Justina Chen

Ni hao! So...after a year of living abroad where I'd never faced quite so much racism in my life, I told myself, NEVER AGAIN. Hello? Did I really need to hear strangers tell me to "go home, insert racial ephithet here"?

So how did I find myself 10 weeks away from uprooting myself yet again, this time to China? And what do I do instead of packing up my house? Practice one of the language tapes forever queued up in my car? Uhhh...no. Instead, I'm baby step blogging. You can tell how badly I'm procrastinating when I--she who promised never to blog again--think to myself, I shall listen to my bloggity friends and blog.

Those first two words on this post? Well, that "hello" just about sums up my entire vocabulary in Mandarin. Let's just say that I'm still waiting for those half-hour language tapes to deliver on its promise that I will be "conversant in 30 easy lessons." Mmmm hmmm. Perhaps I need to learn the universal language for NEVER AGAIN.