Culture in the Blender

My parents are visiting me (easy as pie now that we live in the same country again), and talking about my research in anything except English is a little frustrating. Because I attended college in the States, I learned the vast majority of my technical vocabulary (in any field I know technical vocabulary in) in [...]

My local grocery store recently carried 油菜 (yóucài), which translates literally to oil vegetable. I have no idea what their English name is, if they even have one. I seized the opportunity and bought about half of them. Here, it is not uncommon that the checkout personnel do not know what various vegetables are, including [...]

I was walking down a hallway in my university’s analysis center with a Chinese staff scientist, whom I spoke English with. (I don’t even know what ‘electron’, let alone ‘transmission’ or ‘microscope’ are in Chinese.) Another Chinese student came along, and they started speaking Chinese. The second the staff member opened his mouth, it was [...]