For our country-specific orientations, we had an informal panel discussion about what to expect. Hong Kong’s was the day after Sun God and everyone seemed to have made it in one piece. From it, there were a couple things I think were worth noting.
First was the environment. I’ll be first to admit that I’ve been spoiled by beautiful California weather. Granted we still have overcast days here and there, but compared to the east coast, we have it great. In fact, during the summer and early fall, I’m told Hong Kong is similar to New York City. They are after all similar in set up with dense islands right off the mainland. So likewise, the hot and humid weather is similar too.
This is where the similarities end, though. At orientation we were informed that we would have to pay for our air conditioning. Here at UCSD we are not given air conditioning, but Hong Kong is significantly hotter, and the humidity undoubtedly makes it worse. Easy solution—get out of your room more often. I suppose the library is well conditioned and indoor spaces for convening are probably made bearable as well.
In Hong Kong, there are typhoons as well. I didn’t quite know what typhoons were, so I looked it up, and they’re basically tropical storms (precursors to hurricanes) in the northwest Pacific. During typhoons, the returning students said that they often close up the buildings and do not let people out. Although I suppose it would be for our own safety, it would also be nice to have a warning.
One unexpected item that they overwhelmingly agreed on was to bring bugspray. I do not believe that a mosquito has ever bitten me during the day, but one returnee in particular said that as soon as she stepped out of the airport, five relatively immediately attacked her.
I personally have a weird history with bugs, especially the ones that bite or sting. When I was little, I got bitten all the time. At home, especially during camping trips, it was not uncommon for me to wake up and find another two or three bites. One time, the back of my leg had this giant one that freaked everybody out in fourth grade (for I had not covered it up). Then one day, I did not get bitten any more. I guess they were tired of my blood. And that’s the way it was for years.
This last year though, the attacks came back. Though I have not yet been bitten here in La Jolla, when I go back to Thousand Oaks, I find myself in the morning with more bites here and there like when I was little.
I wonder how my blood will taste to the Hong Kong bugs.
The second item brought up is the bureaucracy that you have to deal with in the university. I was surprised to find this out because here in the United States hardly a person doesn’t have a complaint against the bureaucracy. Apparently it is worse there.
In addition, their method of registering for classes is very different than the one at UCSD. Here, we are given time slots to register for classes, based primarily on units and, consequentially, class level. Once you register for a class, you are in that class. If you get on the waitlist, it is because you didn’t or couldn’t register for classes earlier. Our system is commonly termed first-come-first-served.
The universities in Hong Kong employ a different system. According to the returnees, a typical student go to quite a few classes at first to shop around and will eventually register for about eight classes (the regular class load is five or maybe six). From those choices, the school does a lottery behind closed doors (or more likely computer automated). The students then get informed to what classes they’ve been accepted.
The last notable topic that was mentioned was housing. They all have “hall culture,” which is like school spirit for one’s hall of residence. The hall-mates do events together. They also have a few formal dinners, in the British tradition at HKU—something completely lacking at UCSD (or for that manner any UC I believe).
My host university, the University of Hong Kong is apparently short on housing. So while I hope to get in on hall culture, I may end up living off campus in university-owned or sponsored housing, having to take a short bus ride to school every day.
Fingers crossed.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
"The Ugly American," Part 2
Sun God Festival is UCSD’s flagship event of the year. Though essentially a big concert, it was set up like a carnival and lasted from noon to midnight on Friday, May 15, on RIMAC (standing for something about recreation) Field, located on the north side of campus. There was the large “Main Stage” with an accompanying giant screen where the headlining bands played. On the opposite side of the field there was the “Dance Tent” where DJs did their thing club style. Center field there was “Midway,” a circular tent where many comedic and lower-key performances took place. Towards the west side there were the Student Organization Booths and the portapotties. Conveniently across the field from the portapotties was the food-court area, which serve pizza, teriyaki chicken, and funnel cakes.
Some of the musical performances on the main stage included Augustana, Sara Bareilles, and N.E.R.D. In Midway there was Cirque Berzerk (complete with flamethrowers and funny mime people-things) and Kaba Modern (of MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew fame). That’s all fine and dandy—the default fun part.
The fun part was fun, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about. Sun God is seen as the one day when the UCSD campus comes alive. Normally seen as socially dead, UCSD becomes the party school that many wish it were. Students from other schools come down for the event to take part in the festivities. I myself saw many of my high school friends there. Fortunately, I saw them before they left to get drunk.
This brings me back to the “ugly American” stereotype again. Admittedly, I had only planned to write one post on this matter, but seeing the events surrounding my authorship, it would do well to reflect some more.
The Eleanor Roosevelt College campus is off in the northern area of campus, where few people go. I like it up here because of that fact. Although it takes me longer to walk to class than I would like, its placement off the beaten path makes it quiet. RIMAC Field, where Sun God took place, lies adjacent to ERC and as such, Friday night saw more people up there than usual.
Alcohol was not allowed into Sun God. To this effect, we had to empty all bottles so that no liquids were allowed in, in effect. So to get drunk many students would drink as much as they could before hand and then stumble in through the liquid checkpoints. According to my international drug policy professor, this is more dangerous than at parties, where drinking is more gradual and has time to process.
That night, the ERC campus (as well as Sun God) was bustling with tipsy people. I’d never seen it so crowded. My suite hosted three separate parties at the same time somehow. It reeked of alcohol and bad judgment. One of my suitemates drank what I believe to be vodka from a yellow bottle, sitting against the wall in a corner looking like a crying child. Another one of my suitemates looked more predatory than usual. All in all, their ‘good time’ looked like a group of people full of fake happiness and despair at the same time.
The next morning I woke up to find a mess in our common room. Our segmented couch was disjoined and those infamous red party cups were thrown all over the place. I saw what I thought to be vomit strewn all over the walls; and only later was I informed that it was just salsa. (Consolation?)
All I can say is I’m glad this doesn’t happen every week. I promise the next post will be more of an upper.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Some of the musical performances on the main stage included Augustana, Sara Bareilles, and N.E.R.D. In Midway there was Cirque Berzerk (complete with flamethrowers and funny mime people-things) and Kaba Modern (of MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew fame). That’s all fine and dandy—the default fun part.
The fun part was fun, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about. Sun God is seen as the one day when the UCSD campus comes alive. Normally seen as socially dead, UCSD becomes the party school that many wish it were. Students from other schools come down for the event to take part in the festivities. I myself saw many of my high school friends there. Fortunately, I saw them before they left to get drunk.
