Culture in the Blender

I-85, driven by thousands of people every day, has now become a piece of knowledge and experience that only my family shares, in the frame of reference of my parents. It goes through where I live and if I take it east, I will get to the city they lived in before they had to [...]

I am planning a cocktail party. My guest list has people of four ethnicity categories from four continents. I’d have an even more varied guest list if distance wasn’t a factor.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Pollock and van Reken mention in their groundbreaking book that one of the unique properties of third culture kids is that we experience the world as three-dimensional, meaning that we can easily imagine that we are on the scene of a news report and understand the consequences, suffering or difficulty reported on.For me, the 四川 (Sìchuān) earthquake is [...]

I’m back in Hotelland. I’m at a conference and staying at the conference hotel, the San Fransisco Marriott. (In line with being a typical TCK, I am becoming highly educated by getting a PhD in materials science and engineering.) Last night, I sat in the bar on the top floor looking out at the San [...]

I am visiting my parents at the moment, and while I’m here I thought it might be a nice idea of do some 太极拳 (tàijíquán) with my mother, since we learned in the same context. She bought some 太极拳 (tàijíquán) VCDs in China, and we were going to watch them and follow the instructions to [...]

I recently bought a 3rd generation iPod nano, and have spent most of today ripping CDs and deleting mp3s I never listen to anymore to make space for the CD rips. Going through my music not only brings up memories of other places, but due to the global purchase locations of my CD collection, it [...]

I’ve been very busy lately, with appointment lists filling most of my days and the remainder filled with research, grading and market research. The latter three have tended to spill into nights and weekends a fair bit as well. I’m in some serious need of calm. I was reading some kind of “women’s” magazine, where [...]

From time to time, I get little hints from whatever country I’m living in that the perspectives from other countries I occasionally mention or present are irrelevant or easily incorporated into the way of thinking prevalent in the country we’re in. (If you know physics, kind of like they dismiss arguments about needing to consider [...]