Running away from home

(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon.)

For a long time, it's been a goal of mine to live and work someplace where the language is something other than English. I've studied French in school and I've studied a bit of Mandarin and Japanese. And Swedish. But I'd never had the opportunity to live in another language, to get comfortable enough to have casual conversations and say the things I want to say.

Two years ago (2022) my Aunt Siv planned an 80th birthday celebration for herself, inviting the whole family to join her for a party in Lappland (northern Sweden). Coming out of two long pandemic years, we were eager to go and travel. There was still a lot of uncertainty about Covid, and with the invasion of Ukraine adding to the feeling that the trip might or might not happen, we booked refundable tickets for a vacation in Sweden. 

Swedish was my first language! My parents both grew up in Sweden, but met and married in Ohio. My mom's teenaged sister Siv came over to help my mom with the baby (me) so there was a lot of Swedish in the house. When I started going to nursery school I quickly learned English, and began refusing to speak Swedish. By the time I got to kindergarten, I had completely forgotten all of my Swedish language. But traces remained. After college I decided I should learn Swedish and I took a class in Stockholm. Learning Swedish was completely different from learning French in school, because I could hear in my head if it was right. After one day of class, I could speak 2 sentences of perfect Swedish. I confidently went into a shop, used my 2 perfect sentences, and got into deep trouble because I had no clue what the answers meant. I had a good accent without much trying. This has been very helpful, because when swedes hear a foreigner try to speak Swedish, they immediately switch to English, making it rather difficult for the foreigner to learn. Not me. Swedish people are amazed that I seem to be able to speak good Swedish.

I wanted to improve my Swedish, so I wanted a little longer in Sweden than the rest of the family, and our planning took its final shape when my wife said "Eric, you should just stay! For years you been saying you want to live somewhere in another language, and now the internet lets you work from where ever you want!" So all of a sudden I was going to spend four weeks in Stockholm on my own without much of a plan. I was scared. How would I meet people? Sure, I could sit in my AirBnB and work as a digital nomad, but what would be the point?

Running was one of the answers. There was a half-marathon to run, RUNmaröloppet,  that would take me out to an island in Stockholm's archipelago. I had identified a running club, Mikkeller Running Club Stockholm,   that seemed sociable, as they meet at a bar on Tuesdays and have beers afterward. Both of these turned out to be awesome. And so I started running away from home. 

Running with a group is universal and local at the same time. No matter where you run you can have the same conversations with whoever's running next to you. "Are you training for a race?" "My legs are so stiff." "I'm recovering from an IT-band strain." "My name is Eric, have we run together before?" But every route you run is different in its own beautiful way, and the group helps  newcomers (and often the regulars!) to avoid getting lost. By the end of the run, the group has shared an indelible experience and there aren't strangers anymore.

RUNmaröloppet was a blast. You have to take a boat to the island. The course is quite technical in places and is also the most beautiful race I've ever run. I did it again this year, and finished 5th in my age group, despite a lingering knee injury that force me to use walk-run again. Full disclosure: I also finished DFL (Dead F-in Last) out of 282 runners, and was never so happy with a finish.

Mikkeller Running Club Stockholm meets every Tuesday on the lively urban island of Södermalm. Good people, good beer, 5K, 7K and longer routes. The 5K is at a "cozy" pace and welcomes runners of all paces. (Linguistic note: back home we call it "sexy" pace. Maybe this has deep sociological meaning. Or maybe it's the conversion from km to mi.) 

In Stockholm I discovered this thing called ParkRun.  These people have taken "running away from home" to extremes. ParkRun started somewhere in England and has spread around the world like a pandemic. They have special t-shirts to commemorate milestones such as a runner's 100th ParkRun. I've now run the ParkRun in Stockholm's Haga Park 6 times. It's a timed 5K run. At every run there are people from all over the world - last week I met a couple from Sheffield who had hopped off their cruise ship and took a taxi to the ParkRun so they could add Sweden to their list of ParkRun countries.  Some of them even try to run ParkRun places starting with every letter of the alphabet! I love how crazy runners can be.

