Todd Sandel's Blog from Macau

On September 12 I went to a meeting of the Singkawang Association 山口洋地區鄉親會 . It also called Permasis in Indonesian. Website: http://www.permasis.org/ Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/168710176483301/ This meeting was set up by Mr. Hartono, 李伯巧 , whom Aimee introduced me to the first week I was in Jakarta. As noted below, I did not know what to expect before I went to the meeting. I thought I would speak with just a few people. Instead, it was a meeting of the association as a whole that was arranged to accommodate my schedule. I was overwhelmed. They spoke Mandarin at the meeting for my benefit. I asked afterward how they normally conducted meetings, and Fuidy Luckman, who was very nice to me, said they spoke a mixture of Hakka and Indonesian. Fortunately that morning I took time to do an overall analysis of the interviews, counting the number of marriages with Taiwanese men discussed by participants involving themselves (women) or a close family member...

Recently my University of Oklahoma webpage was deactivated. Since I have adjunct status with OU, I am able to reactivate it. But it will take me some time and is a task for later. One item that I would like to make public, and is difficult to do with the University of Macau website--I do not have personal control over it--is my CV and list of publications. Using Dropbox I am able to present this information publicly and post it to this blog. Those interested in some of my work may access this using the following: Todd Sandel's CV--2014 Select Publications Sandel, T. L. (2014). “Oh,I’m here!”: Social media’s impact on the cross-cultural adaptation of students studying abroad. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research. 43(1), 1-29. Sandel, T. L., Wong Lowe, A., & Chao, W-Y. (2012). What does it mean to be Chinese?: Studying values as perceived by Chinese immigrants to the United States and by their children. In S. J. Kulich, M. H. Prosser, & L. P. Weng (...

Singkawang, Jakarta and Elysium These past two weeks I have been in Indonesia visiting new places and meeting new people. This trip came about not by plan, but by a chance meeting with Dr. Sunny Lie at a conference in Nebraska last year. I presented a paper on my past study of Taiwan’s “foreign brides” and she was in the audience. After the talk, she said her family came from Singkawang ( 山口洋 in Chinese), and that it is a place notable for the large number of young women who married Taiwanese men. As part of my research I had long wanted to visit such a place, and we began to talk about the project that now is being carried out. Last week I was in Singkawang, assisted by Sunny’s cousin, Ulung Wijaya. He was the perfect man for the job, fluent in English, Mandarin, Hakka, and Indonesian. Through him I came to know members of his family who all helped, most especially his brother-in-law AThong. I also met his other brother-in-law, Steven, who led us on a one-day trip to the c...