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The US Embassy in Oslo was attacked in the wee hours of Sunday, Mar 08. I traveled to Oslo on Sunday morning, before news of the attack was made public. As far as I know, all US Fulbrighters in Norway are physically okay. It’s a little jarring, but I am doing okay. 

This week

• Sunday, 01 March met online with a new young adult book club group. It was so fun!
• Tuesday, 03 March went out to Torsnes Skole in Fredrikstad to do two workshops for 6^th and 7^th graders (6 7 !!). We wrote “Where I’m From” poems!
• Wednesday, 04 March went to Norwegian class and had an exciting lesson learning about subordinate clauses (I’m not joking—it was thrilling) and co-planned the second writing assessment design workshop for teachers at Halden VGS
• Thursday, 05 March went back to Torsnes Skole in Fredrikstad to help them celebrate English Day and worked with small groups of 6^th and 7^th graders throughout the day. Each student wrote, shared, and got feedback on a story they wrote with postcards. 
• Friday, 06 March debated whether or not to go into the office since Tuesday and Thursday were long travel days, and ultimately decided to go. So glad I did! Everyone was in the office and it was really fun!
• Saturday, 07 March went on my first run in about 8 weeks and it was awesome! Then prepared for and hosted a Bridgerton Season 4 Part 2 watch party! Tied with Queen Charlotte as my favorite season yet!

I think this week we’re going with two items of potpourri, which is a Jeopardy! category that basically means hodgepodge. 

First up, relationships. If you are a regular reader of this blog (thanks!), you know that relationships and community are really important to me. This week I got to feel like I was in relationship with a lot of people. On Sunday, my work wife and I met with two other young adult (YA) book fanatics for our first book club meeting. We read What We Did To Survive (it was good! I recommend!) and let me tell you it’s super fun to be in a book club with two librarians and YA lit fanatics. We had a great time chatting about the book and even drafted an ALAN Picks for the book—because we are nerds. While chatting, I was able to work on my new Frida Kahlo puzzle! What an evening. Lolz. My life is totes exciting. 

On Tuesday and Thursday of this week I made my last visits to Torsnes Skole in Fredrikstad, which I have been to I think three times this year. It’s been fun to develop relationships with teachers and students throughout the year and I was a little sad to tell the students on Thursday that this would be my last day. The nice thing about knowing students is that on both days I was able to design really successful lessons for them that drew on their interests, that helped me get to know them better, and that pushed them to work through challenges of learning English. After our last class on Thursday, I got a lot of really great hugs from the students, who told me they would miss me. I’ll miss them too. 

On Wednesday, a frolleague (friend + colleague) and I co-planned our second workshop for teachers at Halden VGS in our series on effective writing assessment design. This feels similar to my work at Torsnes Skole: I know the teachers because I worked with them last semester. My co-teacher and I really got to know them during our first session where we shared how we have come into being teachers of writing. And I am getting to know my co-teacher as we plan sessions together. It’s fun to collaborate with people who are well-matched collaborators and work with learners I know a little bit about. 

Also on Wednesday, I got to go to Norwegian class and there were only five students in class. I think three students were absent, but even if they were there, we have a significantly smaller class this semester than last semester. We’ve made it into a great learning community, and I’d like to think that I had something to do with that, with simple things, like learning everyone’s name and asking how they’re doing, remembering things they had said and asking about those things. During one of the class breaks (every Norwegian student is given a 15-minute break every 45 minutes of class), one of the classmates told us that there was cake in the library. Cake in the library?! Together, we marched downstairs, picking up a free goodie bag (with snacks, candy, and facewash!) on the way from some booth advertising the career center, but since we “were all exchange students,” they just gave us the bags for free. We waited patiently for cake, and then made sure everyone got a slice before heading back to class. Our poor Norwegian teacher—sometimes I don’t think he knows what to do with such a rowdy bunch. He was great, though, and after that break we worked with subordinate clauses. It was tough! Good thing we got cake, I noted.

