Naitze Teng

Naitze was born and raised in Brazil where she attended American and British schools in Salvador and São Paulo until she was 17. Despite being half-Chinese, she holds her chopsticks in a strange, decidedly non-Asian manner. Her name can be pronounced in a number of ways but she tends to prefer "night-c" in English, "nigh-tse" (like tsetse fly) in Portuguese, and she’d try to explain the Chinese pronunciation but she always fails miserably at that. Naitze graduated from the University of Southern California as a Renaissance Scholar with a B.S. in Business Administration. She never once went to a football game in the five years she spent in Los Angeles. She did, however, work in promotions while in LA, and became especially good at getting 12-year-olds to buy bad music. At the end of 2005 she moved back to Salvador where she is currently putting her B.S. to good use as an office manager at a plastic factory. And it is from here, now, that Teng observes Brazil and the rest of the world, and tells her PopMatters' readers how pop culture appears from her point of view; a view with a particular take on things. Call it Brazil, with a 'Z'.