My Stockholm 2022 sojourn was topped off by a 10K race around Södermalm called "Midnattsloppet".  Midnattsloppet is sort of a night-time EuroPop Bay-to-Breakers. 22,000 runners in the 10K, another 17K in the 5K. There was a musical act every kilometer to fire up the runners but only two water stations on that pretty warm night. At the top of the first big hill, there was a choir of ~20 blonde women singing “Waterloo” which I thought a poor choice given the pre-ABBA history of Waterloo. The faster waves of runners got “We are the Champions”. At the start, runners were prompted to sing a song which apparently is the anthem of the Hammarby Football Club, written by a guy who must have been the guitarist for a Swedish Spinal Tap. Apparently he caused a scandal by wearing a "69" T-shirt on Swedish television and sadly died at a young age. On Midnattsloppet night you can walk into any bar in Stockholm in a shirt dripping with sweat and the bouncer will say "Good Jobb!". (I verified this.)

I now have a pair of ruby red New Balance 1080 version 12s. (NOT v13!) My running gait is such that there's a flat wear spot where my feet click together. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

This series of posts:

• We'll run till we drop
• Running song of the day 
• All the Streets in Montclair
• Running away from home
• Thank You, New York City

2017: Not So Prime

Mathematicians call 2017 a prime year because 2017 has no prime factors other than 1 and 2017. Those crazy number theorists.

I try to write at least one post here per month. I managed two in January. One of them raged at a Trump executive order that compelled federal libraries to rat on their users. Update: Trump is still president.  The second pointed out that Google had implemented cookie-like user tracking on previously un-tracked static resources like Google Fonts, jQuery, and Angular. Update: Google is still user-tracking these resources.

For me, the highlight of January was marching in Atlanta's March for Social Justice and Women with a group of librarians.  Our chant: "Read, resist, librarians are pissed!"

In February, I wrote about how to minimize the privacy impact of using Google Analytics.  Update: Many libraries and publishers use Google Analytics without minimizing privacy impact.

In March, I bemoaned the intense user tracking that scholarly journals force on their readers.  Update: Some journals have switched to HTTPS (good) but still let advertisers track every click their readers make.

I ran my first-ever half-marathon!

In April, I invented CC-licensed "clickstream poetry" to battle the practice of ISPs selling my clickstream.  Update: I sold an individual license to my poem!

I dressed up as the "Trump Resistor" for the Science March in New York City. For a brief moment I trended on Twitter. As a character in Times Square, I was more popular than the Naked Cowboy!

In May, I tried to explain Readium's "lightweight DRM".  Update: No one really cares - DRM is a fig-leaf anyway.

In June, I wrote about digital advertising and how it has eviscerated privacy in digital libraries.  Update: No one really cares - as long as PII is not involved.

I took on the administration of the free-programming-books repo on GitHub.  At almost 100,000 stars, it's the 2nd most popular repo on all of GitHub, and it amazes me. If you can get 1,000 contributors working together towards a common goal, you can accomplish almost anything!

In July, I wrote that works "ascend" into the public domain. Update: I'm told that Saint Peter  has been reading the ascending-next-monday-but-not-in-the-US "Every Man Dies Alone" 

I went to Sweden, hiked up a mountain in Lappland, and saw many reindeer.

In August, I described how the National Library of Medicine lets Google connect Pubmed usage to Doubleclick advertising profiles.  Update: the National Library of Medicine still lets Google connect Pubmed usage to Doubleclick advertising profiles.

In September, I described how user interface changes in Chrome would force many publishers to switch to HTTPS to avoid shame and embarassment.  Update: Publishers such as Elsevier, Springer and Proquest switched services to HTTPS, avoiding some shame and embarrassment.

I began to mentor two groups of computer-science seniors from Stevens Institute of Technology, working on projects for Unglue.it and Gitenberg. They are a breath of fresh air!

In October, I wrote about new ideas for improving user experience in ebook reading systems.  Update: Not all book startups have died.

In November, I wrote about how the Supreme Court might squash out an improvement to the patent system. Update: no ruling yet.

I ran a second half marathon!

In December, I'm writing this summary. Update: I've finished writing it.

On the bright side, we won't have another prime year until 2027. 2018 is twice a prime year. That hasn't happened since 1994, the year Yahoo was launched and the year I made my first web page!

Christmas and Cooking

In Lalbagh Garden, in Bangalore, I found this plaque establishing the link between Christmas (tree) and the Cook (pine):

"Christian community treat this tree as sacred one & worship during Christmas."

