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

Nov. 4, 2018

After being unable to communicate clearly with people for the first few weeks of our trip, I was ready to use sports as my medium of communication. I heard about ping-pong tables but could not find them and had to ask for assistance from a boy sitting at the top of the steps looking over several courts of pick-up basketball. There are many English majors on the China West Normal university campus, and I thought it would be worth a try to open the conversation in English rather than stumble through any of my basic Chinese phrases that I had not yet polished. When I asked if he knew English, he told me that he was an English major and that his English name was “Box.” I had to confirm the name because of its obscurity. We chatted a little as he led me to the ping-pong tables. I found out that he liked basketball and got his contact information for a possible game in the future. This is how I met many of my Chinese friends.

Box later explained that his Chinese name combined with the Chinese character for “Box” meant psychopath in his hometown. In general, more complicated conversations like this with non-native English speakers can be draining. I have realized that Chinese to English translation is no easy task. This fact is prominently displayed all over China on signs with English translations that often leave me scratching my head. Even if all the words are correct, a cultural point may be missed along the way. Even though most students’ English is better than mine, I sometimes feel that I am speaking to a child as I dumb down my vocabulary and filter my cultural references. I must remind myself that many people I talk to are much more intelligent than they appear in English. My rudimentary Chinese doesn’t paint me as the next Einstein either. In the midst of this frustration, I turn to sports as a universal language to communicate through competition.

I spend many evenings texting all my Chinese friends to ask if they want to play ping-pong. Often, they are busy studying for a test or doing homework, but I usually can find at least one person to play me. In the U.S., I list my ping-pong skills as average. However, after being told by a 12-year-old boy that I “die quickly,” I think my official Chinese ranking should probably be below average. No matter the skill difference, I enjoy either asking questions about college life for Chinese students or putting some of my Chinese language to use depending on my opponent’s English ability.

In the end, I was able to play some basketball with Box. We happened to be on the same team on a weekend tournament put on by the basketball club. With only two weeks remaining in our time on this university campus, it is one of my goals to be as active with others as possible.

-Andrew Troyer

10/16/18

“Are you Christian?”
“Are you Mennonite?”

Every time I’m asked these questions, I usually respond with a sputtering “well I was raised Mennonite”, or even a resounding yes to bring a quick end to an uncomfortable conversation. However, neither answer really felt like an honest portrayal of my uncertain religious convictions.

In the West, we expect a simple yes or no to these questions. To us, religion is a binary: either you are or you are not. This expectation of exclusive belief makes discerning religious and spiritual ideas difficult; how can we figure out our beliefs when there is no room for grayness in religion?

In China, however, religion is nothing but gray. Religion (or philosophy, depending on your definition of religion) in China does not necessarily mean complete faith in one religion but can be a personal combination of many thoughts. Therefore, it is nearly impossible to find accurate numbers for people in China who

consider themselves religious by Western standards. Someone may consider themselves non-religious but still pray for prosperity if they visit a Christian church or Buddhist temple. Or, one may consider themselves religious but believe in any combination of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, etc., and practice in any kind of various ways. (This disbelief in exclusive religion is one of the reasons Christianity struggled for centuries to find its place within Chinese society).

This past Monday, we visited a Daoist temple, Nestorian Christian pagoda and a Buddhist pagoda/temple (all dating back to at least the seventh century CE). Normally, when discussing religion, we try to organize and classify each thought, finding differences between every religion. Visiting three different religious sites in one day, however, enabled me to see the similarities. The Buddhist and Daoist temples each were similar in composition, with classic Chinese architecture, inscribed paintings and figures to venerate. The pagodas at the Buddhist and Nestorian sites were similar in shape and size, and inside the Nestorian pagoda, Daoist and Christian iconography intermingled. If the places of worship were so similar, then surely the beliefs must be in some way as well.

While I walked among the Daoist buildings within the temple walls, each decorated with beautifully bright paintings of nature and in the courtyards wafting with incense, I felt at peace. This feeling of connectedness was greater than anything I have ever felt in a church or at any of the European Anabaptist sites I visited last summer.

Perhaps this sense of peace I felt in the Daoist temple was the spiritual connection I yearned to have out of guilt for lacking the deep faith others’ possessed, but I eventually shunted, out of self-perceived failure and anger.

I have never felt comfortable answering yes or no to inquiries about my Christian faith, but maybe it is because a simple yes or no cannot properly convey my faith. China, and this cross-cultural, have given me a new and open space to explore my spirituality that no where else has and tools to process my complicated relationship with religion that I have yet to find exclusively within the Christian church. For this I am thankful.

I am not ready to turn my back on the Mennonite church, but I need more. While I have yet to reach any conclusions on how I identify religiously, I am no longer sure I want a definitive answer. In some ways, I am more comfortable without clarity. Ultimately, I think the Chinese may have it right: why strictly follow one doctrine when you can syncretize so many beautiful philosophies? Why be religiously stagnant when there is so much to explore?

-Emma Yoder

September 27, 2018

Top Questions Asked By Year at EMU:
Freshman year – “What’s your major?”
Sophomore – “What are your plans after college?”
Junior – “Where are you going for your cross-cultural?”
Senior – “No, seriously pick one. Why haven’t you gone yet?”

I remember picking my destination for cross-cultural in the fall of my freshman year. I was a naive 18 year old from rural Ohio who had never left the east coast, and I was ready to explore the world. I marched into the cross-cultural office as soon as I had mustered up my freshman courage to ask where it was. I pointed dramatically at the first person I saw and declared “Where can I get the most culture shock!” Perhaps my memory is a bit foggy on the details of my inquiry, but I do know I left that office with a definitive answer: China.

