A Conversation Between Mary and Sam

Why China?

To be honest, I just needed to satisfy the cross-cultural requirement. I’m a transfer student, so I didn’t have a lot of options. I decided to sign up at the last minute when my advisor (Mark Sawin) told me it would be a great adventure, and I would come back a changed man.

Since you are a commuter student, what was it like to be thrown into such close encounters with our Cross-Cultural group for over three months?

Even though I had been at EMU for a year, I didn’t have any EMU friends outside of class. I work a lot in my family business, and I’ve always lived at home. I didn’t know any of the other students in our group when we left for the airport. But I soon learned to know everyone. I gained some really good friends by coming on this trip.

What surprised you about living in China?

I didn’t know anything about China before the trip. I expected things to be super difficult. I thought our housing and transportation would be more primitive. I didn’t know we would be traveling on modern high speed trains that could go over 300 kilometers per hour and living in brand new apartments that were nicer than my brother’s housing at JMU.

Tell me about the relationships you formed in China.

I thought going to my host family would be awkward, but they were really great. My host brother was eight and was fun to hang out with. He liked to play Mario Cart. I made a couple of good friends who were students at our university. I met “M” at an English major meeting. We played ping pong and basketball together, ate out, walked around and talked about stuff. Once our group was traveling far from Nanchong, and I couldn’t find anything to eat. I complained to M on We Chat (the Chinese instant messaging platform everyone uses) and he sent me an order of dumplings delivered to the hotel!

What will you take away from this experience?

I learned that American money goes a long way in China. I learned that the Chinese can be some of the kindest people on the planet—they were really helpful and good to me. I learned about China’s long history and current politics.

So are you coming back a different person?

I have a new appreciation for some things I’ve taken for granted, like the American school system (the Chinese system is very stressful and rigorous) and certain “luxuries” like clean drinking water and reliable electricity. I gained a new taste pallet for foods I never had before, like dry hot pot and pomelo (which is like an enormous grapefruit). I learned that even in a new culture that is so different than my own, there are still so many similarities: people are people.

—Samuel Snead IV

Dec. 9, 2018

I am 22 and am adopted from China – well, my mother has to remind me that I was adopted because “adopt” is a verb, not a constant state of being.

I chose to go to China for my EMU cross-cultural long before college, even though I had already visited there in 2012 with my family. My brother was studying in China, so my parents felt it was the best opportunity to visit the three girls’ orphanages where my sisters and I came from.

During my visit to China with my family, the experiences I had changed what I knew of myself before. I was constantly told that I had such good English. Or people spoke to me in Chinese, expecting me to understand. Once, I even had a woman say to me, in Chinese (which my brother could understand), how it was so amazing that someone so young (I was sixteen at the time) was taking foreigners around China.

From these multiple encounters, I felt like I was a “fake” Chinese person, particularly since I didn’t know the language. I explored the term “Chinese-American,” but what I found did not sound like my story. I felt more American-Chinese. Chinese-American families usually involved several generations, where the kids’ grandparents and parents teach them Chinese culture and language. Their other family members looked like them, and they knew exactly where they came from. I didn’t feel Chinese, even though I looked “Chinese.”

I hoped that going to China for a semester would help me find the missing cultural piece of myself. I took the Mandarin course last year in preparation for the cross-cultural. Little did I know what was coming…

Once again, I found myself immersed in a place where I could only say, “thank you” and “my name is….” Our EMU group took Chinese language classes, studied Chinese history and learned on the go. So much new learning about China hit me hard, and it made me feel very defeated.

Most people in China do not understand the concept of adoption. It was difficult to explain it to my host mom and for her to explain it to others, such as taxi drivers, dance moms/dads, store clerks, restaurant workers, family members and grandparents.

I was put into a host family, whose first response to me was “Oh, I think our girls (6 year-old twins) will be a bit disappointed when they meet you next weekend,” since I didn’t look like a foreigner.  And in fact my host sisters kept forgetting that I was a foreigner/American so they would speak to me in Chinese. Even 6-year-old Chinese was far more advanced than anything I had learned in my one semester of Chinese at EMU. So, that did not help me come to peace with my lack of “Chinese-ness”. College students would also tell me that I “look” Chinese. I had to confront this all semester.