Note the Muslim women having a photo snapped, with "Christmas Trees" in the background.

In my house, many holiday rituals surround cooking. One of my most precious possessions is this copy of Stora Kokboken, which I haul out every December to help with my liver pâté, my award-winning Swedish coffeebread and whatever else sparks happy memories. I say hello to my mom's notations and feel her presence.

(Stora Kokboken, Edith Ekegårdh and Britta Hallman-Haggren, Wezäta Förlag, Göteborg, 1957)

Opposite the title page is this:

My parents were married in December of 1957; the cookbook was a Christmas present from my mom's father, stepmother and stepsister. The note says "En god jul önskar vi er!" which translates as "We wish you a Merry Christmas".

What they said.

Charlie Chan Actor Warner Oland Not Mongolian, Say Wikipedia

When my mom was pregnant with her third child, my dad loved it when people asked if they were expecting a boy or a girl. "Well" he'd answer with a twinkle in his eye. "They say one of every 3 children born in the world are Chinese, so for our third child, that's what we're expecting!"

My parents were Swedish. My father was born in Gary, Indiana, but grew up in northern Sweden; my mother was born in Sweden and her mother was a Lapp, or Saami. After his retirement, my father became very interested in genealogy, and he traced his ancestors and relatives, almost 10,000 of them. Since about the year 1400 Sweden has done a very good job of recording births and deaths in church records, and since people didn't move around much, it's not hard for us to trace people. In the farming villages where my parents came from, everybody is related to everybody else.

I've inherited my dad's database and I've put it online. Doing so has has put me in touch with a fascinating variety of distant cousins. Among my distant relatives was the actor Warner Oland, who became famous for portraying Charlie Chan in Hollywood movies. Warner Oland, whose real name was Johan Verner Ölund, was a third cousin to my father's mother. My father noted in his database that he remembered when Warner Oland came to their village by car and met my grandparents. It must have been the same year Warner Oland died, 1938.

Naturally, I pay attention whenever Oland in mentioned in the media. Over the last week, I've read articles in the New Yorker and in the New York Times about a new book by UCSB English Professor Yunte Huang. The book is entitled Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History; it tells the story of the "real" Charlie Chan, a detective in Honolulu, Hollywood's portrayal of Charlie Chan, and Huang's own story as a chinese immigrant in America. A significant part of the book recounts the odd story of how a Swedish actor came to portray the quintessential Chinese detective.

When I read the New Yorker article, I immediately put the book on my "must read" list. (Unfortunately, it's not available as an ebook, and is sold out of my local bookstores!) But one sentence of the New Yorker review, written by Harvard history professor Jill Lapore, stuck out for me:

Oland, born in Sweden in 1880, had, beginning in 1917, specialized in playing Oriental villains, including Dr. Fu Manchu. (Oland's mother was Russian, and he had slavic features.)

Oland's mother was NOT Russian. Oland's mother was my grandmother's third cousin. His father was a 5th cousin to my grandmother. The Swedish genealogist Sven-Erik Johansson has specialized in the digitization of the church records in the region of northern Sweden where Oland and my grandparents came from and has published an ancestor chart for Warner Oland going back 5 generations. None of those ancestors come from Russia. To top it off, Warner Oland was born in 1879, not 1880 as reported in the New Yorker.

So where did the idea that Oland had a Russian mother come from? Doesn't the New Yorker have fact checkers? I went to Wikipedia to find out. The Wikipedia article said that "His mother was Russian of Mongolian descent.", referencing a "page not found" Internet Movie Database (IMDB) article. I refound that article, which says:

He didn't need make-up when he played Charlie Chan; all he would do is curl down his moustache and curl up his eyebrows. In fact, the Chinese often mistook him for one of their own countrymen. He attributed this to the fact that his Russian grandmother was of Mongolian descent.

