April 2025
Agnes He
On Christmas Day 2024, I had a Zoom call to exchange holiday greetings with Snezha and her children, Sandy (and his fiancée Laima) and Andro. Snezha is a very special person to me; she was once my graduate student, research assistant, and co-author on one of my earliest publications.
We first met when she came to the United States from Bulgaria as a Fulbright scholar. Although I was her professor, our relationship quickly became one of mutual learning and sharing. We connected instantly, perhaps because we both came from countries — Bulgaria and China — with similar recent sociopolitical histories. There was a quiet understanding between us, a recognition of the struggles and hopes shaped by the worlds we had grown up in.
That was the early 1990s, and I was deeply moved by Snezha’s sincerity and eagerness to learn. She approached every opportunity with a kind of reverence I recognized — the kind that often shines most brightly in international students who come from places where opportunities are scarce and, therefore, cherished.
Another bond between us was more personal: Snezha is older than me. Back then she was already a mother, and pregnant with her second child during the time she worked as my research assistant. I remember worrying every time we worked together, afraid that something might happen. She would laugh and reassure me, saying the worst that could happen was her water breaking. "What water?" I once asked, completely bewildered — a moment we still laugh about today.
Remarkably, across more than thirty years, we have stayed in touch — as colleagues in linguistics and as personal friends. We've watched each other's lives unfold, sharing stories of our work, our families, and especially our children. I am privileged to have a close relationship with Sandy and Andro; they once even visited me on their own — Sandy flying in from Munich and Andro from UPenn. They are affectionate, brilliant young men, and if I could, I would gladly claim them as my own.
During our Christmas call, Snezha suggested we meet in Latvia, where Sandy is now the Music Director of the National Theater in Riga. I said, “Why not?” — after all, I am still on sabbatical, and Jackson and I had never been to any of the Baltic states.
Soon after, we began searching for flights. We discovered there were no direct routes from New York to Riga — we would need to stop over in either Stockholm or Helsinki. That gave us an idea: why not turn this into a bigger adventure? We could visit all three cities — Stockholm, Riga, and Helsinki. And when Yiran heard about our plan, she decided to join us as well.
And so, around Easter 2025, off we went — setting out on a journey that was part reunion, part exploration.
Some captivate us because we once knew them; others, because we’ve known them forever, or because of what they do, or because they reflect something of ourselves back to us — or, sometimes, because they expand the horizons of who we are. And then there are those whose memory lingers inexplicably in our minds, their presence tucked away until something — a city, a street — brings them suddenly, vividly, back to life.
When we first arrived in Stockholm, a name popped up up from the depths of memory: Tom, a Swedish journalist I met when I was an undergraduate English major in Beijing. Tom had been studying Chinese, and during a summer internship with the language program he attended, I accompanied him around the city on various outings. It was through Tom that I first realized how English could be a bridge not only to native English speakers, but to people from all corners of the world. Looking back, he was among the first to introduce me to the joys and the challenges of intercultural communication. If memory serves, he was working for Svenska Dagbladet at the time. For a while, we stayed in touch by post, exchanging letters across continents. Before this trip, it hadn't crossed my mind to bring his address with me — and now, here in Sweden, I found myself wishing I had.
But in truth, the people who most occupied my mind in connection to Stockholm were the members of ABBA. Their melodies, sweet, buoyant, and ever so slightly melancholic, had been the soundtrack to countless moments of my youth, both in solitude and in friendship. A decade ago, one of their songs, Super Trouper, was even chosen as the theme music for the video commemorating the 30th anniversary of our Beiwai (Beijing Foreign Studies University, my undergraduate alma mater) graduation. Naturally, my first instinct was to visit the ABBA Museum, a brisk half-hour walk from our hotel.
When we arrived, there were snags with purchasing tickets online, and by the time we managed, we found we had to wait another hour for entry — visitors were admitted only at fixed times. As we waited, I browsed the museum’s website, reading about the exhibits: original costumes, reconstructed settings where the group first met, karaoke stations for visitors to sing along. And gradually, a strange confusion set in. Was this really what I had come for? Was I interested in their costumes? No. Did I long to sing their songs in public? Not particularly. Did it matter where they first crossed paths? Again, no.
I realized I had arrived not because I had sought a particular object or story, but because their music had been woven into the fabric of my memories. In the end, I turned to Jackson and said, "Let's forget it." Sometimes, the people — and the things — we are truly seeking live in our hearts, not in monuments or museums. How true that is.
Riga brought an entirely different kind of fulfillment: the joy of reunion. Meeting Snezha and her children in their place is a wish come true. Snezha and I have both grown older, weathering life’s storms and celebrating its triumphs. Snezha, a cognitive and historical linguist, remains an unshakable rock for her family, intellectually sharp and fiercely kind. Meeting Sandy and his fiancée, Laima, was a pure delight. Their youthful energy, artistic creativity, critical spirit, and rich multilingual lives were dazzling. Latvian, Bulgarian, Russian, German, and English are used in this family — and still, that impressive array of languages could not cover every communication gap: generational, geographic, and geopolitical divides sometimes spoke louder than words.
