Jen Knight says that she "won the in-laws lottery" when it comes to her Chinese husband's parents. But luck wasn't on her side this past January, when a day after she arrived in her husband's hometown just outside of Wuhan for a Spring Festival celebration, the Chinese government started shutting down all transit links into and out of the area, eff…

This week we're kicking off Season 4 with part 1 of a special 2-part series focusing on a pair of international migrants who have written a study on how the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in China effected foreign nationals living there. The lead researcher, Chris Barnhart, was a high school teacher in Florida who'd been laid off during a round of bu…

We're interrupting our inter-season interregnum to bring you a discussion with a group of expats who live in China but who have found themselves "stuck" in Bali after the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan shut down virtually all businesses and most travel into the country. It's estimated that there are close to 1 million foreigners living in China, and…

It's part 2 of the two-part Season 3 finale, wherein Mike & Alisa take a look at the issues and problems that have come up for the in their move from Beijing to Bali with a professional. Dr. Sonia Jaeger is a clinical psychologist & psychotherapist who is one of the growing number of location independent professionals who choose to live and work fr…

Season 3 is coming to a close, and in part 1 of the two-part season finale I'm joined by my wife, Alisa Rutherford-Fortunati, to talk about our move from Beijing to Bali, which is our first transition between locations as a couple. There have been lots of unexpected twists and turns, from trouble finding a house, to developing new routines, to just…

Daniela Tomer, founder of Global Nomad's World, knows something about migration. Not only is she a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping families deal with the issues surrounding migration, but she's the product of migration herself. Born to parents who had fled from Eastern Europe to Argentina in the early days of WWII, Daniela migrated…

As Victoria sees it, "To become an American, you have to put in a lot of work." After all, that's been her story. Victoria's path to the U.S. started with a stroke of luck: Her mother won the visa lottery, granting her and her daughter entry to the country; but as many immigrants soon learn after they arrive, the streets in America are not paved wi…

Nut butters were never supposed to be a part of Meredith Sides' life; but, then again, neither was living abroad. Not wanting to choose the path that most other people in her small town followed - moving from high school into the trades, farming or beauty school - she moved to Philadelphia for college, did a semester abroad in Europe, and then, on …

We all need community. And nobody needs community more than people who move overseas; we leave family and friends behind when we move, and building new networks and support systems is vital for us. This can be an especially fraught process for members of the LGBTQ community. This week, we're collaborating with our sister podcast Pop Abroad to take …

Wherever people gather, you'll find music. This certainly holds true for migrant communities. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the music being made in the places finds its way into popular culture. In a world of streaming and niche audiences, you can find an an amazing variety of musical styles and cross-cultural mashups to tickle your ears w…

Shannon Martin thinks a lot about life stages- of podcasts and of people. Currently the Director of Communications at Podbean, the hosting platform for all of Migration Media's shows, she has a bird's eye view of the rapidly-changing world of on-demand audio and often helps shows just starting out to grow and endure. She also works with Aging Wisel…

This week I've got some more bonus content to share with you: a recent episode of The Bittersweet Life podcast. On my last episode I spoke with co-host Katy Sewall about her journey from a safe career with NPR to expat, to podcasting entrepreneur, and we touched on some of the themes that come up often in her show. In essence, I tried to do in abou…

Katy Sewall used to be, as she says, one of those "get-a-great-job-and-hang-onto-it" kind of people. That is, until she got an opportunity to move to Rome where her best friend from childhood, Tiffany Parks, had been living for several years. A senior producer at NPR's Seattle affiliate, Katy decided to jump at the chance for adventure and turn her…

Chaniece started her journey towards life overseas when she was deciding which foreign language to take in college. As it turned out, the professor with the highest satisfaction ratings from students taught Chinese, so that's what she chose. After scoring consistently high grades in her classes, she decided to make it her major and her fate was sea…

This week I've got a bonus mini-pod for you! Both before and after my interviews with Olivia Muszynski & Alaina Miller - the Ricci Scholars featured in my previous two episodes - we had fun, engaging conversations about a lot of topics that I couldn't fit into their podcasts, which is a pity because they're both brilliant, driven people who are end…

While the small town in Michigan where she grew up is the place that she goes back to whenever she "needs a safe haven," Alaina Miller doesn't think of it as "Home" anymore. Not since she set off for school in Chicago- and especially not since she spent the last year studying abroad as part of the Ricci Scholars program at Loyola College. What's dr…

This week I'm sharing the first of my conversations with two recipients of the 2018-2019 Ricci Scholarship. This Loyola University program offers scholarships to highly qualified students to spend their junior year studying abroad in 2 countries and conducting cross-cultural research. Olivia Muszynski owns the fact that she's still figuring things …

