I’ve been thinking about this a lot about over the past several weeks. Do we stop writing because we have too many stories to tell or because we have too few? And when we do stop, how do we get ourselves…
The shitty part about being in your twenties
One of the things we constantly heard during middle school (aside from the fact that we would need to use cursive for the rest of our life. I listened! But I’m pretty sure our teachers were dirty liars) is that we rarely…
23 and unemployed
I feel like, as bloggers, it’s on some level our duty to write about going through life like dreamy-eyed teenagers, We write about the the bright and the exciting (“ooh look at all the Ayis I saw around the West Lake…
Sharing Secrets
I’m never really sure how much of my life should be appropriate to share on this blog. It’s been just over a year since I started writing on here, mainly on a whim. Well, I first started this in November of 2013, meaning to…
Baby steps, or my first year living in China
It still feels a little wrong to say that I’ve been living in China for a year. But I have. Here goes: “I’ve been living in China for an entire year of my life”. Wrong, because I remember coming back…
Life Abroad: What I expected and what really happened
Living in a foreign place never turns out the way you would have thought it to have turned out. And right now, I’m panicking. Hard. In about two weeks, I’m flying back to the U.S. for the first time in almost a year. It’s…
Understanding China
At times, I wonder about my ‘legacy’ in China. Now okay, that sounds a bit ridiculous. The last seven (almost eight) months that I’ve spent in Shanghai, my Chinese speaking abilities have rapidly improved (not as significantly as I would have liked them to, but…
What it's like to write
All writers are liars. We exaggerate, spinning lies out of words in order to create a stronger, more compelling narrative. We disregard facts to make what we write feel more ‘real’ (which is kind of counterintuitive, isn’t it?). In my…
My Morning Commute or "Ten Minutes on the Shanghai Subway"
42 minutes. That’s the exact length of my work commute (that is, if don’t count stopping at the milk coffee-tea stall along the way). Of those forty-two minutes, less than ten are spent underground, passing two subway stops on Line 11 of the Shanghai Metro –…
Why we become expats
Encounters with strangers in Shanghai always come with difficult questions. For one, ‘why did you come to China?’ is one that has been asked each time I have met someone new and over time, it’s become more and more of…
Counting time
When I think back to 2014, what do I remember? I remember the New England air blowing past me, over every single bike ride I took on the Farmington Canal trail this March and April, ten miles up each way,…
The Highs and Lows of 2014
The Eve of my Birthday was spent in a Chinese emergency room. Since coming back from Russia, I’ve had a sharp pain and an increasingly growing tingling in my chest. Naturally my mind turned to the worst possible outcomes (heart…