This brings me back to the “ugly American” stereotype again. Admittedly, I had only planned to write one post on this matter, but seeing the events surrounding my authorship, it would do well to reflect some more.
The Eleanor Roosevelt College campus is off in the northern area of campus, where few people go. I like it up here because of that fact. Although it takes me longer to walk to class than I would like, its placement off the beaten path makes it quiet. RIMAC Field, where Sun God took place, lies adjacent to ERC and as such, Friday night saw more people up there than usual.
Alcohol was not allowed into Sun God. To this effect, we had to empty all bottles so that no liquids were allowed in, in effect. So to get drunk many students would drink as much as they could before hand and then stumble in through the liquid checkpoints. According to my international drug policy professor, this is more dangerous than at parties, where drinking is more gradual and has time to process.
That night, the ERC campus (as well as Sun God) was bustling with tipsy people. I’d never seen it so crowded. My suite hosted three separate parties at the same time somehow. It reeked of alcohol and bad judgment. One of my suitemates drank what I believe to be vodka from a yellow bottle, sitting against the wall in a corner looking like a crying child. Another one of my suitemates looked more predatory than usual. All in all, their ‘good time’ looked like a group of people full of fake happiness and despair at the same time.
The next morning I woke up to find a mess in our common room. Our segmented couch was disjoined and those infamous red party cups were thrown all over the place. I saw what I thought to be vomit strewn all over the walls; and only later was I informed that it was just salsa. (Consolation?)
All I can say is I’m glad this doesn’t happen every week. I promise the next post will be more of an upper.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Monday, May 18, 2009
"The Ugly American," Part 1
UCSD is known for its lack of social life. While not entirely true, there are notably less parties here than the notorious UC Santa Barbara or our neighbor San Diego State University. In reality, if by social life, parties are implied, we rank low, but if drugs and alcohol are thrown into the equation, our numbers are probably not much lower than everyone else. It has been said here that fun won’t be thrown at you, for you will have to go looking for it yourself. The perceived lack of alcohol and related socializing (or vice versa) is notorious here at UCSD, for all people do here is study, right? In short, I wouldn’t testify to that.
At the general orientation a couple of weeks ago, we were taught something about stereotypes and how to avoid them. The prevailing theme of this discussion was “the ugly American.” While it is probable that the average American could guess the meaning of these three words, I doubt a lot of my college classmates get the full extent of this stereotype, for most of them fall into that stereotype.
When oversees, avoid wearing college shirts, especially those with acronyms such as UCSD and SDSU because that just screams American college student. What it said then was don’t stick out like a sore thumb. Even if you don’t fall into the stereotype in the full sense of it, parts imply the whole. Hear Democrats, think gay rights; hear Republicans think religion—it’s the same concept.
In my opinion, the “ugly American” concept is not based on anything too far from the true lives of many undergraduate college students. It entails binge drinking at parties to feel looser and more socially apt, as well as being loud and obnoxious. Now the drinking part really hit me as odd. I personally don’t drink, and I know that alcohol is off-putting to me, not to mention illegal in non-medical, non-religious circumstances for people of my age in the United States. I would say that I buy into the stereotype that those Europeans drink a lot. I’ve heard stories of four-year-olds drinking in Croatia and lax enforcement of the drinking age in other countries. Granted, I haven’t been to Europe, though I am planning on going early this summer to France (mostly Paris) and Italy.
I recently had a conversation with a good friend of mine who goes to UCSD, and with whom I went to high school, about drinking and drugs. It did not turn out at all in the way that she seemed to have expected, though judging by the lack of feasibility of alternative answers, she must have had other motive that was in the end unfulfilled by my answer.
And I told her, “I honestly don’t see the fun in getting so drunk that you’re throwing up. I like being in my head, and an altered state of mind seems equally undesirable.” She told me that I was being on the offensive to the entire social aspect of her life. I apologized half-heartedly, but said that she had solicited my opinion, of which I had given.
She told me that drinking is the only thing that she does regarding drugs. She revealed to me that another old high school friend of mine was into experimenting with drugs, to which I was surprised. I guess you could say that this is where my naiveté becomes transparent and my ideology had to be shifted to accommodate others.
I always prized myself on having drug-free, alcohol-free (or what I like to call clean) friends. This stemmed from the effectiveness of the D.A.R.E. (or Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program on me. Administered in sixth grade, but now defunct, it involved having a police officer come to campus a couple times a week and lead us through the program. Sometimes the police officer would come to campus during lunch and show us how real handcuffs look and feel both on and off our wrists. The program worked on me, I believe, because I was not a rebel in short. I am not more righteous than others for my history, just to say that I am an active product of society rather than the unintentional-though-pervasive product of society, which creates the adolescent/teenage rebel culture.
Because the D.A.R.E. program was presented in a didactic fashion during school hours, rebelling against society included the program through school. When the ineffectiveness of the program was fully shown, it was cancelled, with the money that used to be appropriated to the program re-appropriated to hiring a full-time police officer for each of the three high schools in the school district.
As the high schools in Thousand Oaks were already safe, violent crime didn’t exactly go down. As I would find out later, drugs existed on campus in considerable quantities, and the presence of a police officer did little to decrease drug crime. All that it did was provide more immediate consequences for those caught.
As I would find out later, our Associated Student Government vice president was a pot dealer on campus, and many of the members of the club Students Against Drunk Driving (bouncing off of Mothers Against Drunk Driving) could be seen drinking vodka, Jose Cuervo, and other liquors from Pyrex measuring cups and those infamous red disposable plastic cups on Facebook.
My personal opinion on the matter has changed considerably since I came to UCSD. Before, I took to the D.A.R.E. philosophy that drugs are bad—drugs being any substance besides food that changes or alters bodily function. In my mind, it was an easy enough definition to deal with. Nicotine (tobacco) is bad, as is marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, and opiates (heroin).
I have never smoked first hand in my life, tried a marijuana joint, or dealt with any illicit drug. I know how alcohol tastes and I hate it, which is part of the reason why it has not been an issue to avoid drinking at college parties. On the other hand, many of students that I reside with in my suite do pot, with the frequency, might I add, as often as once every other day. In one seven-day period, O=one suitemate in particular was completely clean but one day.
This provided an overwhelming point of contention for me, because as I had long found solace in being drug free, suddenly I found myself in an environment where I felt as though I were the only level-headed one (or at least one of the very few). When I went from high school to college, I put myself under the impression that I would never have to feel in such a way again.
