The Man With The Russian Bride: One Of The Most Bizarre Interviews I’ve Ever Conducted

I’m not quite sure how it came up in a Google News alert for cat-related stories, but I just found this article from Marie Claire, an excerpt from a book called Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter that details the way an American woman found out her mom was a Russian mail-order bride.

The woman’s response toward her mother is lacking in compassion, but I don’t know her family dynamics and the title of her book indicates she is at least aware of how she comes off. The one thing I do recognize is the longing to feel normal as the child of an immigrant in an America where normal is a form of social currency. Having the “weird parent” who talks funny, has a “strange” name and unfamiliar customs exposes you to all sorts of torture from other kids, who can be inventively cruel.

The story also reminds me of one of the most bizarre interviews I’d ever conducted during my time as a newspaper reporter.

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The guy on the other end of the line pitched it to me as a story about how he was scammed by a foreign temptress, as something other American men should watch out for. I agreed to meet him and hear his story.

He was a mid-level bureaucrat in state government who invited me into a conference room during his lunch break. He was hygienically challenged with visible dandruff, heavy acne, a rumpled button-down shirt and the kind of tie worn by men who view professional sartorial standards as an unavoidable nuisance.

At one point during our conversation he dug a finger into his nose and retrieved a gummy piece of snot. I looked away, embarrassed, but it didn’t even seem to register in his mind.

I’m not sure exactly when I realized he was describing his experience with a mail-order bride, but I will never forget his heavy sigh as he reached into a pocket and retrieved a worn catalog featuring Russian women in their 30s and 40s.

I’d never seen anything like it. The best way I can describe it is somewhere between the print version of a dating site and a grocery store’s weekly circular, with photos of Ukrainian and Russian women dressed to the nines and wearing heavy makeup above their listed stats, requirements for a husband and parody-worthy relationship tropes: enjoying long walks on the beach, sunsets, that sort of thing.

(Above: Not the actual catalog, but it was similar to this.)

“Here,” the man said, pushing the catalog across the table. “You can keep this for your story.”

He paused, took the catalog back, turned to the page featuring his ex-wife, then tore it out carefully before folding it reverently and slipping it into the front breast pocket of his shirt.

I didn’t know what to say as he sat there with a single tear running down his cheek and sniffled. The catalog sat there in front of me and I hesitated to touch it, remembering where this man’s finger had had been a few minutes earlier.

He explained how he had traveled to Moscow with a cohort of American men, then spent the first night on speed dates in a hotel ballroom with women who were desperate to get out of the country, chatting with them under the watchful eyes of burly men with names like Yuri and Artyom.

The second night was spent with a smaller group of women after each of the American men had narrowed down their choices, again chaperoned by taciturn Russian men. The third night was a date with each man’s final pick before agreements were made, contracts signed and the men returned home with a future delivery date for their new wives, as if they’d ordered them off Amazon.

It quickly became clear that the man I was speaking to did not view women as human beings and had little experience with them. He complained about infrequent sex, how much it was costing him to feed and clothe his new bride and her daughter, feeling disrespected, and the many ways in which his fantasy was demolished by reality.

It didn’t take long for his new Russian bride to split. A few months, if I recall. The man went to work one day, came home and found his wife and her daughter gone.

When I got back to the newsroom, my editor stopped me.

“How’d it go with the scam story?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him the depressing truth and said it just wasn’t particularly compelling or newsworthy. I spiked the potential story from my calendar, tossed the mail order bride catalog in a bin far from my desk when no one was looking, and made a beeline for the bathroom to scrub the hell out of my hands.