陌生人在陌生的土地: 亚当的日记

The End, or Crunch Time at CET: The Last Three Weeks in China

NOTE: I kept a somewhat detailed journal of my life while in Beijing, so I’ve culled a fair amount of my report from this chronicle of my adventures (though edited for my horrible spelling, even worse grammar, and occasional use of improprieties). Also, I started writing this while traveling in the wilds of Yunnan after CET ended (because, you know, the wilds always have a fairly good selection of internet cafes) and finished after returning to the wilds of North Carolina (i.e., Cary), so hopefully that accounts for any disjointedness in my paper.

            I wasn’t particularly nervous about our presentation to the Olympic Organizing Committee. We’d already given one to the Pudong government in Shanghai, and with only one week’s worth of research. Here I had a good three months worth of research (on English-language communication in Beijing’s restaurants – it was fairly fun research to conduct) and a considerably longer time to prepare and flesh out my ideas than the one frantic evening I’d had in Shanghai. So why should I be nervous? I went to class as usual that morning (which means I tried to look excited as we repeated sentence patterns over and over and over and over), not particularly excited or agitated. I think I spent more time on deciding how I was going to dress than worrying about messing up (which really says something, since I only have one pair of dress clothes). But since this is China, preparing for my presentation (or rather, getting dressed) ended up a little more complicated than I had planned:

May. 18th, 2005 @ 09:16 pm . I had a very fun time preparing for our presentation to the Beijing Mayor's Office and the Olympic Organizing Committee. As you may (or may not) know, showering every day is, on very rare occasions, somewhat of a problem for me. Not the actual showering, mind you, I'm fully capable of the lathering and scrubbing involved, just getting the motivation to actually go to the washing facilities tends to be an issue. So the fact that I was gung ho about showering should be seen, by everyone involved in this presentation, as a very, very good thing. I just wanted to be nice and clean, you know? (and I hadn't, uh, showered for a few days). But what do I learn, 30 minutes before I leave for the shower? The hot water heater for the entire school (all the buildings, not just our dorm) EXPLODED, leaving us with no, no hot water.

But I, since I just love showering so, decided to go ahead anyway. At first I tried the cold route, but like I said -- no hot water at ALL so I gave that up quickly. Then I got my pitcher from my room, filled it half full with boiling water from the boilers, half with cold water, and went to the shower and, using just that, managed to soap up, shampoo, AND, hear this, condition. I even shaved using that little method. So I ended up being the only UNC kid there who had showered. The hot water heater, of course, is going to be out for quite a while, since this is China. In the meantime, we have THREE electric showers that can serve about three people showering for 10 minutes, and then take over an hour to reheat. This serves not only us 80 people in Donglou, but also the 40 or so in Xilou and who knows how many Chinese students they keep on the fourth floor, hidden away from us. So it should be a fun, uh, week or so.

It took more like two weeks. But this being China and whatnot, the death of a hot water heater didn’t really upset me all that much. Hot water heaters die in the United States too, and they take a while to replace (though probably more like three or four days than 12), but China’s a developing nation and if you don’t have a sense of humor about these things, well, you’ll go crazy.

But I’m (theoretically) writing about my Olympic project presentation, not my bathing habits. So when I arrived, very well-showered, at the Olympic press center, my confidence started to erode a bit. I’m a pretty nervous person usually, but that doesn’t usually manifest itself (at least, not the bad type of nervousness) when I’m talking in front of people, even when facing a wall of video cameras, reporters, and government representatives (there weren’t actually that many, maybe 10 of all of them total). I think working for the Daily Tar Heel did it for me, since I know those reporters (and cameramen and officials) want to be there as much as I do. But this time, I felt different. It wasn’t nervousness. It was dread.

I don’t know why, really. I was much better prepared than my Shanghai report. But that didn’t make me feel any better. I’m just a college sophomore, a history major-cum-journalist-wannabe. I don’t know anything about restaurant management; why should any of these people care what I have to say? A horrible headache ripped in to me; I don’t know why I was panicking. Lili (our TA for Professor Zhao’s class) tried to comfort me – apparently, she saw on CCTV a big group of elementary school student journalists do something very similar to us, with the same public relations official, and they looked like they were having a great time. So my report has the same importance as elementary school student journalists? Not a big surprise, but her attempt to cheer me up didn’t make me feel all that much better.

But in the end, my presentation went relatively well, I suppose. My Renmin University graduate student partners had come over the other night to help me translate my entire PowerPoint, so Professor Zhao could concentrate on translating my more nuanced ideas and suggestions since all the basic description of my project was up on the screen. Everyone told me that I did a good job. But I didn’t really feel relieved after giving my project, not at first. I was disappointed. It didn’t help, really, that some high-up from Renmin University took the opportunity to tell my partners how bad a job we’d done (or they’d done – he forgave me because I was an undergrad and entitled to do a bad job, apparently). But I kept thinking of all the missed opportunities that I’d had, given the scope and time period of the project, to craft my report into something I could truly feel proud of. But as we were celebrating and eating lunch (or I should say “celebrating”, because we ate Old Beijing food, most of which reminds me of some evil blob/science fiction villain that I’m stuffing in my mouth) I forgave myself some – I had done a lot of work and spent lots of time popping in on restaurants, interviewing managers, and just generally trawling around Beijing in search of poorly translated menus. It took a lot of time just to do that, so unless I wanted to dedicate my entire study abroad experience to this project (and I didn’t, since I also wanted to learn Chinese), I really couldn’t improve my project all that much. So I suppose ultimately I was happy, or at the very least content, with my Olympic project.