Up until recently, I was very put off by this experience and in the end I had to fix my mentality. No longer was I stuck in the confines of high school. Even in college, I was surrounded by less-than-savory people, and with no escape, I was forced to cope. I entered this last quarter with my faith in God and the knowledge that they could not change who I am if I don’t want them to.
My mother, the only person that I can really confide these feelings in, told me that I shouldn’t feel so down because of what other people do. She told me that I based by sense of morality in legality and the law, and maybe I shouldn’t so much. I began reevaluating what I believed to be the rule of law in society until I realized that my conception of the law in society fell in the same arena as a great ancient thinker.
Socrates and I were on the same wavelength. Socrates was sentenced to death for three charges that were frivolous at best. In his defense (The Apology) he failed to simply appease his jurors and answer his accusers. He made a scene of it and justified himself with the set of laws that was used to condemn him. When he was found guilty and subsequently sentenced to death, his good friend Crito came to help him escape. He refused his assistance to escape, and said that he must answer to the state that had so nourished him up until that point. Although he may have been unjustly sentenced, he would die as a testament to the legal system, for where would we be without our laws?
So where would we be without our laws? My studies during this quarter have led me to a class on international drug policy—and a revelation. A drug, or more specifically a psychoactive substance, includes the illegal (cocaine, marijuana, and heroin) and the partially legal (alcohol and nicotine), but also caffeine.
Caffeine has a full range of effects, including negative ones, consisting of insomnia, sweating, palpitations, headaches, etc. In addition, studies suggest that caffeine has a higher addiction rate than marijuana, as many a professional would tell you.
As science is showing, marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as initially thought and has lower addition rates that alcohol and nicotine, both partially legal drugs. So why are we still in such an uproar over keeping marijuana illegal? Logic leads one to ask why alcohol and nicotine are legal and a less harmful drug such as marijuana is illegal. That is why countries such as the Netherlands have decriminalized it.
This brings me to my new opinion of drugs and alcohol—moderation. The “ugly American” stereotype also stems from the treatment of marijuana by people in the United States. Similar to college students drinking to the point of unconsciousness, many Americans go to the Netherlands to engage in recreational marijuana, but I am told they over-indulge, treating marijuana as the forbidden fruit of the populace, being what alcohol is to the American under-aged.
However, even if marijuana were made legal, I would not participate recreationally along the same reasoning as why I choose not to smoke tobacco, thought it would be perfectly legal for me to do so. I am not an advocate for lowering the drinking age, but were I of age, I might engage lightly, but never to the point where I find myself bent over a trashcan nor where I might wake up in Mexico. The drinking age is 18 in Hong Kong, and as I will be 19, why not socialize a little?
In short, I am not a rebel to the rebels; I am a traditionalist among the insecure; I am a traditionalist among those who think they are traditionalist; I am a liberal American. Attack me now.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
At the general orientation a couple of weeks ago, we were taught something about stereotypes and how to avoid them. The prevailing theme of this discussion was “the ugly American.” While it is probable that the average American could guess the meaning of these three words, I doubt a lot of my college classmates get the full extent of this stereotype, for most of them fall into that stereotype.
When oversees, avoid wearing college shirts, especially those with acronyms such as UCSD and SDSU because that just screams American college student. What it said then was don’t stick out like a sore thumb. Even if you don’t fall into the stereotype in the full sense of it, parts imply the whole. Hear Democrats, think gay rights; hear Republicans think religion—it’s the same concept.
In my opinion, the “ugly American” concept is not based on anything too far from the true lives of many undergraduate college students. It entails binge drinking at parties to feel looser and more socially apt, as well as being loud and obnoxious. Now the drinking part really hit me as odd. I personally don’t drink, and I know that alcohol is off-putting to me, not to mention illegal in non-medical, non-religious circumstances for people of my age in the United States. I would say that I buy into the stereotype that those Europeans drink a lot. I’ve heard stories of four-year-olds drinking in Croatia and lax enforcement of the drinking age in other countries. Granted, I haven’t been to Europe, though I am planning on going early this summer to France (mostly Paris) and Italy.
I recently had a conversation with a good friend of mine who goes to UCSD, and with whom I went to high school, about drinking and drugs. It did not turn out at all in the way that she seemed to have expected, though judging by the lack of feasibility of alternative answers, she must have had other motive that was in the end unfulfilled by my answer.
And I told her, “I honestly don’t see the fun in getting so drunk that you’re throwing up. I like being in my head, and an altered state of mind seems equally undesirable.” She told me that I was being on the offensive to the entire social aspect of her life. I apologized half-heartedly, but said that she had solicited my opinion, of which I had given.
She told me that drinking is the only thing that she does regarding drugs. She revealed to me that another old high school friend of mine was into experimenting with drugs, to which I was surprised. I guess you could say that this is where my naiveté becomes transparent and my ideology had to be shifted to accommodate others.
I always prized myself on having drug-free, alcohol-free (or what I like to call clean) friends. This stemmed from the effectiveness of the D.A.R.E. (or Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program on me. Administered in sixth grade, but now defunct, it involved having a police officer come to campus a couple times a week and lead us through the program. Sometimes the police officer would come to campus during lunch and show us how real handcuffs look and feel both on and off our wrists. The program worked on me, I believe, because I was not a rebel in short. I am not more righteous than others for my history, just to say that I am an active product of society rather than the unintentional-though-pervasive product of society, which creates the adolescent/teenage rebel culture.
Because the D.A.R.E. program was presented in a didactic fashion during school hours, rebelling against society included the program through school. When the ineffectiveness of the program was fully shown, it was cancelled, with the money that used to be appropriated to the program re-appropriated to hiring a full-time police officer for each of the three high schools in the school district.
As the high schools in Thousand Oaks were already safe, violent crime didn’t exactly go down. As I would find out later, drugs existed on campus in considerable quantities, and the presence of a police officer did little to decrease drug crime. All that it did was provide more immediate consequences for those caught.
As I would find out later, our Associated Student Government vice president was a pot dealer on campus, and many of the members of the club Students Against Drunk Driving (bouncing off of Mothers Against Drunk Driving) could be seen drinking vodka, Jose Cuervo, and other liquors from Pyrex measuring cups and those infamous red disposable plastic cups on Facebook.
My personal opinion on the matter has changed considerably since I came to UCSD. Before, I took to the D.A.R.E. philosophy that drugs are bad—drugs being any substance besides food that changes or alters bodily function. In my mind, it was an easy enough definition to deal with. Nicotine (tobacco) is bad, as is marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, and opiates (heroin).
