About Cath and Lar
We are identical twins living in the United States. Our dad is Chinese and our mom is from the Cajun part of Louisiana (so we are the rare breed known around these parts as “AsianCajuns”). Cath lives in beautiful Decatur, Georgia — a liberal, creative city just six miles east of Atlanta — and Lar lives in the pine-scented, rain-soaked city of Seattle. We are best friends and have been since July 1, 1983 (3:45 pm, to be exact) and hope to one day live next door to each other. In the meantime, we stay connected via daily phone calls, weekly skype chats and this site where we are learning how to live with less — joyfully (most of the time anyway)!
About Living with Less
We do not consider ourselves minimalists (though we salute those that are) and we don’t have perfectly curated black and white wardrobes because, though that looks lovely, that isn’t how we live. Our lives get messy and are certainly not always Pin-able or Instagramable. We want to show you our process of learning to live with less because we do believe it is a process, not just a trendy (and unattainable) end goal.
We hope this helps you to think about trying a lifestyle of living with and consuming less, but we know this transition is a long and slow process that calls for patience with yourself. Just because you have a bad day at work and “binge-shop” at F21 doesn’t mean that you’ve failed and now need to soothe yourself at Target. Taking baby steps forward by starting to be aware of all you already have and learning to feel less overwhelmed by things isn’t a straight chronological journey. We can guarantee you that we won’t be perfect either! We don’t plan to live consumerist-free lifestyles and shun H&M for the rest of our lives, but we aim to keep following our goals as best we can:
- Live with less and be more mindful of what we have
- Buy fewer, but better
- Discover our own styles (and don’t follow fast fashion trends)
- Buy from ethically sourced suppliers whenever possible
- Make less of a negative impact on our environment by consuming and throwing out less
About the AsianCajuns site
We’ve been around the blogisphere since people first started calling it the blogisphere in 2007. What started as a very simple lifestyle blog on Blogger, turned into one of Atlanta’s favorite award-winning fashion blog by 2008. After years of outfit posts, AsianCajuns shifted again when Lar moved to Scotland and we started to use the blog as a way to keep in touch while we were separated by the Atlantic for four years (check out our archives in the side bar).
Now that we both live in the states again, we thought it would be a good time to give AsianCajuns a refresh. We both have been slowly simplifying our life styles over the past five years (there is way less shopping than there was during our fashionista heydays), and we realized we wanted to keep honing that: the process of learning to live with less and consume less.