They say that if you keep a routine for twenty-one days, you will form a habit. However, they do not say the length of time it takes to assimilate yourself into a completely new culture.  I woke up this Monday morning and walked to the bus stop to have our early morning class thirty minutes away. As we waited the fifteen minutes with vacant stares for bus 22 to reach our stop, Anna turned to me and asked, “Do things feel just…normal now?”

For one of the first times in my life, I didn’t immediately have something to say. I looked to my right and there was the usual pop-up shop that sold magazines and various breakfast breads enshrouded in pork floss. To my left were some locals who had pulled out their phones and were taking pictures of the thirteen foreigners who were waiting for the transit. The sound of the endless honking of cars communicating their whereabouts to each other filled my ears along with the sizzling of various meats being cooked, skewered, and sold for 3 yuan per stick; an inexpensive 50 cent breakfast for North Americans. I looked back at Anna, shrugged, and offered, “kinda.”

We have reached our fourth week in China and third week in Nanchong. In no way can I say that I have come to adopt the Chinese culture in its pure essence, but neither can I say that I haven’t grown accustomed to the stark differences. When we arrived here, I can definitely say I felt very out of place. Immediately, I could tell that we were an oddity by the looks we were receiving of neither disgust nor excitement, but of intrigue. Beijing is definitely a place for tourists, however, with a population of two million, we are spread thin. A group of thirteen was a rare sighting. We were followed by whispers of “Weiguorenmin” (foreigners) and then “Meiguorenmin”(Americans) when they heard our comparatively monotone English voices. Once I heard a little girl walking past us in an alleyway, counting out loud how many foreigners there were and exclaiming “Shi san ge Weiguoren!” to her friend when she figured it out.

The racial diversity in Chinese cities may be spread thin, however, the shear number of people per square foot is not. We have had to reduce our personal space down to about 5 centimeters while in public. This was my biggest worry as I have enochlophobia, the fear of crowds. I remember while visiting New York, I had to wiggle my way out of a rather large one to take a breather and collect myself. I have noticed a difference however, to the crowds of New York, USA and those of Nanchong, China.

When in a crowd in New York, people are not used to being this close to each other, and every little mistake is seen as a problem; being elbowed in the ribs after the transit suddenly halts in the road, stepping on another’s shoes when trying to quickly avoid a near death experience with a taxi, or accidentally “brake-checking” someone while reading a sign. Here in China it is different.

Last evening, I was attempting to get onto a bus back to the university at the same time the primary school let out at 9:00 pm. The bus driver looked at the three foreigners and two locals on the steps waiting to scan their bus passes and looked back to the collection of children whom we would spend the next hour standing beside. He shouted something I can only imagine to mean, “Make some room!” I was the first one to board the bus and saw a wall of children hanging onto each other and onto the nearest support, so I did what I had learned in the past four weeks in China to do; I pushed.

In Mandarin, there is no phrase for “excuse me” to use in a crowd setting. The closest we have learned is “qing wen” which literally translates to “please question.” So we must push our way through only muttering “dui bu qi” (sorry) when we accidentally make a wrong move and cause the other person pain. While moving through a crowd, it is less of asking people to part the Red Sea, and more of swimming through Dr. Seuss’s famous Oobleck. I have been able to wiggle my way through, but been restrained by my backpack being stuck between two people.

Curiously, I am less anxious getting onto busses or pushing my way through the sidewalks, invading people’s personal bubble. I think this is due to the expectation that this is how to get from point A to point C when point B is blocking your path. There isn’t the awkward hand on the shoulder and slight bow as you excuse yourself by someone. I think I always feared the social repercussions, responsibilities, and constant apologies that needed to be said.

I feel that China has made me more comfortable with asserting myself. I may be illiterate, but I have gained the confidences of at least two Finns.

-Finn Wengerd

21 September 2018

I want adventure in the great wide somewhere.

This “Beauty and the Beast” lyric has resonated with me since I was a child growing up in small-town Pennsylvania. I related to Belle on a personal level, always wanting more, looking for interesting things to happen whether they be positive or negative. As I was watching this film for the umpteenth time with my host family last weekend, I began to ponder what the lyric has meant to me.

Like Belle when she first arrived in the castle, these first few weeks in China have been rough for me. Changes are never easy for me, but this felt different. Nothing was exciting me nor was it disappointing me. I was just going through the motions, and it felt pretty terrible. I forgot why I wanted to come to China in the first place. I felt like Belle locked in the dungeon. Then, I began to make connections with my classmates, the enchanted household items of my trip, the schedule began to solidify and made days go by swiftly, and I took the time to absorb and explore the world (castle) around me.

Some of my favorite explorations so far have been riding alone in a sketchy three-wheeled cart, sitting introspectively on the Great Wall and taking in the immensity and beauty of my first wonder of the world, playing badminton with my host mom, searching for American food among the noodles and rice, tasting duck (“Be Our Guest”, am I right?), and snapping pictures of every piece of Peppa Pig merchandise I can find.

This is my adventure. This is the great, wide somewhere I have been seeking. The Beast locking me up is Chinese class, the Gaston chasing after me is sickness, mental and physical, and the magical utensils providing me with support are my classmates. Most people where I am from do not travel to other countries; they get stuck in their “little town,” and I never wanted that for myself. I chose to travel to China because of the immensity of the Great Wall, the expansiveness of cities, and the adventure of it all. I am no longer thinking of this trip as a three and a half month cross-cultural, but as the adventure that has always eluded me.

-Cheyenne Marzullo