Greetings from the sunny…uh…well…not today…Southern California! Varavarai Oakley (Phromyothi) Boren reporting in from Long Beach, California, offering up the perspective of a Thai woman with an American husband living in the United States.
First of all, thank you Richard for putting up this blog. It’s a wonderful space! I’ve been sending my American friends here to read the blog so that they’d really believe a wonderful holiday of Songkran really does exist. (Of course, after I flicked some water at them, they’d want to know if Songkran is real or I made that up just to be able to flick water at their heads.)
Now, a little bit about me. I came to the US in 1993 to attend 11th grade in Orange County, California, as the only international student at the school. I proceeded to University of Southern California. Instead of returning home after graduation, I stayed another year and landed a job at Hollywood Stock Exchange, a dot com, who kept me on as an intern when I returned to USC for graduate school in 2000. I met my husband Brandon at HSX, and we got married after my graduation in 2002. I live in Long Beach, but I work in Downtown Los Angeles as a communications manager at a non-profit organization.
I’ve been into blogging for about a year now, getting more active as I go. I used to write articles for The Nation’s Femme for Women magazine while I was in grad school called “West of Campus”. It was an advice column about student life in the US. Now that I’m in an interracial marriage with my family back in Thailand, I hope to shed some lights on how Thai cultures still affect my daily life, how relationships on both side of the Pacific works, how Americans think of Thailand, and perhaps share some thoughts on being married to my big, geeky white guy. 🙂
Warning: I am outspoken and opinionated, sarcastic and fully capable of being a smarty pants, and occasionally a little bitter. Not all that typical of the general Thai women population. So please, don’t think that Thai women are all like me because I *am* a freak of nature. As my mom would say, she has 3 sons, not 2 sons and a daughter. Haha.
Looking forward to posting and “meeting” you all!
Oakley (Oh+) Boren
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