Sandy’s story is remarkable. The first time I met Sandy, he was just a toddler. Because his mother called me "Dr. He" back then, Sandy affectionately referred to me as "mommy’s doctor." It is deeply gratifying to see the remarkable man he has grown into today. Raised English/Scottish and Bulgarian, trained musically in German, now writing professionally in German and appearing frequently on Latvian national television speaking Latvian, he embodies a dynamic, comparative, and critical intellect.
It was a pity that, visiting during Easter, we missed seeing Maestro Sandy perform at the national theater. Being a professional musician is demanding beyond words; being a composer even more so — balancing the tug between artistic fidelity and audience expectations. I am so happy that Sandy has found a place where his music has the potential to flourish. May it continue to reach ever wider audiences. (And yes, Yiran thoroughly enjoyed joining the younger generation for some spirited barhopping in the evenings!)
Helsinki gave us a different kind of serendipity. By sheer fortune, I reconnected with Marja-Leena — my fellow student from UCLA, fellow researcher in conversation analysis, and fellow mentee under the great Manny Schegloff. Since she does not use Facebook or other social media, and since our conference paths had never crossed again, we had not seen each other since graduate school. While visiting the National Library, I noticed that the University of Helsinki was right next door. On a whim, I stepped into the main building and explained to the security guard that I was hoping to find a professor.
When I gave him Marja-Leena’s name, the security guard smiled: "Oh yes, I know her — she gave some lectures at the Language Center!" He kindly provided contact information, and soon after, Marja-Leena met us for coffee one afternoon, then again the next day, for a whole afternoon of museum visit and an evening of shared dinner, laughter, reminiscence, and deep conversation about life, work, and the political climate's impact on research and education these days. Our visit to Helsinki became much richer thanks to her companionship.
Marja-Leena, like Snezha, remains true to her intellectual passions and her personal kindness. These days, she is analyzing young children's conversational response tokens — those early, precious "one-word answers" in Finnish — both as a researcher and as a much loved aunt. And she has remained a playful, curious spirit herself. As Yiran put it, Marja-Leena is wonderfully "cool": she wears mismatched mittens because she’s lost one from each pair; she carries a giant backpack, which, on the first day we met, contained no fewer than five different Finnish translations of Alice in Wonderland — a project comparing how the English expression "oh" is rendered in Finnish across versions.
Of all the places we've traveled, we've usually been able to get by, as long as the local language uses the Latin alphabet. Familiar scripts often allowed us to guess the meanings of words and manage very basic communication needs. There have been notable exceptions: Turkish (a Turkic language written in the Latin alphabet), Hungarian (a Uralic language), Czech and Polish (two Slavic languages), and Malay (an Austronesian language). Despite using the familiar writing system, these languages proved much harder to decipher.
This trip, however, has shown us that those exceptions may not be so exceptional after all. As we traveled from Stockholm to Riga and then to Helsinki, we found the local languages increasingly difficult to understand—even though Swedish, Latvian, and Finnish all use the Latin alphabet.
Swedish and English are both Germanic languages within the Indo-European language family, but they have evolved separately over the centuries. English has a relatively simple grammatical structure, with few noun cases and a mostly fixed subject-verb-object word order. Swedish, on the other hand, retains two grammatical genders (common and neuter) and marks definiteness with suffixes attached to nouns. Phonetically, English has a wider variety of vowel sounds and relies heavily on stress patterns, while Swedish features a distinctive pitch accent system, where a word’s meaning can shift based on tone and melody—somewhat like tones in Chinese.
English has absorbed a significant amount of Latinate vocabulary through French influence, making its lexicon less purely Germanic than Swedish. For example, the English word entrance comes from French; in Swedish it is ingång, which looks more like the German equivalent. However, English and Swedish share many cognates. Because of this, we were able to figure out some Swedish words based on our knowledge of English.
When we arrived in Riga, however, Latvian felt much more difficult. Although Latvian is also an Indo-European language, it belongs to a completely different branch of the family—the Baltic branch. This makes it look and sound very different from both English and Swedish, which made it hard for us to guess the meanings of words.
Snezha explained that Latvian has a highly inflected grammar, especially for nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs. Nouns decline into seven cases depending on their grammatical role (subject, object, etc.), and adjectives must agree with nouns in case, number, and gender. We passed by a monument in the city center, and carved into it was the name “Oskaram Kalpakam.” This is not the base (nominative) form of the name “Oskars Kalpaks,” but the dative case, used to indicate something like “to whom” or “for whom.” The “-am” ending marks the masculine noun in the dative. Oskars Kalpaks is a Latvian national hero who organized the defense against Bolshevik attacks.
