So. Twelve chapters. And all I wanted to tell you was that I was born with a resting bitch face. Apparently, I had a lot to say about it. I could blame my childhood. My school. The literature. My family. The tourists. The men. The English language. Honestly, the English language deserves at least some…
My kid was born in the same city I was. At four, she moved to another country. At nine, to Canada. She was raised bilingual, just like me. Then came daycare and three years of school in her third language. Then English. Two years ago, I decided Mandarin would be a great idea. Don’t ask…
I like asking questions. Real questions. Not the ones you ask just to be polite. The ones I genuinely want answers to. And when I ask, I usually don’t smile. Because I’m serious. I want to know. Apparently, this can be a problem. At my workplace, I once asked a coworker: “Do I sound rude?”…
Every day, I remind myself of one thing. At least I no longer sound like I’m sexually harassing people in English. And I’m pretty proud of that. Because I fixed it. You see, in my native languages, vowels are generally short. We don’t stretch them into completely different sounds the way English does. And the…
How often do you actually smile when you type “hahaha”? Okay, if you’re texting a friend, probably pretty often. But what if you’re working? I worked mostly online for almost ten years. Clients. Emails. Messages. Meetings. And a lot of “hahaha.” Which, in my case, rarely involved actual laughing. “Hahaha, no worries!” Translation: I sent…
Being a woman with ambition and a desire to work meant learning how to survive. And surviving wasn’t fun. I hated it. I once worked on a project to launch a new international branch. Website, marketing, call centres, partners. Everything needed to be translated into the local language. Simple enough. Except the branch manager was…
School is a place to study. Not to have fun. And definitely not to smile. Starting in middle school, my specialization was language and literature. Have you ever read the literature we studied? If you finish it and you’re still smiling, you might be a psychopath. I did find a few exceptions. But what is…
Of course, summer was the cherry on top. But you could argue that my resting bitch face was just a side effect of growing up in a crowded seaside city. What about the rest of the country? Well. Let’s talk about holidays. When I moved to Canada, I discovered something fascinating. Apparently, you can celebrate…
I’m an only child. My parents came from big families. So did my grandparents. And when I say big, I mean five to seven kids was perfectly normal. Apparently, not for me. But that’s fine. I never had siblings to share my room with. I had cousins. Aunts. Sometimes family friends. And when guests arrived,…
I gave the wrong chapter the title Under Control. Because if we’re talking about keeping things under control, we need to talk about our mothers. Grandmothers. Actually, the women I grew up around. Remember I told you I was born in a city by the sea? Well, that’s the short version. The full version is…