Interesting people

On top of the interesting people I met while in Cincinnati, on the way to and from and in Denver I met several interesting people. Jiexia (pictured above) is a first-year sociology professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where my former colleague Gina is one of her colleagues. Somehow I was sitting next to Jiexia on BOTH my flight from Cincinnato to Denver, and on the flight back. Jiexia got me to tell the story of my Korean grandfather, Harabaji, and then told me about her own grandfather, a hero of the Chinese Revolution whose humiliation during the Cultural Revolution was so thorough that his wife, Jiexia's grandmother died. On the bus trip from the Denver airport to downtown Thursday night, I met Mark, a grad student for whom I pulled out my laptop to see he could help me with some of the regression analysis for my presentation later at the conference. Finally, I met two interesting Eastern European women. A night clerk at the hotel printed and made 25 copies of my 8-page presentation handout. She had moved to Denver some 10 years ago from Croatia, in the aftermath of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Another Eastern European woman I met was Olga, a sociologist from the former Soviet republic of Belarus, who was trying to introduce congregational studies to her country (via some training at the University of Texas at Austin, where Jiexia had also studied.

-- Perry