Paul Richard Kuehn
I am a retired American expat who has been living in Thailand since 2007. You can find me writing on Hubpages as one of the latest challenges and adventures of my life.
In my early life, I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and spent half of my youth growing up on a dairy farm in southeastern Wisconsin. Almost all of my moral values were obtained from my parents in a rural environment. As a boy, I enjoyed playing baseball and football.
After graduating from high school, I attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison and earned a B.S. while majoring in pre-med and chemistry. For extra-curricular activities, I played fast-pitch softball, was active socially in my dormitory, and pledged and joined a professional chemistry fraternity.
Upon failing to get into medical school, I took graduate work in chemistry at the University of Michigan before enlisting in the Navy in the late 1960s. Experiences in the Navy changed my life as I started to learn Chinese Mandarin and then was assigned to overseas duty in Taiwan and Japan. A love for East Asian languages and literature quickly followed.
When I left the Navy in 1971, I took more graduate courses in Chinese language and literature before going to live and work teaching EFL in Taiwan in 1973. After an interesting and successful six year stay in Taiwan, I returned with a family to the United States.
After getting a job with the federal government, I relocated from the Toledo, Ohio, area where I had been teaching ESOL and studying education courses to the Washington D.C. area. The next 25 years were spent doing Chinese translation work and also teaching newspaper Chinese translation to junior Chinese linguists.
My challenges and adventures did not end at retirement from federal service. Within three months of retirement, I got back into EFL work after moving to Thailand. For the past six years, I taught EFL to middle school students at an all-girls school in the Bangkok area. Since April of 2014, however, I have been living in retirement in Udorn City in northeastern Thailand. In addition to learning Chinese languages and Thai, teaching EFL and ESL have been passions in my life. When I am not teaching or writing articles for Hubpages, you can find me following my favorite sports teams from Wisconsin: the Milwaukee Brewers, Green Bay Packers, Milwaukee Bucks, and Wisconsin Badgers. I also like travelling and would like to visit Yunnan, China, and other southeast Asian countries in the future.
