Culture in the Blender

I haven’t posted in a long time. My husband asked me about it a while back, and my answer was that nothing much had happened in my life that related to being a third culture kid. Adult third culture kid now, I suppose. Anyway, he pointed out that we had gone through the process of [...]

My parents just moved back to Sweden, after having been given a month’s notice that my father was no longer needed in the US. Other than the suddenness of the move – a confused Swedish HR manager is to have said “But don’t you own a house….?” when my father called – I am surprised [...]

Although I think we’ve all heard “home is where the heart is” as some kind of well-meant, but misguided attempt to shed light on a lifetime of thought in a few seconds, I’m starting to appreciate a second possible meaning to the proverb, one that might actually be helpful. My rub with the idea is [...]

After some thinking at the beginning of the year, I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my boyfriend and wanted to stand up and say so. In other words, I decided I wanted to marry him. I cooked up a proposal scheme (had to be flexible, since we live [...]

I’m homesick for China. I think anywhere in Asia would do.  Yesterday morning was rainy with a hint of fog, and I thought for a second that it was smog. I’m listening to Chinese music and wondering what’s in fashion. I want my morning bus to be one of the old Beijing buses with the [...]

I’m supposed to be writing my doctoral thesis (hence very few posts lately), but for some reason I can’t stop thinking about where I’m going to live after I defend. I will be done with my education and so for the first time in my life have some kind of decision about where to live [...]

A week ago, I flew to see my boyfriend and had to connect through O’Hare. Even without a snowstorm, there were weather delays – due to lightning this time. I brought along Ruth Van Reken’s book Letters Never Sent to read. While I can’t say that I recognized my own experience other than very occasionally, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]