That evening, CET hosted a career fair for us. Four people came, three businessmen (and woman) and a guy from the State Department. Lucky for us UNC students, we already had our dress clothes from the presentation. But with any presentation that deals with, you know, how I have to survive after I get out of college, it left me feeling deflated and a little depressed. The gist of the presentation seemed to be, “Yeah, Chinese won’t really help you that much, unless you really, really want to get into business. Other than that, nope, nothing.” Which is a point of view I can somewhat sympathize with. Business makes the world go ‘round. It’s why I’m studying economics. It’s why I want to do journalism. But I really, really don’t want to spend the rest of my life laboring in a little cubicle, working for some business I really don’t care about all that much. So when business high-up types (the important people) tell me that the only way I can succeed is by, well, working for them, it usually doesn’t make me feel too great, especially since I was already not too thrilled about my Olympics project.

And speaking of Chinese, the week brought our CET language immersion weekend. I suppose the name is rather self-explanatory – basically, we’d travel to a relatively remote location (the town of Miyun, about a two-hour bus ride away from Beijing) where we can only speak Chinese, and if we break this rule, we get fined (about 700 kuai) and sent back to CET. I (and pretty much everyone else at CET) was none too happy about the school threatening us with a monetary fine (I try to imagine my French class taking us out to the mountains, then fining us 90 bucks and making us find our own way home if we spoke a sentence or two of l’anglais). So I probably ended up approaching the weekend with a bad attitude from the start.

Ostensibly, the weekend was supposed to be fun, and to a certain extent it was. My roommate realized I was in a bad mood and did his best to cheer me up and make the Chinese-only communication easier (he started by using English to explain words I didn’t know; when another student told him to stop, he switched to spelling out words on the [rather flimsy] basis that English letters don’t REALLY count as English). And we got to play ping pong (which I lost horribly) and other games. But we still had to do work, preparing a presentation showing how much we’d improved in Chinese. I suppose I should be flattered – my teachers (or the higher ups at CET) placed me in the second level Chinese class instead of my normal beginner one – but at the time I was just angry I didn’t get to be with my friends and classmates.  The second day of the weekend was considerably more interesting. Each of the groups went to a peasant village near Miyun and interview random peasants about their lives and aspirations as well as eating with a local peasant family. The village, I think, was pretty well off – in Shaanxi province, my friends and I had visited a coal-mining village in the mountains, where people still lived in caves, but this village had electricity, fairly large houses, and a pretty good TV-to-person ratio. Most importantly, I got a chance to really use my Chinese. I found out that yeah, I can barely speak Chinese, but I already knew that. But I also realized my listening and comprehension level was much higher than my speaking (as opposed to people who learn a language just at college). Even though I didn’t fully understand the peasant who I had to interview, I gleaned enough to answer each of the questions on my interview sheet (my roommate was actually surprised that I could do that). Plus, talking to the man was interesting. He told me how he had just built another house for his parents, and how he was getting ready to send his daughter to elementary school, and that he hoped she’d go to college and then go to study abroad in America. It was nice to have a modicum of a real conversation with a non-English speaking Chinese person (who wasn’t cutting my hair) about his life and daily concerns, even if a little sheet of paper was guiding it.

So in the end, I suppose I enjoyed the language immersion weekend. But once I stepped back off the bus back at CET (first words in English: “Man, I love speaking English!”) I was faced with the prospect that, like it or not, soon I had to leave China. Well, not quite. After the program, my parents were flying over and, after seeing Beijing, we were all going to go to Yunnan for a few weeks and travel around. But still, CET was ending soon; I would have to leave all my friends, and then in the meantime, my workload was going to model an exponential function and probably drive me close to insanity. Because not only did I have my Chinese finals to prepare for (not walk in the park, since Chinese is, well, kind of hard) and I also had our final American image project for Professor Zhao’s class. I always felt we rushed into the American image project to start with. We started planning and preparing for the Olympic project from day one, and I was conducting research by the third week of school. But though we talked about the American image project a little in the beginning, no real planning started until well after the middle of school, and we actually started conducting interviews with about five weeks to go in the semester (the gist of the project was interviewing various Chinese people in different professions and of different ages about their views on the United States, using our Ren Da partners, of course). So with about a week and a half left in the semester and the interviews finally finished and translated (with varying degrees of success) into English, I got to spend a considerable chunk of my free time in the computer lab (which by this time contained four or five working computers – spyware, viruses, and the 8-15 year old kids staying at Beijing Institute of Education had done a pretty good job on the rest).