I have never smoked first hand in my life, tried a marijuana joint, or dealt with any illicit drug. I know how alcohol tastes and I hate it, which is part of the reason why it has not been an issue to avoid drinking at college parties. On the other hand, many of students that I reside with in my suite do pot, with the frequency, might I add, as often as once every other day. In one seven-day period, O=one suitemate in particular was completely clean but one day.
This provided an overwhelming point of contention for me, because as I had long found solace in being drug free, suddenly I found myself in an environment where I felt as though I were the only level-headed one (or at least one of the very few). When I went from high school to college, I put myself under the impression that I would never have to feel in such a way again.
Up until recently, I was very put off by this experience and in the end I had to fix my mentality. No longer was I stuck in the confines of high school. Even in college, I was surrounded by less-than-savory people, and with no escape, I was forced to cope. I entered this last quarter with my faith in God and the knowledge that they could not change who I am if I don’t want them to.
My mother, the only person that I can really confide these feelings in, told me that I shouldn’t feel so down because of what other people do. She told me that I based by sense of morality in legality and the law, and maybe I shouldn’t so much. I began reevaluating what I believed to be the rule of law in society until I realized that my conception of the law in society fell in the same arena as a great ancient thinker.
Socrates and I were on the same wavelength. Socrates was sentenced to death for three charges that were frivolous at best. In his defense (The Apology) he failed to simply appease his jurors and answer his accusers. He made a scene of it and justified himself with the set of laws that was used to condemn him. When he was found guilty and subsequently sentenced to death, his good friend Crito came to help him escape. He refused his assistance to escape, and said that he must answer to the state that had so nourished him up until that point. Although he may have been unjustly sentenced, he would die as a testament to the legal system, for where would we be without our laws?
So where would we be without our laws? My studies during this quarter have led me to a class on international drug policy—and a revelation. A drug, or more specifically a psychoactive substance, includes the illegal (cocaine, marijuana, and heroin) and the partially legal (alcohol and nicotine), but also caffeine.
Caffeine has a full range of effects, including negative ones, consisting of insomnia, sweating, palpitations, headaches, etc. In addition, studies suggest that caffeine has a higher addiction rate than marijuana, as many a professional would tell you.
As science is showing, marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as initially thought and has lower addition rates that alcohol and nicotine, both partially legal drugs. So why are we still in such an uproar over keeping marijuana illegal? Logic leads one to ask why alcohol and nicotine are legal and a less harmful drug such as marijuana is illegal. That is why countries such as the Netherlands have decriminalized it.
This brings me to my new opinion of drugs and alcohol—moderation. The “ugly American” stereotype also stems from the treatment of marijuana by people in the United States. Similar to college students drinking to the point of unconsciousness, many Americans go to the Netherlands to engage in recreational marijuana, but I am told they over-indulge, treating marijuana as the forbidden fruit of the populace, being what alcohol is to the American under-aged.
However, even if marijuana were made legal, I would not participate recreationally along the same reasoning as why I choose not to smoke tobacco, thought it would be perfectly legal for me to do so. I am not an advocate for lowering the drinking age, but were I of age, I might engage lightly, but never to the point where I find myself bent over a trashcan nor where I might wake up in Mexico. The drinking age is 18 in Hong Kong, and as I will be 19, why not socialize a little?
In short, I am not a rebel to the rebels; I am a traditionalist among the insecure; I am a traditionalist among those who think they are traditionalist; I am a liberal American. Attack me now.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Loss of Life, Limb, or Language
A major component of most study abroad experiences is the foreign language aspect. On one hand, the prospect of going to a place where no one speaks your language can be daunting. On the other hand, going overseas has the potential to provide the practice necessary for foreign-language learners as studying in that language (as opposed to just studying the language) improves the depth of practice, necessitating increased fluency on a higher register than mere conversational speech.
In my opinion, a major problem with American students is the lack of motivation to learn other languages, and according to the British Broadcasting Company, many British students feel similarly toward the discipline. (“A Point of View” by Lisa Jardine, May 9, 2006) Yeah, it makes rational sense. English is spoken by much of the world population, and some estimates put it in front of Mandarin as the most spoken language when counting second-language learners in addition to native speakers. A boatload of people spread over a good chunk of the world speak English, which is what I speak, so why should I learn a separate language? Before I entered high school, this was my opinion, so I guess I was not so different.
When I was little, I detested the idea of having to learn another language, and now I’m not so sure that I understood the concept of different languages and multilingualism back then. For me, English just seemed the natural way of communication because I came out my mouth so easily and so easily for those speaking to me as well. Other languages may have seemed just weird sound to me, odd and bizarre, containing sounds that I did not believe I could pronounce myself. Now I know better.
Chinese school was a burden, a waste of Saturday mornings. The program (teaching Mandarin) was largely ill structured and the teachers bored me dearly. Chinese confused me by notion of tones and quantifiers, and having left the program early, I came out confused about Chinese and thought the process of second language acquisition was boring and pointless.
In third grade, I picked up an American Sign Language book that I could not and did not put down for months. I learned to sign the English alphabet (which I still know) and independently learned some words. My teacher thought I had a knack for it and told my mother.
Today, learning languages is something of an addiction. I took Spanish 1 freshman year of high school and found acquiring it so easy that I studied to skip Spanish 2. I passed the final for Spanish 2 with flying colors, with the Foreign Language Department chair touting my abilities to inflect reflexive verbs with little direct experience. The following year I entered Spanish 3 and blew my teacher’s socks off with my near-native accent (I chose Colombian) that convinced some of my friends that I was half-Mexican.
The following year I continued in Spanish, as well as picking up college-level French and college-level Japanese, which I found fascinating, but the pace a little lackluster. My senior year of high school, I continued my French studies and maintained my Spanish competence, also picking up Latin and trying again at Mandarin in Chinese 2, after skipping Chinese 1 by studying (for the same reasons as why I skipped Spanish 2). That year, I also decided to start picking up Italian, and now I continue my efforts to become as fluent as possible in all aforementioned languages.
Many people, including my mother, believe I have a natural propensity for learning languages, which, while not necessarily untrue, is not the entire basis for my success. I’d rather think it was because of my effort and passion for language learning.
