city. Underground and badly lit, it was a hipster spot decorated in gray and pink, frequented by plenty of twenty-somethings and expats. When I walked in, I didn’t feel so self-conscious. It was the first moment when I felt like I could relax and pretend that I was not different from anyone else. I ordered a Long Island iced tea to loosen up even more. Who knew when I would return to Russia, a country that’s famously known for its vodka? I might as well go hard, I thought. Because I had never had a Long Island iced tea, I underestimated its power, and by the time I returned to our spot in the back of the bar, the side of my face was already on the table. Catherine and Emily giggled at how drunk I was before talking to some locals, who invited them to come to another bar. We figured that we should all go as a group, and the bar they suggested was not too far from Mishka.
I don’t remember where we turned; all I knew was that the street was suddenly less populated than the riverside embankment outside Mishka Bar. A group of young Russian men was hanging around on the sidewalk, and one of them pinned me against the wall of a building. He smirked at me, and because his eyes weren’t focusing I knew that he was drunk. I stayed still and said nothing. There wasn’t enough time to be afraid. As soon as I realized that it was probably not wise for me to try to escape from underneath his arms, Michael gently grabbed me and escorted me to the bar, which was a hole-in-the-wall on the second floor of some building.
The woman at the door checking IDs examined my face more than my driver’s license and asked, “You from America?”
When I told her yes, she said, “Good luck,” and handed me back my license.
Believing that she did not know how to say “Have a good time” or “Enjoy” in English, I took her response as a well-wish rather than a warning.
By this time, I had somehow sobered up, but Daniel was beyond drunk. We had lost Catherine and Emily from the moment we turned the corner onto the street, but given the smallness of this new bar, we felt sure that we would find them inside soon. It was much dirtier and less attended by internationals than Mishka. After about a half hour of circling around, we saw both Catherine and Emily sitting beside some Russian men, dressed in all black, with shaved heads. Michael, who was also very inebriated by this point, decided to approach one of them. I stood farther back, my body disappearing behind his.
Michael stuck out his hand and one of the men shook it before saying, “Do you know what I am? I’m skinhead.”
Immediately, I pivoted and grabbed Daniel’s hand. He tried to resist, but I gripped his wrist tighter and we flew down the staircase. In that moment of fight-or-flight, I couldn’t feel my feet hitting the steps or the pavement outside. Once we were out in the open air, Anastasiya joined us, visibly concerned but her mind congealed by alcohol. Daniel drunkenly yelled at me, asking me why we were outside, and I told him that there were neo-Nazis. His face dropped, but he was so drunk I didn’t know if he’d fully understood what I said. I dragged both him and Anastasiya into a nearby Subway sandwich shop, and we sat there until the Edinburgh students joined us. Michael was quiet, but Catherine and Emily were giggling as they recounted the men and their Nazi saluting—they said they had joined in. They said that they’d done it because they were afraid, but their faces suggested otherwise. I began to wonder if this was just another raucous night for them, a crazy story that they could afford because they were white.
We were in the same city where three Zambian students had been severely beaten, one left in coma, just a few months before we arrived. Several years earlier, Lamzar Samba, a fifth-year student from Senegal at Saint Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, was shot dead as he left a club with his friends. A hunting rifle decorated with a swastika was found at the scene. As I sat in that Subway shop, thoughts of what could have happened to both me and Daniel swirled in my head. We could have been severely beaten. I could have been raped. We could have been left half dead on the street outside that hole-in-the-wall bar and the police would have taken us to jail, and once we came to, the officers would have said that we were damaging St. Petersburg’s reputation with our Western hooliganism. When I explained to the Edinburgh students just how afraid I was, their laughter subsided. Their eyes expressed concern. They were sympathetic, but they weren’t capable of true empathy—this fear wasn’t theirs to know.
As white people, they could never fully understand. Sure, they might have realized that I could have been targeted because I was black. But that understanding is an abstraction. When it is contained within your black body, well, that is different in a way they will never be able to wrap their heads around, because they don’t have to.
In 1964, Harper’s Magazine published an essay called “Harlem Is Nowhere,” which Ralph Ellison had written nearly two decades earlier, in 1948. The inspiration for his piece was a trip he’d taken to the first mental hygiene facility in Harlem, the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, where black residents could receive care for twenty-five cents. Located in a church basement, the clinic and its staff, who worked for free, hoped to provide clients the tools they needed to survive in a hostile world. The essay begins, “To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter underfoot with garbage and decay.” Ellison observed that, in Harlem, a common response to “How are you?” was “Oh man, I’m nowhere,” signaling the speaker’s lack of a stable position in society.
When I first moved to Harlem, I found a summer gig teaching first-and second-generation Chinese students who wanted to test into elite prep schools. The job was in southwest Brooklyn, and my subway commute was an hour each way. I would try to carve some kind of private space for myself during that time by reading books and sticking my earbuds in so deep that I believed that everything was the soundtrack of my own biopic. I learned early on that if you want to be invisible in New York City, it is very easy. Someone may be sitting next to you on the train, but you can squeeze your body so far into itself that you can fool yourself into believing that you alone have the whole row of seats. Homeless people and hopeful rappers may call out to you on the street, but you can walk past them without so much as turning your neck. Then there are the people who do not want to be invisible, who will do everything to bridge the gap between public and private spaces.