And of course, since I’m just finishing my sophomore year in a pretty intimidating foreign country, I’m stuck with contemplating what I’m going to have to do to bring the bacon in after I get out of my four-year college vacation. Once again, my journal probably says it better:

May. 27th, 2005 @ 07:39 pm. Lately I've been trying to decide what *I* want to do after college. It's tough. But living here in China for four months, meeting a lot of interesting people, both Americans and Chinese, and seeing how many opportunities there are for smart people who are just willing to come and, well, take advantage of them, has made me realize that I don't want to start working right after college, or go to grad school right away. I want to get a chance to have fun and see the world while I'm still young, because traveling when you're older, while I'm sure is still awesome, is not even close to being the same experience. So while I have no concrete plans (god knows if I'm going to come back to China, but since I've put so much trouble into learning Chinese, I imagine I probably should -- plus there's still a whole lot to see), I do know I want to, you know, do some living after college, because it's not expensive, work isn't THAT hard to get, and it can only ultimately make you more marketable for both businesses and grad schools.

We’ll see what my parents think of that.

                And, right out of nowhere, the end came. Finals were actually pretty underwhelming. In retrospect, I don’t know why I worried so much about them. They basically boiled down to, can you speak Chinese? And, I mean, on some sort of relative scale, I can’t speak Chinese at all, but for the requirements of beginning Chinese I’m pretty competent, so there were no problems really. My teacher even complimented me during the one-on-one, which never happens, so that was either good or she just took pity on me.

            About this time, my parents also arrived in Beijing. That was interesting. Seeing them so fascinated by every little aspect of China, totally overwhelmed by the language, but thinking that every little mundane moment was an adventure reminded me of what I was like when I first got to China. And it also gave me a measure of how far I’d come in just four months. My parents thought my hesitant Chinese I used to order flowers for my teachers was amazing; I just despaired that I couldn’t fully express myself. But when learning a language, I suppose it’s easy to forget how far you’ve come and just concentrate of how much (how very, very much) you don’t know, and I suppose recently I’d fallen into that trap. I realized how much I’d adapted; from the first bathroom I went into in the Beijing Capital Airport, I never imagined I’d ever get used to the weak sewage system’s inability to flush toilet paper. Now it was so mundane to me I even forgot to mention it to my parents. I used to be afraid to go anywhere in Beijing by myself, and now I couldn’t understand my parents’ apprehension at taking the subway to Tiananmen or renting a car to go to the Great Wall. Even the Beijing air (which is pretty much like breathing dirt) I had adapted to and taken for granted (or rather, forgotten how disgusting it was).

            Then the semester ended. Graduation seemed to last no time at all. My most vivid memories involve the Western buffet, the kuai we spent on gigantic bouquets for our teachers, and me having to wing a speech (in Chinese, of course) thanking our teachers. I think I called them beautiful.

            Right after graduation, Lili herded all of us UNC students into a group of taxis to take us to Ren Da for our final American image presentation. Now, good stories, like good paintings (or, well, any type of painting, really) have frames (and not that I’m saying that this is a particularly good story). Parallelism. A repeated element to make some sort of contrast between moods, states, characters, what have you. A Tale of Two Cities had, yeah, the two cities. The Iliad has two tough guy heroes. Even Star Wars has the two Death Stars. So I feel it’s appropriate for my story to end as it begins, with a UNC presentation. Not that I meant for that to happen or anything, that’s just how the dice fell and the weeks got chopped up.  But especially since this is a UNC program, I feel it’s somewhat fitting.

            The meeting took place in Renmin University’s journalism school’s pressroom. It was pretty impressive, too – big flat panel monitors, fancy hardwood tables, high-tech mics (that I managed to embarrass myself with when mine kept urning off during my presentation). Ostensibly, we were to discuss the results of our interviews and then give our Ren Da partners a chance to respond. This happened for about 10 minutes. But the afternoon was still interesting, to an extent. For the first time in our class, our partners got a real chance to discuss what they thought about America. And it wasn’t really all that good (of course, after doing this project for a few months, that really doesn’t surprise me all that much). An example:

Jun. 6th, 2005 @ 11:10 am. They were making a big deal (I think foolishly) out of this internal e-mail at Dell which said something like, "IBM is now owned by the Chinese communists. Tell dealers to carry us instead of them". Now, this is a single e-mail (not even a memo) from a single person at Dell, and the Ren Da students were trying to say that this showed that the U.S. government was trying to contain China economically. It sounds more like old fashioned corporate name-calling and competition to me. They just want to sell more computers!

It would have been nice to get a chance to respond, but at the very least I enjoyed hearing their opinions.

            And that’s about it. The rest of my weekend was spent celebrating with my friends, American and Chinese, helping my roommate out, doing some last minute souvenir shopping, celebrating a little more, and then saying goodbye. I finished the semester feeling worn out and actually not looking forward to my trip to Yunnan. But Spring City is a place to feel refreshed, and as my plane left Beijing two and a half weeks later to return to America, I thought something along the lines of, “You know, China’s not so bad after all”. Which is high praise, really, for a country that makes itself really hard to love sometimes.