And then Friday everyone was in the office! What a sight! And the noise! It was glorious. Since he rarely answers my emails, I was finally able to talk with the Center Director about an idea I’m working on for me and two other Rovers to write about in their annual journal. He is into it. Sometimes I am okay deciding things face-to-face rather than over email. We all even got to have lunch together, since every Norwegian eats lunch between 1130-1200, and all squeezed into our big lunch table. 

As the week drew to a close I texted my friend, who teaches at a local high school, who is Iranian. We’ve talked before about how things are going in Iran, how her family is doing, what I can do to ease her mind from all the stress—go to coffee, go for a walk, talk about books. And now the US and Israel have gone out of their damn minds and are bombing Iran. At the beginning of the week I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if she’d want to talk to me. But by the end of the week I relied on the strength of our relationship to reach out. 

Second up, language. I love language, and learning language. I feel my Norwegian getting stronger. I even (finally) started a Norwegian translation of When Stars Are Scattered this week. 

What I find super interesting, though, are comments from people wondering about the English I or others in my proximity use. This week, when a fellow Rover and I were being driven to Torsnes Skole, the other Rover said something like, “I’ve been working out of my home this week” or something like that. The person who was driving us was like, working out? Are you training for something? I was like, whoa, right. Because “working out” usually means training for something, but you can also put together the words “working” and “out” and it doesn’t mean “working out.” So, if you had to separate the clauses in the sentence it would be: I’ve been working / out of my home this week. But she heard it as: I’ve been / working out / of my home this week. English is wild.

In a separate part of that same conversation, we were talking about Norwegian immigrants to the US and how their language feels older than the language of their family members who stayed in the home country. This is a phenomenon linguists observe in all immigrant communities! I chimed in. Immigrants are so afraid of losing elements of their culture when they come to a new country that they do many things to preserve it, including often rejecting change in things that generally shift all the time, like language and food. When linguists study immigrant communities, they often find that their language is closer to the language people spoke in the home country around the time of immigration than the language the people in the home country speak in the present day. So the Cantonese spoken in San Francisco’s Chinatown (the US’ oldest Chinatown) is way closer to the Cantonese spoken in the 1840s than the Cantonese currently spoken in China. I was thinking about this when I was thinking about French the other day. I don’t know French slang and the French I know was taught to me in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s like language can be petrified. But language changes all the time. What happens if you teach a language and you’re not in the place where that language is spoken all the time? What version of English, so to speak, do you have and are teaching to others? 

So this made me think about how many words in English might not make it to other places that also speak English. At our big lunch in the office on Friday, a friend had some cheese I had seen at the store but didn’t want to risk buying in case I didn’t like it. So she offered me a slice. It smelled like a mix between muenster and brie. It was delicious! She was like, what’s muenster? I was like, oh, um, a cheese in the States. It’s like a soft, delicious, buttery cheese. Like if you took out the brie taste and smell from this cheese that’s what you’d get. Or I was calling a roasted chicken a rotisserie chicken and she was like, why do you call it that? What does that mean? There are so many words I take for granted and I love getting questions about words and thinking about how we use them.

Final note about words and using language as a way to preserve culture: this made me also think about how immigrant parents try to preserve their home cultures for themselves and their children after they immigrate. In the What it means to be American? To be Norwegian? workshop, a lot of students who don’t feel Norwegian tell me it’s because they and/or their families are immigrants. They don’t speak Norwegian in the house or participate in Norwegian food or holiday customs. It makes me think about my own childhood. Sometimes it was Thailand in our house: we spoke Thai, ate Thai food, sometimes my parents would watch Thai movies and shows, my dad would read Thai newspapers. And then we would step out the door and be in the US. But we were always in the US.

After walking my friends to the gate at the courtyard of my apartment after our Bridgerton watch party, I walked back into my house to the smell of jasmine rice. I was immediately transported to so many homes: my childhood home, my house in Atlanta, my home in Colorado. Once more it felt like a little piece of Thailand wherever I am. 

I think a lot about what it means to be Thai American. I am thinking more about how my parents wanted my brother and I to be Thai and American too. And I’m thinking about the Norwegian kids who feel like they’re in two worlds as well. What does it mean to be from a place and live in another? How does one integrate multiple elements of who you are to be more than the sum of its parts? What role does language play in preserving and communicating who you are, whose you are, and where you are from?