As I plan to discuss in a later post, my love of language, and consequently culture, has brought me to where I am today. With my Linguistics major, I get to study the principles of language and the role that it plays in society (my concentration in Language and Society). My interest in culture has brought me to find interest in international relations, a subset of political science, which brings me to my other major. While there is an International Relations major offered by the Political Science Department, I chose to study political science through the International Studies department because the interdisciplinary nature of the program allowed me to choose a secondary track that improved upon the breadth of my discipline.
Now, I believe that everybody should learn a second language because it is hypothesized that the nature of a particular language allows us to develop different ways of analyzing a situation that a rigid, monolingual mind would theoretically otherwise find incomprehensible. A basic and well-known example of this, though not analyzed as such, is the fact that when expressing age, English speakers are the age, whereas some other language speakers possess the age. “I am 18 years old” in English would be expressed as “J’ai 18 ans” in French or “Tengo 18 años” in Spanish—both of which literally mean “I have 18 years.” In short, my French professor Marie Agel at Moorpark Community College said, “Learning another language just makes us smarter and people who know more than one language are just smarter.”
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin is minimal at best. I know that I need to concentrate on my learning Cantonese because it’s the primary language of communication there. Whereas what little Mandarin I know was acquired formally, the way I acquired Cantonese is a different story.
Whereas Mandarin can be written down word for word, Cantonese does not have the formal ability to be formally written down exactly as uttered, with the exception of some common informalities, or Written Colloquial Cantonese, which is a recent advent. This confused me a lot. As an example of this, a phrase like “Why am I your friend?” would be uttered like “dinggai ngo hai neige pengyao” in spoken Cantonese, with proper tones of course, and written as “为什么我是你底朋友?” Now with Chinese having monosyllabic orthography, the discrepancy is clear that you just used nine characters to write down eight syllables. It’s like writing down in Latin what you say in Spanish. As such, when a Cantonese speaker would read that sentence, it would come out as “waiswomwo ngo si nei ge pengyao” with nine syllables and appropriate tones. As such, this means that there are effectively two kinds of Cantonese (and many other Chinese dialect-languages as well)—one for spoken speech and one for reading, which, as I understand, is basically Mandarin with Cantonese phonology.
This created a problem for me because a big key to learning language for me personally is the ability to write it down and study it independently. This is not the natural way of learning language, as evidenced by the facts that most languages are unwritten, and that children learn to speak before they learn (and most often must be taught) to write. This is compounded by the fact that the only person who I really learn Cantonese from is my mother. Both of our primary languages are English, so it’s difficult, at least for me, to not take the easy way out and just reply to her in English, which I inevitably end up doing to her dismay. In addition, my mother left Hong Kong when she was 11, and since Cantonese is a modern language, with the definition of a modern language being one that is changing as it is currently in use, the language changed without her, and as a result the Cantonese that I learn from her has a retro twist. Isn’t that groovy?
On the surface, this should not be a problem, because HKU, which I will be attending, officially teaches in English, as do most universities and colleges in Hong Kong, but after watching a documentary about codeswitching among university students and other Hong Kongers, I wonder how far English has permeated into daily life, and whether it is gaining or losing ground and how I will be treated if I try to hold on to my language in the face of another.
The documentary is titled Multilingual Hong Kong Present 一个 Project, and it is, in essence, a case study of several of my anthropology and linguistics classes. In INTL 101 Languages in Competition (for which I actually wrote a 4,700-word paper about the bilingual/trilingual government of Hong Kong), we focused a great deal on codeswitching, which is basically shifting between languages in certain situations among bilinguals. In LIGN 101 Introduction to Linguistics, we spent a little bit of time on bilingualism/multilingualism and phonotactic constraints. In ANSC 122 Language and Society and ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, we focused on codeswitching as a sociological force in creating personal and community identity.
The main feature of the documentary was the simple-yet-revealing sentence, “Today, I must present a project.” As a foray into the linguistic nature of Hong Kong, not a single subject on camera was able to say the complete sentence in Cantonese. The problem lied in the word “project,” for which many Hong Kongers could not find a Cantonese equivalent. When it was brought to their attention (for many fluent bilinguals do not realize that they codeswitch) they tried again, pausing before “project,” but inevitably finding that the most effective word in their vocabularies to express that which is a “project” was the English word “project.”
Certain English phrases were simply imbedded in Hong Kong Cantonese speech, and there was little that could be done to undo it. Not to say that codeswitching is a bad thing, but many “purists” believe that we must be pure of (a single) language in our speech and use one language or another and not switch mid-situation, or (oh my!) mid-sentence. People who have not consciously investigated and studied this phenomenon, including those who do it, often have this opinion.
Unfortunately for this school of thought, history is not on their side. English in its purist form is a prototypical mutt of a language. It is estimated that Modern English (existing sometime before Shakespeare on) consists of a full two thirds Latin largely via French, which is more than its namesake in Middle English (with an estimated less than one thirds contributing in some way to Modern English), itself with Germanic heritage. As a result of this heritage, in English we have many pairs of words that mean exactly the same thing, just with different connotations. Oversee and supervise, build and construct, deadly and fatal, eat and dine, forbid and prohibit, and mistake and error are just a few pairs. In general, the Latin-based words are more formal than their Germanic-based counterparts.
To compound this hybridity, there are borrowings from many other languages. Algebra comes from Arabic, yacht from Dutch, bungalow from Hindi, and brainwash from a direct translation of Chinese, to name a few. These words are so integrated that no speaker thinks about keeping English a pure language when speaking it. In addition, historical attempts by scholars to purify English by bringing it back to its Germanic roots proved ineffective.
In short, codeswitching and the borrowing of words is not a problem—rather it enhances the expressiveness of the speakers, serving as an innovative force. As with everything human, such phenomena have much deeper meaning than just the phenomena themselves (ergo anthropology!). Therein lies my issue. I know it seems like these past four posts, I haven’t been doing anything but whining, and I’m sorry. If you want to reconsider Rhinesmith, I’m still in the first stage, so bear with me, for I have knowledge to drop!
As we have examined in INTL 101 Languages in Competition and again in depth in ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, codeswitching serves as an identity-creating force, and the choice of language, often a subconscious decision, is used effectively to this point.
I understand that a large part of the study abroad experience is the foreign language aspect—don’t get me wrong, I do. But with Hong Kong’s history as a British Crown Colony and the fact that more than a third of the population has receptive competence of English, I would be lying to you and myself if I were to say that I am not going to take advantage of this. I’ll try not to, but I hardly think I’ll be able not to, at least in the first couple weeks if not the entire first month or more.
