Upon completion of her MA in Linguistics, she started off her one-year-and-a-half journey in Taiwan. She first chose to station in Taipei and studied for her certifications in TCSL (Teaching Chinese as a Second Language) at National Taiwan University (NTU)'s International Chinese Language Program, and then left for the culturally-sophisticated county of Taoyuan for good. There, she did her preliminary sociolinguistic fieldwork and resulted in two academic papers: "Myth or Miracle? On the Multilingual Language Policy of Taiwan" (2004) and "Trick or Chic: Revisiting Code-Switching in Taiwanese Colloquial Mandarin" (2005).
In 2004 she relocated in Sydney, Australia, and she worked as a freelance translator whilst doing her M.App.Ling. in Language Program Management at Macquarie University (MQU). Her research interests, at this point, changed from sociolinguistics to language policy & planning. She became interested in issues of language ideology and its political interplay in the contemporary Asian world. She finished her thesis on the recent Dialect Literacy Curriculum of Taiwan in the Australasian winter of 2005, and almost immediately she was ready to make her way to the Scandinavian Europe.
At Stockholms Universitet (SU) of Sweden she registered herself as a postgraduate student at the Faculty of Social Sciences, and studied full-time under the multidisciplinary International Graduate Program. She had her initial taste of Social Anthropology and Economic History in the IGP classes, and that was simply unforgettable. And hence she eventually returned to Hong Kong for her PhD at CUHK Department of Anthropology in the Eurasian summer of 2006, specializing in Linguistic Anthropology and Ethnicity Studies. Her co-edited work on the collective memory of overseas students from Hong Kong is due in 2007 and will be published by Chung Hwa Book (HK) Co. Ltd., whilst an anthology of her own poems is expected by mid-2008.
Loretta and Louis met in the year 2000. The rest, after all, is history.
