Hi! Cześć! Salut! 你好！

Before I was born, my parents decided to emigrate from then-communist ruled Poland to virtually anywhere else: their choice (and only practical opportunity to obtain a passport) was to go to North Africa, to Algeria. The reason being, that the then freshly independent country was in the process of severing colonial ties with France and the majority of the former French colonists were gone. As a result, Algeria was actively searching for skilled labour from other parts of the world. With the Cold War at its height, the Eastern Block countries provided Algeria with the professional assistance it needed, and in the process my parents got the opportunity to leave.

Algeria's cultural richness and diversity amazed my parents, ​who considered their 5 year stay there as one of the best periods of their lives. Nevertheless, due to internal turmoil in the country, they were eventually forced to leave. However, returning to Poland was also not an option, as Martial Law had just been implemented in an attempt to quell pro-democracy forces within the country. Without much other choice, my parents and sister moved to Canada.

I was born in Ottawa, in 1989. As such, English became my first language, although I simultaneously have had early exposure to Polish and French. Even though I was a clueless child, I loved Canada for its natural beauty, the warmth of its people, the diversity and tolerance of its society. 

 

In 1995, after 10 years in Canada my family decided to move back to Poland - and, of course, they brought the 6 year old me with them. For a very long time Poland felt to me as not only a strange but also very foreign place to be - very different from the multicultural and bilingual Canada, which at the time ranked #1 in terms of quality of life in the world. Poland was anything but. The only way one can describe Poland of the 90s is with the word grey: grey buildings, grey life, grey people. It took much adjusting to, and the natural difficulty of the Polish language and somber mentality of most Poles did not aid in any way.

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Nevertheless, growing up I got to see the country transform itself from being Europe's armpit to its beating heart. The first steps were small: the successful arrival of Western companies (like McD's and Coke) combined with the failure of others (like Dunkin'). I vividly remember the first times I saw Kit Kat bars, Heinz Ketchup bottles, and Smarties arrive onto the shelves of Polish grocery stores - and only as a late teen I could finally purchase some of the things I took for granted while a kid in Canada.

 

The real shift and explosion happened however in 2004, when Poland entered the European Union. After decades of economic stagnation millions of Poles could finally search for opportunities across the continent. So did I. After graduating from high school I ended up in Sweden as part of the EU wide scholarship program known as Erasmus. Sweden was like a breath of fresh air for me, as it reminded me much of Canada - but not entirely. It was there and then that I understood that many of the cultural aspects I had considered as "typically Polish" were in fact wider European (or at least North-European) traits. Sweden and Swedes were not subject to the perversions of communism, yet their attitudes and expressions often seemed equally... aloof. It was there that I had gained a true passion and interest in the study of cultural differences. 

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By pure luck and chance, having had studied in Sweden long enough, I was given the possibility to study further abroad: first for a semester in Mexico in 2010 and then a semester in Taiwan in 2011. These were truly eye opening and mind-broadening experiences for me (just like previously Algeria was for my parents) and without much hesitation I decided to pursue a degree in social sciences pertaining to the study of Asian culture. The study of Chinese language became a focal point of many of the endeavours I engaged in during my late twenties. It eventually brought me back to Taiwan in 2017-2018.

With time, an aspect that started to draw my attention was the different cultural expressions of laughter, humour and comedy around the world (especially, but not only, the differences between Western and Eastern approaches to joking). This interest only grew, and eventually it became the basis of my academic research, culminating in a thesis titled "The Cultural Differences in the Politicization of Comedy".  I defended it during the summer of 2024.