Molly Gleeson has been teaching English overseas for the last seven years.  Besides China, she has also taught in Japan and Saudi Arabia, and on-line in Afghanistan. When she isn’t fooling around with young Chinese men, she enjoys reading, writing, and doing all sorts of crafts. She’s continually working on a book about her travels, with the emphasis on “continually.”

How Do You Say Threesome in Chinese?

BETTER TIMES AHEAD read the wallpaper on the ceiling. I read it while having my hair washed in a trendy hair salon in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China. English is still a popular thing to sport on clothes and other items, and the day before I had spotted a woman who was wearing a t-shirt that said merely, FORGET. So I was trying to do one and believe the other. I have spent five years, off and on, in China, and this was proving to be the loneliest yet. Mostly this was on purpose, knowing the foolishness I had engaged in in my 30s, and knowing that that foolishness hadn’t provided anything but embarrassing memories.

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Caroline Helper is a Los-Angeles-born writer living and writing in New York City. Writing mostly about food and wine, Helper has freelanced for various online websites such as Vine Talk, Refinery 29, Big Girl Small Kitchen, and Thought Catalog, while also writing her own wine blog, called Forget Burgundy. Helper has an insatiable passion for food, wine, and all things culinary and hopes, one day, to be able to pay the rent through her writing and ramblings about eating, drinking, and cooking. In addition to her obsession with food and wine, Helper has a strange and unwavering affection for chick singers, Woody Allen movies and good romantic comedies.

Patient as Penelope

In college I went through a phase of being mildly obsessed with the women that occupy Greek mythology. More than any of the goddesses, nymphs, or even that troublemaker Helen, my obsession usually came back around to Penelope. My appreciation for Penelope wasn’t borne of a feminist appreciation of her cunning or an incredulous respect for her fidelity and patience (20 years of chastity and obnoxious houseguests? Forget it!).

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   Laurie Sohng has been an editor for Fairchild, Hachette Filipacchi and Time Inc. This essay was all about speed on her part; she decided to send something to Modern Love one morning after breakfast, wrote the essay in one afternoon, and sent it off before dinner. Things only slowed down when Daniel Jones took his requisite time with it—about two weeks—during which time, she discovered Modern Love Rejects. As soon as Mr. Jones' email came, she sat with it for an hour or so, kissed it goodbye, and sent it over to us. 

Catch Me If You Can

Living the expat life in Korea is a series of adventures—some disconcerting, some comical, and a few that are downright freaky—all made more singular, to me anyway, given that I look Korean, but can’t speak the language. I’ve got the eyes, the face, but not the words, or at least not enough of them to have a meaningful conversation. I immigrated to the U.S. with my parents when I was two, and never learned to speak anything other than English properly.

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Brooke Berman’s memoir No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 30 Apartments was published in June 2010 by Random House and called “Brilliant” and “Highbrow” by New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix. When not writing about her many dwellings (and other good/bad luck), she is a playwright and screenwriter whose work has been produced Off-Broadway and regionally at theaters including The Second Stage, Primary Stages, Steppenwolf, The Play Company, The Humana Festival and others. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School and she attended Barnard College.  Her plays are available through Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Backstage Books and Smith and Kraus. It is a particular dream of hers to be published by Modern Love.

On The Road of Love

I have driven across the United States three times. First, when I was 23, with The Third Wave Foundation as part of Freedom Summer 92, a voter-registration drive helmed by Rebecca Walker. We travelled in a caravan of Greyhound buses, emblazoned with the words “VOTE EQUALS POWER.” I had never before seen the part of the US where the dirt turns crimson, nor had I canvassed for a cause. The trip itself was equal parts frustrating and revelatory as we visited underserved communities across the country, sleeping in YWCA’s and getting on each other’s nerves. Four years later, I drove across the country again, very differently, with my former boyfriend, a 22 year-old macrobiotic chef. He’d taken out the back seats of his red Chevy mini-van for the trip, and we stuffed my futon into the space where they used to be, along with the rest of our stuff. Although I’d sublet my Park Slope apartment to a friend of my roommate’s and left most of my things there, there was still this notion that maybe, just maybe, my new boyfriend with the van and I might find a new life together out West. I was 27 years old.

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