This is the professional memoir of an ethnologist, who studies the cultures and languages of ethnic groups, in the present and in the past. Victoria R. Bricker's journeys -- from Hong Kong to Shanghai during World War II, to the U.S. after the war, to Germany, Harvard, southeastern Mexico, and eventually to New Orleans -- influenced her choice of ethnology as a career and shaped that career over 50 years. Ethnology served as the stepping stone for intellectual forays into other related fields, such as linguistics, ethnohistory, epigraphy, and astronomy, all focused on the Maya people of southern Mexico and Central America.