Culture in the Blender

Someone posted a very illustrative story about cultural marginalization for third culture kids on TCKID.
In primary school, I was in a public school with a foreign population of 75%.
On the first day I transferred there, a teacher went:” Stand up. Okay… If you’re from Singapore/ Singaporean, sit down.”
I sat down as I had been in [...]

Although I’ve witnessed first-hand the kinds of campaigns that Europeans that fear more integration can put on, it surprises me every time how strongly people can feel about avoiding it. Today’s article in the International Herald Tribune about the Irish voting ‘no’ to further integration was no less of a surprise than why so many [...]

While getting my iTunes library in order and exploring some new music suggested by a friend, I started looking up old Europop on YouTube. Following a trail of “Oh, it’s this song!”, I found Dr. Alban’s Look Who’s Talking. I do not feel that that listening to that song says anything about the race of [...]

This weekend, I was putting in some grad student time (which one might call overtime if one had a job) with a colleague and friend who is trying to have their thesis done in two weeks. Afterwards, we ended up going to fly a fish kite in an empty lot on a little hill surrounded by mostly [...]

Latoya Peterson at Racialicious has written a post about American hip-hop politics. The post and the comments revolve around weighing the poor quality of music on American radio channels in general (there are few non-commercial channels that focus on bringing quality or novelty to American radio, meaning that radio channels mostly cater to mass markets [...]

China has been in the news a lot lately, and for some reason I’m missing 北京 (Běijīng) something fierce. I’m meeting a friend for drinks tonight, and I desperately want to go to 三里屯 (Sānlǐtúnr). I want to walk out into the 北京 (Běijīng) night into my safe, familiar third culture world. I [...]