I have to admit that as a native English speaker, I thought I would be revered in a city full of aspiring English speakers who feel that their main connection to the world is through English. While I know that English is respected, people codeswitching with too much English in Hong Kong are often thought of arrogant as demonstrated in the documentary, and it’s not clear whether this applies equally to foreigners and locals. Being a foreigner, I would like to think that I will receive some acceptance in speaking English from the locals, but I also know that my heritage gives me the ability to look like a local, so I might not receive the same cushion that a white American might receive, per se.
This documentary, having used many university students as subjects of interviews, has brought about language as an object of contention in my mind. Most of the subjects of conversation were spoken in Cantonese, with an English word inserted here or there, which disrupts the preconception that I had that since the classes are in English, it would make sense that the students would speak English regularly as well. Since this documentary has brought to light the fact that this may very well not be true, I wonder if codeswitching goes on in class, because it seems that it is difficult to stick to one language or the other in Hong Kong.
All I can say is I can try to acquire Cantonese and use it to my advantage for “social profit.” Until then, I hope I can be given the benefit of the doubt in the intentions of my actions like an unseasoned beginner. I’ll be sure to practice ahead of time and see what comes of it.
*
In my opinion, a major problem with American students is the lack of motivation to learn other languages, and according to the British Broadcasting Company, many British students feel similarly toward the discipline. (“A Point of View” by Lisa Jardine, May 9, 2006) Yeah, it makes rational sense. English is spoken by much of the world population, and some estimates put it in front of Mandarin as the most spoken language when counting second-language learners in addition to native speakers. A boatload of people spread over a good chunk of the world speak English, which is what I speak, so why should I learn a separate language? Before I entered high school, this was my opinion, so I guess I was not so different.
When I was little, I detested the idea of having to learn another language, and now I’m not so sure that I understood the concept of different languages and multilingualism back then. For me, English just seemed the natural way of communication because I came out my mouth so easily and so easily for those speaking to me as well. Other languages may have seemed just weird sound to me, odd and bizarre, containing sounds that I did not believe I could pronounce myself. Now I know better.
Chinese school was a burden, a waste of Saturday mornings. The program (teaching Mandarin) was largely ill structured and the teachers bored me dearly. Chinese confused me by notion of tones and quantifiers, and having left the program early, I came out confused about Chinese and thought the process of second language acquisition was boring and pointless.
In third grade, I picked up an American Sign Language book that I could not and did not put down for months. I learned to sign the English alphabet (which I still know) and independently learned some words. My teacher thought I had a knack for it and told my mother.
Today, learning languages is something of an addiction. I took Spanish 1 freshman year of high school and found acquiring it so easy that I studied to skip Spanish 2. I passed the final for Spanish 2 with flying colors, with the Foreign Language Department chair touting my abilities to inflect reflexive verbs with little direct experience. The following year I entered Spanish 3 and blew my teacher’s socks off with my near-native accent (I chose Colombian) that convinced some of my friends that I was half-Mexican.
The following year I continued in Spanish, as well as picking up college-level French and college-level Japanese, which I found fascinating, but the pace a little lackluster. My senior year of high school, I continued my French studies and maintained my Spanish competence, also picking up Latin and trying again at Mandarin in Chinese 2, after skipping Chinese 1 by studying (for the same reasons as why I skipped Spanish 2). That year, I also decided to start picking up Italian, and now I continue my efforts to become as fluent as possible in all aforementioned languages.
Many people, including my mother, believe I have a natural propensity for learning languages, which, while not necessarily untrue, is not the entire basis for my success. I’d rather think it was because of my effort and passion for language learning.
As I plan to discuss in a later post, my love of language, and consequently culture, has brought me to where I am today. With my Linguistics major, I get to study the principles of language and the role that it plays in society (my concentration in Language and Society). My interest in culture has brought me to find interest in international relations, a subset of political science, which brings me to my other major. While there is an International Relations major offered by the Political Science Department, I chose to study political science through the International Studies department because the interdisciplinary nature of the program allowed me to choose a secondary track that improved upon the breadth of my discipline.
Now, I believe that everybody should learn a second language because it is hypothesized that the nature of a particular language allows us to develop different ways of analyzing a situation that a rigid, monolingual mind would theoretically otherwise find incomprehensible. A basic and well-known example of this, though not analyzed as such, is the fact that when expressing age, English speakers are the age, whereas some other language speakers possess the age. “I am 18 years old” in English would be expressed as “J’ai 18 ans” in French or “Tengo 18 años” in Spanish—both of which literally mean “I have 18 years.” In short, my French professor Marie Agel at Moorpark Community College said, “Learning another language just makes us smarter and people who know more than one language are just smarter.”
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin is minimal at best. I know that I need to concentrate on my learning Cantonese because it’s the primary language of communication there. Whereas what little Mandarin I know was acquired formally, the way I acquired Cantonese is a different story.
Whereas Mandarin can be written down word for word, Cantonese does not have the formal ability to be formally written down exactly as uttered, with the exception of some common informalities, or Written Colloquial Cantonese, which is a recent advent. This confused me a lot. As an example of this, a phrase like “Why am I your friend?” would be uttered like “dinggai ngo hai neige pengyao” in spoken Cantonese, with proper tones of course, and written as “为什么我是你底朋友?” Now with Chinese having monosyllabic orthography, the discrepancy is clear that you just used nine characters to write down eight syllables. It’s like writing down in Latin what you say in Spanish. As such, when a Cantonese speaker would read that sentence, it would come out as “waiswomwo ngo si nei ge pengyao” with nine syllables and appropriate tones. As such, this means that there are effectively two kinds of Cantonese (and many other Chinese dialect-languages as well)—one for spoken speech and one for reading, which, as I understand, is basically Mandarin with Cantonese phonology.
This created a problem for me because a big key to learning language for me personally is the ability to write it down and study it independently. This is not the natural way of learning language, as evidenced by the facts that most languages are unwritten, and that children learn to speak before they learn (and most often must be taught) to write. This is compounded by the fact that the only person who I really learn Cantonese from is my mother. Both of our primary languages are English, so it’s difficult, at least for me, to not take the easy way out and just reply to her in English, which I inevitably end up doing to her dismay. In addition, my mother left Hong Kong when she was 11, and since Cantonese is a modern language, with the definition of a modern language being one that is changing as it is currently in use, the language changed without her, and as a result the Cantonese that I learn from her has a retro twist. Isn’t that groovy?
