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    As an aside, I've grown up a native English speaker and gotten snarky reviewers telling me to get help from a native speaker.
    – Richard Erickson
    Commented Mar 26 at 18:50
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    "Because of this, I have vowed to never submit a paper to this particular journal again (though I did not bring this issue with the editors)." I am sorry, but this makes zero sense to me. How is it the journal's responsibility if a referee exaggerates languages issues in a manuscript? A meaningful course of action would be the opposite: instead of vowing not to submit to journal X but not saying anything to the editors, it would have made sense to mention this to the editors' (who can act on it in some way or another) but not engage in a dramatic but private act of vowing not to submit there.
    – Adam Přenosil
    Commented Mar 26 at 19:21
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    @AdamPřenosil If the same situation happened today I would most certainly bring this up to the editors. At the time I was a PhD student who was virtually unknown, so I did not feel that my comments to the editor (who is a prominent academic, very well-known and connected in my field) would help me, and might be perceived as very negative or whiney. It could have potentially hurt my future career aspects, so I decided not to do it. That said, a journal should take responsibility for what their referees do because they were the ones who asked said people to referee their submissions.
    – Stanley Yao Xiao
    Commented Mar 26 at 19:49
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    @AdamPřenosil depending upon the tone and content of the reviews, a good editor will shelter authors from abusive or otherwise bad reviewer comments. Especially for younger authors or those who may not be able to standup for themselves.
    – Richard Erickson
    Commented Mar 26 at 20:26
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    @AdamPřenosil of course there is a lot of subjectivity as to whether something is "seriously rude"... I most certainly considered the report to be seriously rude, though you might disagree with my assessment. This is exactly why I asked the question here, I do not want to come off as unacceptably rude even though I have no intention of being rude at all. That said, I do not give any benefit of the doubt to the referee: to me we received those comments because the referee saw our names and assumed we were Asians who did not speak English.
    – Stanley Yao Xiao
    Commented Mar 26 at 20:51