There were times when I did not want to go to my host family’s [home] or felt embarrassed and scared about even going to the grocery store because of the looks I would get when I came up to a clerk with my Google translator or my broken Chinese vocabulary. When I was with EMU classmates, salespeople or restaurant workers assumed that I could translate or order for the foreigners, but I didn’t have enough vocabulary to explain my situation in terms they would understand. In the end, as one way to cope with the constant bombardment of feeling inadequate as a “Chinese”, I would use only English so as not to confuse native speakers into thinking I knew any Chinese at all.

But from this semester I have learned quite a bit about myself. These lessons are not from just my experiences, but from observing people in my cross-cultural group. The support I have received through this semester has been such a light at the end of my own tunnel of singular thoughts about my own identity. Even though I did not learn as much Chinese or become as fully “Chinese” as I initially thought I would, I have started to change my mindset and idea of what it means for me to be Chinese. Through the great support of my family at home and my cross-cultural friends and leaders, I am beginning to take a different approach to how I see myself as Chinese. For me, it will be a nonlinear path of growth. This cross-cultural is only a small part in my journey of self-acceptance.

-Claire Waidelich

“Nan…chong? Never heard of it.”

When I told my sister-in-law, a native of Zhejiang province here in China, that I would be spending a semester studying in Nanchong she was understandably confused. A small provincial town of only about 1.3 million, Nanchong isn’t the first place to come to pretty much anyone’s mind when you tell them you are studying in China. Why are we not exchanging with one of the bigger cities with the more famous colleges like Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, or even Hong Kong, like most colleges do?

The answer is actually fairly simple. Nanchong is our main home during the cross cultural because it is where students can experience a normal life away from tourists and tourist sites. While those big cities are still very much Chinese, it is in places like Nanchong that one can learn to know people and the culture best.

Places like Shanghai and Nanjing, where most American students usually end up are much larger and more modernized than the provincial cities of China. Public transportation mainly consists of buses and the occasional taxi; metros and other faster transportation are reserved for larger cities. Westerners are less of an oddity in larger cities as well, and it’s easy to see others culturally like the majority of our group, whereas in Nanchong we stand out and there are less people to share our experience with. We have to interact with the culture and people more than in a big city. American fast food takes more work to get in Nanchong, with a 25 minute bus ride to get to the nearest McDonald’s or the other limited options of western food while Nanjing seems to have a McDonald’s or Starbucks every few blocks and Shanghai even has Taco Bell and Shake Shack. Not being able to blow our stipend on western fast food easily forced us to try more foods and small shops. This also proved to be a good way to connect with students and learn the food culture of China.

Being at a smaller less prestigious school like China West Normal University allowed us to connect with Chinese students much easier than it would have probably been at a larger school, since there is less opportunity to latch on to other foreigners. Through them we learned a lot, from high school and college life dynamics to the art involved in Mahjong and ping pong. Being a small group at a small school also seemed to make the English majors more willing to open up with us. They talked to us about their stresses over school and their future, and even about the drama they experienced amongst themselves. We made good friends and cultural connections at Nanchong’s China West Normal University than we probably would have at a large, prestigious university in Beijing or Shanghai.

Being in a small provincial city also allowed us to connect with the countryside culture along with the urban. Many of the people we saw in Nanchong were originally from the countryside but had relocated to the city to work. We were able to visit a countryside farm, and talk to the farmer to see what their lives were like. Living off small pensions and the food they grow themselves, life is far from lavish in the countryside. The farm we visited couldn’t even sell the goods they grew due to low sale value. The farmer was very open with his life and his past.

Nanchong is definitely not Nanjing or one of the other larger Chinese cities. Even in the city itself it is a completely different world. There is very little western influence and the infrastructure is less modern, though Nanchong is still growing. Though it seems odd to those who don’t know about Nanchong, being in a less touristy area gave us a more realistic view of China and allowed us to experience much more than we could have at a famous school.