On the surface, this should not be a problem, because HKU, which I will be attending, officially teaches in English, as do most universities and colleges in Hong Kong, but after watching a documentary about codeswitching among university students and other Hong Kongers, I wonder how far English has permeated into daily life, and whether it is gaining or losing ground and how I will be treated if I try to hold on to my language in the face of another.
The documentary is titled Multilingual Hong Kong Present 一个 Project, and it is, in essence, a case study of several of my anthropology and linguistics classes. In INTL 101 Languages in Competition (for which I actually wrote a 4,700-word paper about the bilingual/trilingual government of Hong Kong), we focused a great deal on codeswitching, which is basically shifting between languages in certain situations among bilinguals. In LIGN 101 Introduction to Linguistics, we spent a little bit of time on bilingualism/multilingualism and phonotactic constraints. In ANSC 122 Language and Society and ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, we focused on codeswitching as a sociological force in creating personal and community identity.
The main feature of the documentary was the simple-yet-revealing sentence, “Today, I must present a project.” As a foray into the linguistic nature of Hong Kong, not a single subject on camera was able to say the complete sentence in Cantonese. The problem lied in the word “project,” for which many Hong Kongers could not find a Cantonese equivalent. When it was brought to their attention (for many fluent bilinguals do not realize that they codeswitch) they tried again, pausing before “project,” but inevitably finding that the most effective word in their vocabularies to express that which is a “project” was the English word “project.”
Certain English phrases were simply imbedded in Hong Kong Cantonese speech, and there was little that could be done to undo it. Not to say that codeswitching is a bad thing, but many “purists” believe that we must be pure of (a single) language in our speech and use one language or another and not switch mid-situation, or (oh my!) mid-sentence. People who have not consciously investigated and studied this phenomenon, including those who do it, often have this opinion.
Unfortunately for this school of thought, history is not on their side. English in its purist form is a prototypical mutt of a language. It is estimated that Modern English (existing sometime before Shakespeare on) consists of a full two thirds Latin largely via French, which is more than its namesake in Middle English (with an estimated less than one thirds contributing in some way to Modern English), itself with Germanic heritage. As a result of this heritage, in English we have many pairs of words that mean exactly the same thing, just with different connotations. Oversee and supervise, build and construct, deadly and fatal, eat and dine, forbid and prohibit, and mistake and error are just a few pairs. In general, the Latin-based words are more formal than their Germanic-based counterparts.
To compound this hybridity, there are borrowings from many other languages. Algebra comes from Arabic, yacht from Dutch, bungalow from Hindi, and brainwash from a direct translation of Chinese, to name a few. These words are so integrated that no speaker thinks about keeping English a pure language when speaking it. In addition, historical attempts by scholars to purify English by bringing it back to its Germanic roots proved ineffective.
In short, codeswitching and the borrowing of words is not a problem—rather it enhances the expressiveness of the speakers, serving as an innovative force. As with everything human, such phenomena have much deeper meaning than just the phenomena themselves (ergo anthropology!). Therein lies my issue. I know it seems like these past four posts, I haven’t been doing anything but whining, and I’m sorry. If you want to reconsider Rhinesmith, I’m still in the first stage, so bear with me, for I have knowledge to drop!
As we have examined in INTL 101 Languages in Competition and again in depth in ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, codeswitching serves as an identity-creating force, and the choice of language, often a subconscious decision, is used effectively to this point.
I understand that a large part of the study abroad experience is the foreign language aspect—don’t get me wrong, I do. But with Hong Kong’s history as a British Crown Colony and the fact that more than a third of the population has receptive competence of English, I would be lying to you and myself if I were to say that I am not going to take advantage of this. I’ll try not to, but I hardly think I’ll be able not to, at least in the first couple weeks if not the entire first month or more.
I have to admit that as a native English speaker, I thought I would be revered in a city full of aspiring English speakers who feel that their main connection to the world is through English. While I know that English is respected, people codeswitching with too much English in Hong Kong are often thought of arrogant as demonstrated in the documentary, and it’s not clear whether this applies equally to foreigners and locals. Being a foreigner, I would like to think that I will receive some acceptance in speaking English from the locals, but I also know that my heritage gives me the ability to look like a local, so I might not receive the same cushion that a white American might receive, per se.
This documentary, having used many university students as subjects of interviews, has brought about language as an object of contention in my mind. Most of the subjects of conversation were spoken in Cantonese, with an English word inserted here or there, which disrupts the preconception that I had that since the classes are in English, it would make sense that the students would speak English regularly as well. Since this documentary has brought to light the fact that this may very well not be true, I wonder if codeswitching goes on in class, because it seems that it is difficult to stick to one language or the other in Hong Kong.
All I can say is I can try to acquire Cantonese and use it to my advantage for “social profit.” Until then, I hope I can be given the benefit of the doubt in the intentions of my actions like an unseasoned beginner. I’ll be sure to practice ahead of time and see what comes of it.
*
Saturday, May 9, 2009
My Nervousness
Recently, I hypothetically asked my mother what she thought of me driving down to San Diego from Thousand Oaks, some one hundred fifty miles, by myself. I will be turning 19 in less than two months and like to feel as though my maturity exceeds my years. She told me that she was unsure, and still felt that it was still too early. While I understand that she’s just being a protective mother, inconsistencies arise, such as the fact that she knows that I take rides back to UCSD with other students around my age with less driving experience than me. I suppose this exception is to make sure I get to school, seeing as the alternatives would be either a three-and-a-half-hour train ride (costing $27) coupled with a half-hour bus ride to campus, or they drive me to school (two-and-a-half hours optimistically) and then back. Anyway, I help pay for my friends’ gas and carpooling is good for the environment, right?
There is one big hurdle that one needs to get over when studying abroad—leaving home. I guess it is a fairly straightforward process that everyone goes through when they leave the nest. Unfortunately for me, I, as well as most of my suitemates (whom I dorm with), have not really left home. We all go home for breaks, most of us have gone home more than once during each of our three quarters (each quarter consisting of eleven weeks), and first and foremost, we refer to our former domiciles as “home,” and refer to the act of visiting as “going back [home].” Last quarter, my roommate went back to Glendale six or seven weekends out of the ten, and another suitemate went home every weekend until just a month ago and still goes back frequently. I really am no different. Fall quarter, my family visited me once, and I went home once. Winter quarter, I went home twice and my family visited me once. This current spring quarter, my mother has visited me once, and my family plans to visit me the weekend after next, both occasions regarding orientation for study abroad.