If Latvian is difficult, then Finnish feels almost impossible. Finnish belongs to an entirely different language family—the Uralic family—which means it shares virtually no vocabulary or grammatical structure with English, Swedish, or Latvian. Specifically, Finnish is part of the Finno-Baltic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric branch of Uralic languages, and it is only distantly related to Hungarian, which belongs to the Ugric subgroup of the same branch.
Rather than using prepositions like “in,” “on,” or “to,” Finnish attaches endings directly to nouns. There are 15 grammatical cases, and word forms change depending on their grammatical role and meaning. For example, talo means “house,” talossa means “in the house,” and taloon means “into the house.” This leads to long and complex word formations, as suffixes are stacked to express layers of meaning. Finnish is an agglutinative language, meaning that word endings pile up in a systematic way. While this makes words long and potentially intimidating, Marja-Leena told us that the language is very consistent. If you can memorize the rules, she said, you’ll be just fine.
Travel has always been, for us, a way of learning—not only about new places, but about ourselves, about language, history, politics, and the deep texture of everyday life. On this journey from Stockholm to Riga to Helsinki, we encountered familiar alphabets but unfamiliar worlds. And the more we traveled, the more we realized that reading a street sign or interpreting a monument was not just a linguistic task, but a cultural decoding—a moment of wonder, confusion, insight.
Our days in Stockholm were a gentle immersion into the Swedish way of life. We delighted in fika, the beloved Swedish afternoon tea ritual, accompanied by strong coffee and delicate pastries. The cuisine offered simple yet hearty pleasures: reindeer and elk meat, meatballs nestled in rich gravies, velvety salmon soups, and marvelous breads that were both rustic and refined.
Among the many museums, the Royal Palace, and the charming old town of Gamla Stan, one place stood out—the Vasa Museum. There, we were stunned by the grandeur, and the tragedy, of the 17th-century warship Vasa, which sank less than 1,300 meters into its maiden voyage. It perished almost exactly where it was born. The ship, commissioned to project royal power, was adorned with lavish symbols of the divine, of mythology, of authority, everything but stability. It was, in a way, a vessel built to fail, yet one that found its ultimate purpose not on the seas, but as a monument to human ambition and complacency. Sometimes, things are created only to serve purposes no one had imagined.
Given the city's deep intellectual and cultural significance, it felt only right to also visit the Nobel Prize Museum. The museum itself is housed in the heart of Gamla Stan (Old Town), a compact but rich exhibition space that explores the history, ideals, and impact of the Nobel Prizes. Interestingly, the Nobel Prizes are not awarded here—the actual ceremony takes place at the Stockholm Concert Hall. When we visited, the hall was under renovation, its grand facade hidden behind scaffolding, but the symbolic weight of the place was still palpable.
The museum does a nice job of showcasing the human stories behind the awards. For young people engaged in study and research, the Nobel Prize has long stood as a symbol of the highest intellectual achievement—a beacon for those who dream of making a difference in the world through knowledge, discovery, and creativity. But as one gets older, the idea of winning a Nobel Prize no longer holds the same allure. The glory of prizes gives way to something deeper: the joy of inquiry, the discipline of thinking, the humility of not knowing. The process of learning, researching, and discovering—often in collaboration with others—is what endures. These moments of insight and connection, rather than public recognition, become the true rewards.
Riga, the capital of Latvia, felt at once intimate and vast—smaller and less cosmopolitan than Stockholm, but full of quiet dignity and resilience. Riga’s history is both ancient and abruptly modern: it has been shaped by Slavic, German, and Swedish powers, and more recently, by Soviet occupation. Latvia regained its independence only in the early 1990s, making it a country with a long memory but a short time of true self-governance.
Besides Vecriga (Old Riga, cobblestone streets filled with architectural styles ranging from Nordic to Gothic and Baroque and many more), one of the most striking features of Riga is its Art Nouveau (Jugendstil or ‘youth style’, the German term for the Art Nouveau movement) architecture. Almost one-third of the buildings in the city center are in this style, making Riga the city with the highest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture in the world. Strolling through its streets felt like walking through a living museum of curves, ornaments, and expressive façades.
It was Easter when we arrived in Riga, and the city felt quietly festive, with signs of spring and renewal all around. Snezha welcomed us with thoughtful and nostalgic gestures, as she had brought homemade, hand-colored eggs, a cherished tradition from her childhood. The eggs, dyed in rich, earthy tones using natural ingredients like onion skins and beetroot, were not just beautiful but deeply symbolic. We were soon introduced to the lively custom of egg-fighting: each person selects an egg and taps it against another’s, and the one whose shell remains uncracked is the winner. It was a playful, laughter-filled moment, connecting us to centuries of tradition across Eastern Europe, where Easter eggs are not only symbols of rebirth but also tokens of shared joy and good fortune.
