Protsenko was a small but formidable forty-year-old who wore her dark, curly hair cropped sensibly short, born in China to Sino-Russian parents, yet forged in the crucible of the USSR. Her grandfather had been arrested and disappeared into the Gulag during Stalin’s purges; when she was a baby, both her older brothers died from diphtheria because they were kept from seeing a doctor by the curfew in the Chinese border town where they lived.
