Late blogger activate!

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The thought of blogging has intrigued me for years now, even as early as 2010 when I moved to Davis, California for graduate school. I thought it’d be cool to collect my thoughts on what it’s like to live in a completely new environment with different cultures, different social interactions, different foods, different customs, etc. Yet I kept holding it off, hiding behind the so-called excuse of my “busy” life as a Ph.D. student. I found plenty of stuff to procrastinate from work, but blogging did not come to reality. So many ideas and opinions on my daily life were culminated, none were written.

Now that I have graduated, moved back to Jakarta, brought an American boy back as my husband, and am currently struggling with getting used to living with my parents again, I think I need to finally kickstart my own public diary. I plan to write in English and Indonesian interchangeably, as some things are simply not translatable. Expect to read my bittersweet recollections on life as a graduate student in an American institution. I’ll also talk about what it’s like to be a local and at the same time a stranger in a city where you have spent more than 75% of your life. Every now and then you will see a post on my experience dealing with the stereotype of being married to a foreigner in Indonesia. It might seem like a hodgepodge of rants from a 30-something middle class Chinese Indonesian academia, but the common theme is the connection among my sense of familiarity, foreigness, and everything that lies in between.