My belated semester report

Jesse Day

Final Report

Associated Colleges in China, Fall ‘09

At the end of the semester, Ma laoshi, head of ACC, called me into her office to provide a message that was part injunction, part encouragement. Essentially, she was telling me that I needed to improve my attitude and be a role model of sorts for the new students of next semester. How, may you ask, did I gain the reputation for being a malcontent?

After being extremely happy with what I gained from HBA over the course of the summer, it was hard not to hold ACC to those standards. As a result, I came away with some mixed feelings when I might have been quite satisfied had this been my first experience in intensive Chinese study. As a third-year student the goal of the semester seemed to be providing a background in more formal Chinese, the kind used in news broadcasts, newspapers and scholar. On the one hand, the selection of articles definitely succeeded in introducing us to that particular style, although one of the textbooks (the light blue one, other students will know what I’m talking about) ended up seeing very heavy-handed and dull, likely due to how outdated the material was. As with any textbook some of the lessons seemed a bit arbitrary, but the choices all in all tended to provide a good sample of new vocabulary and discussions. The problem is that I found that most students felt a dissatisfaction with their ability to actually speak to Chinese people and participate in life in China - in other words, they wanted to work on their kouyu more. In general, I felt more of a sense of discontentment and tiredness at ACC than at HBA. The language pledge was not kept nearly as well, especially towards the end when lassitude seemed to overtake just about everyone.

Essentially, I felt that ACC didn’t stand up to HBA’s level of quality. This is certainly not to blame the teachers or the students. The teachers were hard-working and sociable. I would even say that a lot of them were excellent. The students worked hard and seemed to show more raw interest in China collectively than my HBA peers had. But I found ACC less effective than HBA at improving my Chinese. Part of this must be attributed to my situation. Being in China for the summer, and in particular studying at HBA, clearly gave me a head start. A lot of the grammar patterns early on looked rather familiar, though by the end that stopped being the case, and it seems to me that I may have had an easier time with the vocabulary due to already having studied a greater proportion of it. It’s also because the level of my fellow students was lower than at HBA. I liked the diversity of backgrounds of my classmates, but it also meant that they didn’t necessarily have the benefit of good first- and second-year programs. However, I think ACC can be squarely criticized on two fronts: Pronunciation and a lack of opportunities for creativity. The latter issue is that most students left third-year with pronunciation errors that the second-years at HBA had already eradicated. HBA dedicates half-an-hour a day just to reading aloud. I’m not saying that ACC has to do likewise, but I think that ACC teachers were too satisfied with a mediocre level of pronunciation. To my eyes, it often prevented my fellow students from communicating with Chinese people in elementary situations. The other issue is that HBA tended to leave students to invent phrases using a particular grammar, whereas ACC always gave an extremely specific sentence for students to repeat, taken from the lessons but irrelevant to real life. I felt that this left most people uncomfortable creating their own sentences even in routine circumstances. Ultimately, I don’t know about the validity of these complaints because I clearly made huge leaps forward in my Chinese ability. Perhaps my progress didn’t feel as dramatic as over the summer, but in my travels around China over the break I have never had any problems making myself understood. But I came away from the semester tired and a little bit disappointed.

In recalling my experience for the semester I definitely need to step beyond just evaluating ACC. Although my frustration permeates a lot of my recollections, there were all sorts of positives to mention. I love living in Beijing, and I think that relative to other students I went through very few days where I felt unhappy with life in China. Chinese food is better than what’s in the States, in my opinion, while being as cheap as you want. My favorite lunch (daoxiaomian, down the alleyway after the secret Korean restaurant, for anyone curious) costs 6 kuai. While ACC kept me very busy at times, I still had the time to regularly head over to Wudaokou on the weekends to catch up with my friends over there, wander around the city and play ultimate frisbee. With the latter in particular, I was playing about two times a week and even went to Tianjin to run a clinic for university students at TEDA. Having a working computer, while damaging to my studies, made Chinese study considerably easier. It also coincidentally allowed me to develop my taste for Chinese music. I also had the good fortune of having a great host family who I would go visit about once a month. I can’t even really think of any quality of life issues, other than my occasional craving for steak.

I feel very comfortable with living in China and am excited to keep doing so for the next four months. In spite of my earlier whining, ACC is definitely responsible for this latter situation. My roommate turned out to be a great guy and good for my overall sanity. He had never been out of the States before, but I was really impressed with his willingness to try new stuff. For next semester, ACC set me up to have my own apartment with a Chinese roommate, which should be a superb opportunity. ACC does a good job of providing fun activities (almost to a fault) and the teachers were always willing to talk to me, even politics and other potentially touchy situations. A particular episode comes to mind where a laoshi spent at least a couple of minutes trying to explain to me what duotai meant, as I failed to understand. Another major part of the semester was continuing to discover the city. My favorite part of Beijing is that it seems to consist of a thousand different neighborhoods, all suitable to how you‘re feeling and what you want to see. Korean barbecue, going to Minzu daxue, one-on-one beer pong at Pyro’s, wandering through a market catered to Russians...it may not always have been didao, but it was a superb break to the endless swathes of ACC work. I would like to do even better, but I went to a lot of new places, best of which was easily 798 art district. I hope to go back there all the time next semester.

There are some tough aspects to life in Beijing. The one that comes most readily to mind is the trouble of getting around such a big town. Going anywhere seems to take an hour by default. The subway never seems to have any seats regardless of what time it is. I kept in worse contact with my friends on the other side of town than I had hoped. There was a visit to Fragrant Hills with my host family in particular that took a good two and a half hours each way. Playing ultimate required a streak of masochism because the hour spent getting there and back meant that I would be sleep-deprived for the next day, not to mentioned tired and sore. Perhaps as a result, life at ACC tended to assume some aspects of cabin fever, especially around the due dates of major products. Some people started adopting bizarre sleep schedules and seemed to go outside only sparingly. To any future ACC students: do not become them, I beg you. Find places to go outside of the campus. The weather also contributed more than a little. After flirting with blue skies and 60 degrees, Beijing weather decided somewhere around mid-October to skip the entire season of fall and drop to the freezing point. It snowed at least five times during the month of November alone. I fear returning to frigid Beijing from South-East Asia and Southern China where I’ve been traveling. However, I suppose the fact that I am mentioning the weather at all indicates that I don’t have more urgent problems in life.

All in all, I am pretty optimistic for next semester. Taking a good long break has rekindled my passion for improving Chinese. For all that I was far too negative about ACC for the past few months, the teachers are excellent, the lessons tend to be compelling and my Chinese skills made leaps and bounds. I feel prepared to take charge of my Chinese study and rely on my own methods if I feel unsatisfied with what ACC has to offer. I also want to state that, in spite of being a negligent blogger, I am extremely grateful to the Light Fellowship. My life has changed in ways that I notice only when I drop Chinese words in conversations with my friends from the States and react casually to the prospect of eating chicken feet. On a bigger scale, I am applying to geophysics graduate school at the moment in no small part because of my experiences in China and the thought that I might be able to return and use my language skills to make some contribution to China’s environmental issues. I appreciate the faith that the Light Fellowship placed in me, and I hope to do a better job of validating it over the course of next semester.