-Brandi Nelson

On a Saturday night in October, we were drifting off to sleep in our dorm beds when bloodcurdling screams coming from just outside the building jarred us awake. Moments later more screams followed, apparently chanting words I couldn’t decipher. The next morning, Sam revealed to the group what he had been told by a student of the university- the screaming was part of a game between girls and guys in separate buildings of the campus, modeled after a dating show on TV. What I had taken to be something horrific happening outside has actually been a fun event for students.

China West Normal University is in many ways a school very different from our EMU. For one, CWNU’s undergrad students number 30,000, while at EMU we’re hovering right above 1,000. CWNU is a teacher’s college, meaning most of the students will eventually be teaching in their respective fields. And, apparently, at CWNU you might be woken up by screams as you’re falling asleep. These differences aside, CWNU’s students are easy to relate to (even despite the language barrier) and we’ve had fun bonding with students over the similarities and differences of our respective cultures.

As a senior, Wang Hong Yan (English name Kiko) studies all day. She doesn’t have classes, so instead spends all her time in self-guided preparation for her teacher certificate exam on environmental engineering. She’ll spend all of next semester working on her thesis paper, a graduation requirement for her major. Other than meals and maybe a short nap mid-afternoon, you’ll likely find her in the library, sitting on a stool or pacing the hallway, textbook in hand, chanting aloud the material to aid in memorization. 25-30 other students will be doing the same thing in the same place, so the hallway will echo with the din of 30 students talking aloud to themselves, all this while classes are taking place in rooms just off the hallway. If Kiko does go back to her dorm for a mid-afternoon nap, she’ll be greeted by her roommates; 5 other senior girls in her same major. At CWNU, roommates are assigned by the school, and decided based on your major. When students enter as freshmen, the roommates they meet will remain with them all four years. Only in very unusual circumstances are students allowed to change roommates from one year to the next.

Liang Chun Yan (Ada) is an English major. As a junior, she still has classes, which typically start at 8. After leaving her dorm in the morning, she won’t return till around 10 at night. She’ll spend all day in class, or studying in the library. She explains that most of the fun activities on campus (like the screaming match I heard) are geared towards the freshmen. Their first three weeks at college, CWNU’s freshmen participate in required military training. During this time they don’t have classes, and just train with their unit all day. This consists of camo-clad guys and girls jogging around campus in groups of 10-20 students, or standing stock still in the middle of a field for up to half an hour while the leader of their section paces up front, making sure no one moves a muscle. After this three-week period, classes start, but the freshmen still have time in their schedules to join clubs and participate in fun activities organized by the school. After their freshmen year, many students will drop out of the clubs they joined that first year, as they no longer have time in their schedules.

Another strange orientation tradition is that during the first month of school, the freshmen are required to clean their entire dorm building and keep it spotless. Students themselves, and not a cleaning crew, are responsible for cleaning bathrooms, sweeping the floor, and making sure all surfaces are mess-free. Another group of students (usually upper-classmen) regularly inspect the dorms to make sure freshmen are meeting the cleaning standards. Dorms are ranked at the end of the month according to how clean they’ve been kept, and the residents of the building in last place have to clean other buildings on campus as punishment. How’s that’s for a Royals Cup event, EMU? When I asked Ada if there was anything else she thought I should know about student life at CWNU, she said that in the library there are 6 bathrooms for girls, and only 2 for boys. This highlights the gender imbalance among students, and as Ada said rather dejectedly, “Many girls are single, and almost all the boys have girlfriends.”… We feel ya Ada, we feel ya.

Chen Jun Feng (Bob) is also a junior English major. He confirmed that junior year is very challenging academically, but (luckily for Andrew) that doesn’t mean he can’t find time to fit in a ping pong game or two every once in a while. His favorite activities are ping pong, sports matches, mountain climbing, or pretty much anything athletic.

We’re lucky that no matter how busy the students of CWNU are, they still make time to hang out with us 🙂

-Emma Stutzman