This was my second visit to Helsinki. The first time, I was a graduate student attending my very first international conference, the Systemic Functional Linguistics Congress. I presented a paper. I was earnest, nervous, and was the same age that Yiran is today. Life has come full circle.
Back then, I didn’t do much sightseeing. I attended every session diligently and spent an entire day at the U.S. Embassy trying to renew my visa to return to UCLA. I was living in the U.S. on an international student visa at the time.
This time, however, I saw so much more. One of the most impressive places we visited was the Oodi Helsinki Central Library. Built to celebrate Finland’s 100 years of independence, Oodi sits directly across from the Parliament building, and was designed at the same height to signify equality and dialogue between the government and the people. The building itself is an embodiment of civic philosophy. The first floor is for gathering, a space for community. The second floor is for creating, with sewing machines, 3D printers, and maker spaces. The third floor is for reading and reflection, open to people of all ages.
For the eighth consecutive year, Finland has been ranked as the world's happiest country in the World Happiness Report (released on March 20, 2025). Happiness in Finland, I gathered, is not so much about what one has, but about how deeply one appreciates what one has. It’s a culture of modesty, functionality, and simplicity. Marja-Leena suggested that we visit the Architecture and Design Museum in Helsinki, which we did. I didn’t know before that it is Finland that gave us Angry Birds, world-famous video games, and the universally recognizable scissors with the orange/red handles—ubiquitous in homes and offices!
Another thing about Helsinki that struck us was the quiet but remarkable culture of honesty. Whether on the ferry, train, or tram, there were no turnstiles or ticket inspectors—just a shared expectation that everyone would pay their fare. While this system isn’t unique (we’ve seen similar trust-based models in other cities like Vienna), it remains deeply impressive. It reflects a social contract built on mutual respect and civic responsibility, where public systems operate not through surveillance, but through trust. There’s something quietly dignified about that—an everyday act of integrity woven into the rhythm of city life.
At the Architecture and Design Museum, there's a special exhibition titled Quietly Monumental, featuring Maija Lavonen, a pioneering figure in Finnish textile art. I find the title especially fitting—it beautifully captures the quiet strength and understated elegance often associated with the Finnish spirit.
Toward the end of our 12-day trip, troubling news arrived from Madrid: my mother had been hospitalized. Her symptoms were not immediately life-threatening, but they were very concerning. She had been struggling with a poor appetite for some time, and more recently, she had experienced dizziness and nausea. The doctor’s diagnosis was myocardial ischemia and cerebral confusion. Her stay in the hospital was distressing—made worse by her mental disorientation.
I stayed in close contact with my father, and with every passing hour, I debated whether I should cut the trip short and fly to Madrid. There were endless rounds of questioning and soul-searching. But after some conversations with my father and much internal struggle, I decided to continue and complete the trip. In part, this was because my mother’s condition, while worrying, was not unusual for someone her age. She is ninety, after all. We had only recently celebrated both my parents’ 90th birthdays together. I also knew I could change my plans at any moment if her condition worsened.
(Less than 72 hours after we returned home from this trip, my mother was discharged from the hospital. What a relief!)
There is a Chinese song I love, and a line from it has been echoing in my mind:
我也將見你未見的世界
寫你未寫的詩篇
(I will also see the world you have never seen
and write the poems you have not written)
These lines speak to something at the heart of why we travel. Even in moments of uncertainty, even when those we love are unwell and we feel helpless, we are drawn to the world—to its beauty, its surprises, and its quiet invitations. We travel not to escape responsibility, but to keep ourselves open to life. We travel to honor the dreams our loved ones once had and perhaps could not fulfill. We travel to carry their hopes with us, seeing what they never had the chance to see, writing what they never had the time to write. In this way, our journeys become extensions of their lives too, stitched with memory, love, and an eternal yearning for meaning.
And maybe that’s the lesson of this journey: things that seem impossible at first can, with openness, time, and care, begin to make sense. Whether it’s a language full of unfamiliar endings that slowly unfold into meaning, a library built for everyone, or a sunken ship that humbles us with its preserved past, each moment offers its own quiet revelation. Even our travel plans, intentional yet open to serendipity, have mirrored this balance of structure and spontaneity. At the Royal Palace (Kungliga Slotten) in Stockholm, I stepped into a playful photo frame meant for visitors to pose like royalty. Wrapped in the long, warm wool shawl that Yiran bought for me in Boston, I looked unexpectedly Nordic, perhaps even natural. And maybe that, too, is what travel is about: placing ourselves, even momentarily, in the lives and worlds of others—not to claim them, but to learn, to honor, and to belong for a fleeting moment.