Update on My Life

First off, I just want to let everyone know that I had a nice birthday just simply because everyone in the US wished me a Happy Birthday by some mode or another of technology, and I went out to lunch with my friends at a fantastic restaurant. The best thing that happened was on Friday one of my good friends from last semester, John, and his girlfriend Tingting took me out to dinner (actually at the same restaurant where we had lunch on my birthday since the food was so good). It was such a nice birthday present, not only because the food was more on the expensive side, but more just because I got to hang out with John and Tingting. To me, just having a nice relaxing night with two good friends was better than anything else. After dinner we went and got tea together at a coffee shop (or should I say tea shop) and chatted together for a couple of hours. So much fun.

Secondly, just an update on my language progress for those of you who follow my blog and are interested. On the up side, I can have long, relatively in-depth conversations about life in general in Chinese. I almost never speak in English anymore, excepting the every once in a while when I hang out with my American friends on the weekends. I can watch TV with virtually no problems (I was watching TV the other day and didn't know the word for "high-interest loan" so I was confused why this poor girl was so upset until I finally admitted to myself that I needed look the word up in the dictionary). My strongest point is my listening comprehension AND (drum roll please) I can talk to people on the phone in Chinese!!!!! That was probably the hardest thing for me to do last semester and I'm so happy I finally got over that hurdle.

On the downside, my grammar is absolutely atrocious, I stutter a lot, still have a thick accent, still have to stop in the middle of a sentence if I don't know the word for something and explain the situation. For example, I forgot the word for tire (which was silly because it's actually a transliteration from English), so when my bike got a flat tire I had to explain to my host family that the black round things on my bike didn't have air in them. I also struggle with reading comprehension. Most of all, I can't really talk all the naturally and smoothly yet and I can't talk about politics or the economy. This is the area that I want to improve the most because when I am talking to someone in Chinese I can't articulate my feelings as well as I would like. This is particularly frustrating if I don't agree with what someone is saying and I want to prove him or her wrong but I can't. So my goal is that by the end of the semester I will be able to have a successful political argument.

Thirdly, just an update on my daily life in general. From Monday through Thursday, I have Chinese lessons for four hours a day, from 8 am to 12 pm. Besides that, during the week I usually meet up with friends for lunch, meet with my language partner (who has become a good friend of mine now), meet with my Chinese tutor, go to my elective class (which is Chinese current events), go to Kungfu class in the evenings, and do homework.

I am also currently doing an independent research project (kind of like writing a thesis... in Chinese) on Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy, and how it influenced world politics and Chinese international status, as well as foreigners' reactions to his foreign policy. Currently I am still getting familiar with his policies by reading Chinese Foreign Policy Journals; it takes me a good 3 hours to finish just a short article so hopefully it will get easier. So I meet once or twice a week with my "research coach", as we call it (I can't think of a better way to translate his position), who is a graduate student in international politics at Nanjing University. Right now it is super challenging but I am looking forward to conducting interviews and writing the paper. This is probably the highlight of my college education thus far. It's so nice to sit down and read a policy journal article in Chinese and actually understand it and just be like, "This is what all the blood, sweat and tears have been for the past two and a half years. This is why I'm in China. This is why I'm spending so much time studying a foreign language. So I can read articles like this and truly understand why a culture is the way it is, why people think the way they do, why policies are written the way they are and why the global political climate is the way it is." It's incredibly satisfying to finally know that all this studying has not been in vain, but I can actually use my skills to conduct research. I'm going to post sometime this week some translated excerpts from one of the articles that I found particularly interesting so that those who are interested in foreign policy can take a look.

On the weekends, I usually travel somewhere, and you can see some of my pictures from Yangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou on my facebook. This past weekend was the first weekend that I wasn't traveling, so it was nice to take a break and relax. When I'm not traveling, I hang out with my friends, usually go to a bar or a restaurant, do homework, hang out with my host family, and study for the HSK (the Chinese equivalent of the TOEFL). This weekend I took my host brother out to eat with some of my friends and I think he enjoyed hanging out with kids older than him. He is really tall for his age, particularly Chinese boys his age, (he is the same height as I am) so he was shocked that everyone we went out to dinner with was taller than him. It was pretty funny. So that is my life currently! Things are going well!

p.s. Just a random note about Chinese culture that I found out this weekend when I went to visit my friend in her dorm room. Boys can't enter the girls dormitory and vice-versa. I mean, I thought Grove City College was insane for having a curfew and kicking boys out of their dorms after 11:00 pm. Here you can't even step foot inside the girls dormitory. What they would think if they knew I had co-ed bathrooms my freshman year of college.....