Steve Schwankert is one of the proudest and most committed expats that I've ever met. Originally from "the part of New Jersey that loves Spingsteen, and not the part that loves Bon Jovi," Steven had his eyes set on moving to China as early as high school. Now, 23 years after making the leap, he's sick and tired of people asking him when he's going …

This week we're sharing a little something extra with you: The episode of The Stoop that got me hooked on the show! As I discussed with her during our interview earlier this week, co-host Hana Baba has explored and discovered new things about her heritage through her work producing her podcast. One of the things that she talked about with me are th…

Hana Baba, the award-winning host of Crosscurrents on KALW & co-host of the groundbreaking podcast, The Stoop, grew up in much the same way as her baby sister, Ethar (see previous episode)- by splitting her time between Khartoum, Sudan, and the U.S. Now that she's all grown up with a family of her own, the concept of "Home" is complicated, as it st…

This week I'm bringing you the first of my conversations with two sisters who've shared a similar globe-spanning bi-cultural upbringing. Ethar Baba is the youngest in a family of 6 Sudanese-American children who all split their time between their parents' hometown of Khartoum and Washington, D.C. Moving back and forth between cultures during her ch…

We kick off Season 3 of the show by welcoming our newest team member to Migration Media, Michelle Ibarra! Her show, Pop Abroad, explores the keys to finding success and living your best life overseas. The show's first season explores the importance of community in our lives and how successful people have built theirs. Her own desire for community l…

Welcome to Season 3 of Migratory Patterns! After dozens of conversations across 2 seasons I'm more passionate than ever about exploring the lives of international migrants. What drives us to move away from home? What makes us stay overseas? And how does it change us? As an expat myself, I'm exploring these ideas within my own life, and I'm thrilled…

Season 2 has wrapped, but I'm dropping this special bonus episode as a "Going On Hiatus" present. This past spring, I organized a Beijing chapter of Podcast Brunch Club, a global community of podcast enthusiasts who gather each month to talk about what they're listening to and share recommendations. To help things along, leaders provide a Listening…

This is it dear listeners. We've come to the end of yet another season- and what a ride it's been! When I began this experiment last summer I was searching for community. I was thinking a lot about the changes that I have gone through as I have spent more and more time overseas, and I was wondering if anybody else out there was going through the sa…

While growing up in his native Argentina, Brian O'shea never quite felt like he belonged, so it's no surprise that his idea of where "Home" is boils down the sum of an equation with ever-shifting values that works out to something like Home = Where You Are + Where Your family Is + Where the People You Care About Are. It's probably one of the most a…

Jun Trinh never thought he'd be in China. As a half-Chinese kid growing up in Toronto he refused offers to take trips there with his family. He never went to Mandarin class. But now, 11 years after a detour during an around-the-world trip all but marooned him in Beijing, he's thinking about his next steps and reflecting on the internal voyage of se…

Alex Sherr didn't choose the #ExpatLife. His parents brought him from his native New York to Hong Kong while he was in high school, but he's taken to life as a foreigner with gusto. After graduation, he spent a gap year in Beijing learning Chinese, and never left. A year of college prep was followed by enrollment in Peking University's prestigious …

What it's like to want it all, to be able to live in 2 worlds at once? Like several other people who I've spoken with,, Gabe Clermont often feels like he's rooted in two worlds: His hometown of New York, and the place where he's been able to thrive professionally. In part 2 of our conversation, we touch on the challenges that feeling at home in mul…

Gabriel Clermont has a deep affinity for his hometown of New York, yet feels that it was kind of inevitable that he made the leap to living overseas, trading one global media hub for another. Each of his parents has an extraordinary #MigrationStory, and he "Didn't want to be the least adventurous person in [his] family." As familiar as living in a …

Barbara Chen got her first taste of China in 1989 (what timing!), fell in love, got married, and after a stint back in the US, has called Beijing home for the last 18 years. During that time she's raised a bi-cultural family and now works as a recruiter for an American university, helping Chinese kids make the leap to the west for their education. …

Born in America, Mio Rudnicki grew up as a TCK, bouncing around the world as part of a multicultural family. In essence, she's been a migrant all of her life. So when she ended up in the US for high school and college, the experience that most of us take for granted was a huge culture shock for her. How do you navigate your daily life when you're s…

I've often described Badr Benjelloun as the quintessential example of a "Renaissance Expat," and this was never more obvious than when he opened Cu Ju, Beijing's first (and only) Moroccan/Rum/Sports Bar in one of the city's 1,000 year-old hutongs (alleyways). It was seen by many as a living example of the unique cultural mash-up that can only happe…

