Expatriates and Creative Bitching

I’ve often got this song on a loop in my MP3 these days when I ride the subways: Before you read the following, seriously, listen to this song, check out the lyrics, of which the following passage grabbbed me (hard, by wrist) when I first heard it: I understand the culture’s Of a different kind, But here [the] word celebration Just doesn’t come to mind! This resonates with me in the context of the story the song tells: a band that describes itself, in its early days, as “a bunch of immigrants jamming” who met at “a Russian wedding in …

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Zocalo’s Questions

A blogger who goes by Zocalo left a comment linking to a recent post about imperialist white male English teachers in Asia, and I started to type a reply. The reply got long enough that I knew it’d be multiple comments in the post, so I’m putting it here instead. Before you go on, you probably should read Zocalo’s post in full (as well as the post it links to). For those not click-inclined, here’s a snippet: I have mentioned a few times before that I read some blogs written by Caucasians teaching English in Asia. Some of these blogs …

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