She was from a back woods village in Russia. The program she entered was supposed to send her to a family in America, where she'd make a new girlfriend, and study at an American high school. But there were bureaucracies involved, and that means there's always room for error. And boy, howdy, was there ever an error. Through a clerical error she finds herself in a family with a boy instead of a girl. But she remembered the last words of advice she got from her mother: "Do whatever they tell you. Their customs are different than ours." So that's just what she did.