Our Story
Three passports, one table
This is the long way of explaining why our kitchen has three spice racks, why the phone rings at odd hours across time zones, and why “home” was never one place — it was always the people. Here is how the Nolan family came to be, chapter by chapter.
01
Oregon beginnings
Robert Nolan grew up on a hazelnut farm outside Salem, the fourth of five kids in a house that never quite had enough chairs at dinner.
He learned early that a full table mattered more than a full pantry — a lesson he’d carry across two oceans.
02
The Freiburg years
A scholarship sent Robert to the Black Forest to study forestry. He meant to stay one year; he stayed six, and never quite left the German language behind.
It was in a Freiburg lecture hall that he met Ingrid Bauer, whose family had farmed vineyards along the Rhine for four generations.
Turning Point
1998: the move that started everything
Robert and Ingrid packed two suitcases and one crate of books for a research post in Chengdu — a decision that would quietly rewrite the family tree for the next three generations.
03
Meeting in Chengdu
At a language exchange in a teahouse near Wenshu Monastery, Ingrid met Li Mei, a translator who would later become her closest friend — and, in time, her daughter-in-law.
Mei’s family had lived in Chengdu for as long as anyone could trace. The two women taught each other recipes before they taught each other words.
04
The three-passport household
When Robert and Ingrid’s son David married Mei’s daughter, Lin, in 2009, the household officially became trilingual — and gloriously over-documented at every border crossing.
Sunday dinners now rotate between sauerkraut, dumplings, and David’s stubborn attempts at Pacific Northwest barbecue.
05
Today
The youngest Nolans grow up counting in three languages and asking, without irony, which grandmother’s version of dumplings is correct.
Every summer the whole family reassembles somewhere new — Freiburg one year, Chengdu the next — proof that home was never a single address.
In Their Words
"Home is Zuhause. Home is 家. Home is wherever the next meal is being argued over."
— Ingrid Nolan, on being asked to define home in three languages