Born and raised on Russia's "Fish Tail" island of Sakhalin, Margarita Lukavenko got her first taste of foreign culture when she went to Malaysia as part of an exchange program at 16. Save for her final year of high school, she's been a migrant ever since- first as a student in far-off (and practically foreign) Moscow, and then as an educator and en…

When I met Dr. Kate Bailey Gardner in Boston in the mid-1990s she felt, as she says, "Like a bit of a social outcast." The term "TCK" was still new and she was coming to terms with her identity as a kid raised overseas who had moved back to her passport country for college. She's been on a journey to find herself and what "Home" means for her ever …

We humans have a deep need for community- none more so than we humans who are living outside of our places of origin. The power of community organizing is twofold: We not only make ourselves feel like we fit and belong in a place, but it also helps us discover more about ourselves. The overseas journey of my guest this week, Abe Sorock, began as a …

My good friend Adriana, who I have known since she first moved to China from her native Romania back in 2011, is a person I've always admired. From an early age she stood out from her cohort- people who came of age just as their country emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. She discovered Couchsurfing in its early days and was an active member of t…

It'd be tough to find someone who has had a more successful #MigrationStory than PT Black, but it's also one that you would not expect. He grew up in a famous Boston neighborhood, was able to get into top schools and then launch a career in international business in New York. But after watching the second plane fly into the World Trade Center from …

As a child growing up in the predominantly white, John Hughes-ian suburbs outside Chicago (think Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club and Uncle Buck), Daphne Cheng rebelled against the expectations of her parents' native Chinese culture, but she also didn't identify with her surroundings. She chafed at taking Chinese lessons on weekends and…

From the very start, Amelie Mongrain has been in places where she had to fit herself into her surroundings, which might be why she says that home is "wherever my two feet are." She's gone from a child of Quebecois parents growing up in rural northeastern Ontario, to a high school exchange student in Turkey, to big city life in Montreal for universi…

Kira Sirois can kick my ass. At least that's the feeling that I had when we sat down for our chat. It's not that she's mean or puts off an "I'm ready to fight you" vibe. Rather, there's a "solid-ness" to her, an inner strength that demands to be recognized & dealt with. So what happens when a tough-as-nails military brat finds herself butting heads…

Richard Robinson isn't a guest on this week's show because of his status as a legend in Chinese entrepreneurial circles. Nor is it because we went to the same high school (though about a decade removed from each other). He's on because he represents a phenomenon among many expats that I've noticed within myself: We grasp onto and amplify the cultur…

Migratory Patterns' 2-part Season 2 kick-off continues as I chat with another one of my BFFs from college, Josh Gardner. Josh first traveled to China in the mid 1990s as an anthropology student where he almost died when he caught typhoid while conducting research in rural Yunan province. But this didn't deter him. He came back for a short stint aft…

Season 2 of Migratory Patterns kicks off with a twist: On a trip back to my hometown of Boston in December for my BFF's wedding, she took the reins of the show when we sat down to talk about what life overseas is like for me. I've known Virginia Johnson since she started college, and we've been close friends for 20+ years (my wife calls her my "sis…

To wrap us Season 1 of Migratory Patterns we end where we began: by welcoming my amazing wife & partner, Alisa (Margaret!) Rutherford-Fortunati, onto the show. A lot has changed since we recorded what was supposed to be a test interview in early April. Now, one move across town, a Masters degree, and 19 episodes later, we sit down to... well, I don…

When you consider that, according to the U.N., there are over 250 million people living outside of their country of legal residence, it's pretty shocking that there hasn't been very much social research conducted on them. This week's guest, Tanya Crossman, is one of the people trying to change this. 2 years ago she vented her curiosity and frustrat…

Like many people who choose to live overseas, Katie Capstick never imagined that she'd leave her home in the northwest corner of England... until a chance conversation with a Chinese student at university led to an internship with the U.N in Beijing. After 6 months in China she was hooked, and for the last year and a half shes been doing the "Expat…

Sarah Peel is one of my Beijing friends from way back, and one of the friends who I admire the most. Originally from a small town in Ontario, she's lived near Hiroshima, Japan, Beijing, and has been in Shanghai for 6 years. We met for a drink at our favorite Beijing bar to catch up, and so that she could tell me the details of her #MigrationStory. …

As if choosing the #ExpatLife wasn't a big enough change in one's life- imagine falling n love almost as soon as you get to your first new country. In one sense, taking a big life-changing leap may seem easier if you're thinking of doing it after just having taken another one, but all too often overseas relationships, especially those that come abo…

This week's guest has seen it all. 99 year-old Eleanor Liu might very well be the oldest foreigner in China, who's been living the #ExpatLife since the early 1980s. Born in Tennessee in the days after WWI, she came of age in the American South during the Great Depression and WWII. In the years that followed she would graduate from university, get h…