Sweden is more than just Vikings
What I learned about quality of life in Stockholm
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At my institution of higher learning, most of my peers at one point or another have studied abroad. I chose to study abroad in Stockholm, the capital and largest city in Sweden.
Most of my friends were baffled—here I was, a young, doe-eyed Asian American, about to fly to Stockholm to take classes (in English) at a university in a Nordic metropolis of 2 million.
In trying to learn about Swedish society, I learned a bit about the inner workings of Sweden (or at least Stockholm). Even given the racism and microaggressions I experienced in Sweden, I still left wanting to one day return to permanently live there.
Not all was rosy, of course. Late one evening, a friend and I approached an empty metro platform, and a Swedish man in a drunken stupor once approached me and called me “Asian chicken shit” and drew his knife before us, completely unprompted. He told us he wished modern Swedes would become like their forefathers, the Vikings, and murder all of the immigrants invading his homeland.
Why, in the face of racism and white privilege, am I so willing to one day leave the United States and return to Scandinavia? The answer is simple: elevated quality of life. My overall quality of life in Sweden was markedly better than my quality of life in the United States. Notwithstanding that one instance of blatant racism I experienced, structurally, Sweden is often much more sympathetic to the underdogs of society than the United States. Underneath the surface, Sweden is not solely the land of the hypermasculinized and oft-romanticized Vikings—it is a country that has taken strides in codifying socially-just legislation that lead to a higher quality of life for a greater part of its populace.
Fika
The word fika was formed by reversing the syllables of the english word “coffee” back in the 1800s. A fika is essentially a coffee break or a coffee date, appropriate for acquaintances seeking to become closer friends, people seeking to pursue romance, friends who want to catch up, and colleagues or coworkers hoping to take a break from the hustle and bustle of quotidian life in order to recharge before returning to work.
Fika quickly becomes every American’s favorite Swedish tradition because it gives us an excuse to 1) drink coffee, and 2) eat pastries. The most traditional Swedish fika consists of a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun (en kanelbulle), and generally costs upwards of 20 crowns ($3.10) at a generic café.
However, fika is more than an excuse to load up on caffeine and sugar. My friends and I strengthened our bonds and processed our lives over food and drink, arguably one of the most primordial sites of sociality in human history. The universality of fika is also a wonderful way for both socially awkward or introverted people like myself as well as many Swedes to get to know another person casually. Fika reminds us to slow down, smell the coffee, and savor the richness of life around and beyond us.
High taxes for social services
I had a contact family while in Stockholm. Whereas a student would live with a host family, a student could be in touch with a local family and partake in activities with their contact family while still living in their own apartment. The matriarch of the family was a single 60-something woman who takes in foster children and provides for them.
One child that she adopted when he was a newborn has Down syndrome and is non-verbal and autistic. I’ll call him Patrik. I spoke with my mormor (grandmother) about his various health conditions and how she can afford to care for him and his expenditures. Thanks to the Swedish public health system, there are no runaway medical costs like there often are in the United States for less severe conditions.
As a baby, Patrik was found to have a severe heart condition that required an operation to correct. Under Sweden’s public health system, Patrik was entitled to surgery for free since it was an emergency surgery as opposed to a cosmetic surgery or any other non-essential surgery. His surgery was to take place in a hospital in the south of Sweden, about three hours away from Stockholm by train. The government paid for train tickets for Patrik and his family to accompany him in the hospital and also covered the family’s hotel expenses for as long as they needed to stay there.
Today, Patrik earns a sum of money from the government that will pay for fulltime caretakers as well as food and other living expenses for both Patrik and his caretakers. Although mormor had once complained to me about her rising taxes, she is thankful that the public sector has thus far taken care of Patrik, allowing her to invest her income in other quality of life improvements for her, Patrik, and her two other adoptive children.
Jämställdhet, or the equality of the sexes
As someone who identifies as queer, Sweden was of particular interest to me because Sweden since the 1970s has sought to eradicate inequality between women and men as well as queer and straight folks in more recent years.
Most Americans notice in Sweden that fathers with strollers are much more present in public than they are in the United States. Thanks to Swedish public policy aiming to reduce inequality between men and women, male and female parents in straight as well as queer relationships are entitled to 16 months of paid parental leave within the child’s first 8 years of life, at least two of which must be taken by fathers. As a result, many young men walk around Stockholm, pushing their baby in a stroller.
Once when I was at mormor’s house, she had invited over two of her friends for fika, a young couple with a baby. The couple seemed to be interested in me growing up in the United States and were curious as to how I ended up in Stockholm. Their baby, perhaps a little under a year old, was colicy and began to cry. The father excused himself from the table and picked the baby up from her stroller and began to bounce her on his shoulder. She spit up some of her food and it got on his nice sweater. He smiled and said, “Aww,” and handed her to her mom while he cleaned up. I told them I thought it was amazing that they were so patient with her and that he didn’t get angry with his daughter as I often see in the States. He responded that, having had time to spend with his daughter, he has forged a strong emotional bond with her and wouldn’t get angered over something as trivial as spitting up.
The gender-neutral pronoun “hen”
Thanks to a book called Kivi och Monsterhund by Jesper Lundqvist and Bettina Johansson published in 2012, there was much attention in Sweden given to the gender-neutral pronoun “hen”. For readers not acquainted with queer studies, gender-neutral pronouns refer to third-person subject pronouns we use that don’t indicate gender. In conventional English, there are two main ones: it, to refer to objects; and they, used primarily in the plural but increasingly in the singular. A growing number of people today do not identify with either man or woman, and instead may describe themselves as genderqueer, neutrois, agender, or any other host of identities and indicate that they prefer prononuns such as they/them/theirs, ze/hir/hirs, se/sir/sirs, or any other host of pronouns constructed in recent years.
In Kivi och Monsterhund, the protagonist Kivi is genderless, and is referred to with the pronoun “hen”, originally proposed for two primary reasons: 1) its construction is supposed to be an intermediary between the masculine “han” and feminine “hon”; and 2) in Finnish, the only third-person singular subject pronoun is spelled “hän” and pronounced like the Swedish “hen”—the Finnish language does not distinguish between “he” and “she”.
At RainbowS, Stockholm University’s HBTQ (homosexual, bisexual, transgender, and queer) organization, I met Swedes who would discuss adamantly and emphatically the importance of hen, noting that they would rather be referred to with hen/henom/hens (gender-neutral) rather than han/honom/hans (masculine) or hon/henne/hennes (feminine). At one meeting, students lamented the refusal of Sweden’s largest newspaper Dagens Nyheter to use hen in its journalistic writing. I was impressed with the outspoken progressiveness of the Swedish students in RainbowS, something I only see at my college in the United States. One student remarked, “If a person uses hen for themselves, how can DN simply ignore that?”
Through my experience in Stockholm, I learned that being introspective and shy is okay. Most Swedes I met were humble and shy, and thus may come across to most Americans as cold until trust is forged (probably over fika). Many Swedish people and Scandinavians in general reminded me that slowing down and taking breaks often lead to higher quality in work. More importantly, perhaps, stop and remember the beauty and fleeting nature of life. I leave you with a quote from former Prime Minister Olof Palme, a Social Democrat who transformed Swedish policy from the 1960s until his death in 1986:
As we are here on earth and we’re doomed to be on this earth, we should try to make life as decent as possible. That is really very simply the basis of my political ideology. That’s what politics is about.
