200: Christina Kim

My guest this week, for my 200th Nostalgia Interview, is Christina Kim. It was terrific to catch up with Christina, who is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, before I left the University of Kent in July 2024.

Christina begins by remembering the visa issues that consumed her time upon arriving at Kent just over a decade ago and how it took a while to work out who everybody was in the School of European Culture and Languages at the time.

Christina grew up in Los Angeles and went to university in Boston and was doing a postdoc in Chicago before moving to the UK. Christina discusses how she had not lived outside the US before moving to Canterbury.

She has a linguistics, psychology and cognitive science background and we talk about how there are different sides to ourselves that define us in different ways. Christina also discusses the allure of going to another countries and how Canterbury feels very different from California.

Christina reflects on growing up in LA and the dimensions with which it is possible to connect with people. In turn, I refer to my experience of walking on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2002 and how it didn’t relate to the Hollywood of my imagination.

Now that Christina lives outside of LA, she can see how it’s perceived, and why people have polarizing opinions of the place, and she remembers trips to different types of cinemas around LA. Christina insightfully discusses how this is her nostalgia now but that she couldn’t have known at the time that she would be nostalgic about this period. We reflect on what nostalgia means in this context.

We talk about the possibility of reframing and inserting ourselves back into our pasts, and Christina brings up a particular memory she has relating to The Bodyguard. We talk about the different lenses through which we look at the past, how we interact in different social contexts, whether there is anything we have to prove to others e.g. from our childhood, and whether other people have moved on in the same way we have, and so whether it is healthy to ‘go back’.

Then, at the end of the interview, we talk about whether it is possible to be nostalgic about negative experiences and we find out why Christina is more of a looking back than a looking forward type of person.