So IMDB says it's his grandmother who's Russian and of "Mongolian descent"; the key thing to note is the attribution. I immediately edited the Wikipedia article to omit to spurious information. A day later, a wikipedian had put back the Mongolian bit, but more accurately worded as being something Oland said. A proper reference, to a book by Ken Hanke, Charlie Chan at the Movies: History, Filmography, and Criticism (Google Books, Amazon) had been added. That book says:

"Even before the role of Charlie Chan came his way, Oland was a frequent onscreen Oriental, despite the fact that he was born in Sweden to a mixture of Swedish and Russian Parents. Physically, he had an exotic look to begin with, and the addition of an Oriental-style mustache and beard made the transformation complete. "I owe my Chinese appearance to the Mongol invasion," he once told Keye Luke. "That's true," Luke agrees, "because the Mongols did get up there around Sweden and Finland and naturally sired some children, and so, he said, 'I come by it naturally.' And, his whole family looked like that." There was never any need for elaborate make-up. "All he did," explains Luke. "was put that little goatee on his chin. Otherwise, he had his own mustache. Everything was just like that. No make-up. It's just amazing."

At this point, I must make an observation. Please look at the photo and decide for yourself. As far as I can judge, Warner Oland didn't look the least bit Oriental. He looked like most everyone else living in that area of northern Sweden would look if they put on a smudge of eyebrow makeup. But the resemblance to that Chinese detective in the movies is uncanny!

There is, however, a story I remember my dad telling about a deserter from the Russian army. (The Russians burned down the closest city, Umeå, in a war in 1720.) It was said that this deserter hid in the woods or disguised himself as one of the locals. The way my dad told it, it was quite a scandal, even 200 years later. So maybe Warner Oland was joking when he said his mother was "Russian". In any case, the mysterious Russian in my family does not appear in the church records!

If Oland really had exotic features, it's much more likely he got them from a source other than a stray Mongolian. The closest the Mongols got to northern Sweden was Lithuania. In the area where Oland's family originated, the ethnic mix was dominated by Finns, Swedes, and Saami.

Take a look at a photo of my mother's cousin (unrelated to Oland), a pure Saami. With a bit of make-up (and some acting talent), she would have easily been able to play a Chinese woman. The Saami look quite different from the Finns and the Swedes. They are an indigenous people of Scandinavia, and no one really knows where they came from. Though their language is related to Finnish, they are not genetically related to the Finns. A recent DNA study (PDF, 399KB) published in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggests that they are related to the Berbers of northern Africa. It may well be that Oland thought they might be related to the Mongols.

There's another interpretation of Oland's references to his "Mongolian" blood. In his time, children with Down's syndrome were referred to as "Mongoloid". In the 19th century, Down's syndrome was regarded as an expression of genetic "degeneration" toward the inferior "Mongoloid" races. It could well be that jokes about Mongolian ancestry reflected a belief that cases of Down's Syndrome were a result of racial contamination. My father's database shows many examples of women with large families bearing children into their 40's; his own familiy of 11 included one Down's child.

So it seems likely that Warner Oland's statements about his ancestry were either inventions or jests. What's interesting to me is how this truth is constructed. It's not hard for people to look at the evidence now available and decide that a genealogist working with church records is probably more reliable than a co-star's recollection of an actor's constructed persona with regard to Oland's ancestry. Yunte Huang, the author of the new book, emailed me to say he agreed that it was a jest of Oland, who was known to be "quite a wisecracker". Now THAT sounds like my Dad's family!

At first glance you might say Wikipedia is totally unreliable, because anyone can change it. But compared to the New Yorker, IMDB, and a book published in 2004, Wikipedia is more reliable because it CAN be changed, and because it supports a version history and a culture of citation and transparency for any information that might be disputed. While I'm optimistic about Wikipedia's ability to construct truth, I'm worried about systems that extract facts from Wikipedia articles and feed them in to the semantic web. While editing the article on Warner Oland, I deleted the assertion that he was a "Swedish Person Of Russian Descent". I wonder about the lifespan of this assertion as it has been copied and distributed throughout the world. There are really no good mechanisms to de-sert this sort of assertion. It's only with context that assertions can build truth.

As it happens, I married into a family that really IS Chinese. I remember showing my mother-in-law old pictures of Saami ancestors in their traditional dress. "Those look like Manchu people!" she exclaimed. It's true. If you put aside the lens of race, we all look more or less alike, and we all look a bit exotic.

Update: The author of the New Yorker article, Jill Lapore, got back to me to report that her article relied on the entry for Warner Oland in American National Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000) for the assertion about Oland's mother's ancestry.

Update, August 23: Some additional research shows that Oland is also a third cousin of my grandmother.