My home is in Thousand Oaks, where I was born and raised. I can point to minute landmarks and show whoever cares to where I reached milestones in my life, just the way my parents intended. Don’t get me wrong—I love La Jolla. The weather’s great and insects are few; there is much more diversity here than the suburban community close to my heart, and I can see the blue Pacific from by window. In fact, the similarities between La Jolla and Thousand Oaks, particularly around Westlake High School (where I graduated), are plenty. In a sentence—it’s full of old rich people. There are many nice cars, crime is low, and drivers are bad. It reminds me of home in my own personal way and I’m glad to have it. So in a different way, I have not yet left home. My new town is reminiscent of the old and I have yet to start seeing my family any more than three times a year. Therein lies my stage in life.
Well, I purchased my round-trip ticket from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Hong Kong International Airport (HKG) a couple weeks ago, and ever since my nervousness has been building steadily. I told my mother of this increase when she was here the other weekend. I received the response, “Why?” Simple and succinct, her one word said a thousand. Did you do something wrong? Did you miss a deadline…oh no, did you miss a housing deadline? It would have been a good thing she didn’t say it out loud, but her intonation gave her utterance meaning, possibly including meaning she didn’t mean to give.
My mother used to live in Hong Kong during her early childhood back in the day, so I’m not sure she understands the full gravity behind my nervousness. Previously, my family visited China for two weeks with a tour group. We visited Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou, all of which in central and northern China. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is in southern China (along with the good food, my mother tells me!). It was a good experience in every sense. Not only did we experience a slice of culture, we also got too see the developing country in development. There were construction cranes everywhere, and unfortunately the cities were masked in pollution. My brother and I realized the extent of our language barriers (my brother’s more than mine).
Will Hong Kong be enshrined in smog? Will it be hot and humid like the rest of China during most of the year? I already know I will have to give up my California weather—but to what extent? I suppose I will find out soon enough. How will the people be? Will the people spit all over the ground like they did in Beijing? Will the people lift their shirts halfway up their chests so as to mitigate the heat as the men did in Xian? Only time will tell I guess.
And back to my family—I will not likely see them during the four-month semester, nor will they likely see me. Whereas I do not think this is going to be a problem on my end, I know my mother has different feelings, to which I answer, “Well at least I’m not leaving for the whole year.” Little consolation, I know.
Recall that she is currently against the idea of me driving to San Diego myself—a distance of one hundred fifty miles. Hong Kong is seven thousand, two hundred miles away (or forty-eight times the distance), on a journey I will be taking by myself, crowded onto a Boeing 747 “Jumbo-Jet” with some four hundred fifty other people. I know that she will be worrying about me and my safety, and while I tell her that I’ll be okay and there’s nothing to worry about because I’ll watch myself, I know that she will remain worried until the whole episode is over and done with.
This is evidenced by the first time I came home by train. I had a 6:35 p.m. train from Oceanside going north to Los Angeles Union Station; and from there I had a bus leaving at 9:30 p.m. for arrival in Simi Valley at 10:40 p.m. Now, I am confident in my directional bearings more than the average bear, and my parents know of my keen abilities (such as being nocturnal). Nevertheless at 6:15 p.m. my father called me to see if I was at the train station yet. On a side note, I realize this whole time I’ve been focusing on my mother. That’s not to say that my father doesn’t care, I just don’t know if in his silent ways he worries about me in the same way. Because of this, I do not know whether he called me on his own accord or whether my mother had him call me. My parents claim to put up a unified front, so I’ll treat this matter as such.
Anyways, I told him yes, that I am at the train station, on the proper platform, and I will call him when I board the train. The train was late by five minutes. At 6:40 p.m., as I was entering the train, my father called me worried because I did not call him shortly after 6:35 p.m. I cleared things up, but before we hung up, he made sure I was on the correct train (keep in mind that trains don’t come any more often than three or four in any given hour on one of two platforms) and that I had my ticket still.
At Union Station in Los Angeles, I boarded the bus and called my parents again to update them. My father wanted to make sure I was on the correct bus again. I told him I was sure because it had the correct number on it as well as the destination Santa Barbara, along which was Simi Valley, the driver accepted my ticket without a problem, and the bus-loading lot was populated with one bus—the one I got on.
In Chatsworth (one stop before Simi Valley), I texted him to tell him of my whereabouts. I didn’t call because there were people on the bus sleeping.
“I’m in chatsworth. I should be in simi by 1045”
I was texting my brother’s phone, which my parents borrowed to pick me up. My parents, having never owned a cell phone personally except for a short stint in 1994, much less one with texting abilities, made an attempt to reply.
“O 2 n i k 2 m m m” I read it and lol-ed.
Anyways, I got there and saw my parents a couple hundred feet away. I began walking to them when I saw my mother flaring her hands about to get my attention, for fear that I may go the wrong direction, though I was clearly going towards them. It was like a corny movie, a scene that was bound to happen. In the car during the ride home they told me how they were so worried because the bus was fifteen minutes late and that it was night, to which I smiled.
Multiply that by 48 for the difference in distance and 4 for the difference in time gone without seeing each other, and we’ll see where we are then.
*
There is one big hurdle that one needs to get over when studying abroad—leaving home. I guess it is a fairly straightforward process that everyone goes through when they leave the nest. Unfortunately for me, I, as well as most of my suitemates (whom I dorm with), have not really left home. We all go home for breaks, most of us have gone home more than once during each of our three quarters (each quarter consisting of eleven weeks), and first and foremost, we refer to our former domiciles as “home,” and refer to the act of visiting as “going back [home].” Last quarter, my roommate went back to Glendale six or seven weekends out of the ten, and another suitemate went home every weekend until just a month ago and still goes back frequently. I really am no different. Fall quarter, my family visited me once, and I went home once. Winter quarter, I went home twice and my family visited me once. This current spring quarter, my mother has visited me once, and my family plans to visit me the weekend after next, both occasions regarding orientation for study abroad.
My home is in Thousand Oaks, where I was born and raised. I can point to minute landmarks and show whoever cares to where I reached milestones in my life, just the way my parents intended. Don’t get me wrong—I love La Jolla. The weather’s great and insects are few; there is much more diversity here than the suburban community close to my heart, and I can see the blue Pacific from by window. In fact, the similarities between La Jolla and Thousand Oaks, particularly around Westlake High School (where I graduated), are plenty. In a sentence—it’s full of old rich people. There are many nice cars, crime is low, and drivers are bad. It reminds me of home in my own personal way and I’m glad to have it. So in a different way, I have not yet left home. My new town is reminiscent of the old and I have yet to start seeing my family any more than three times a year. Therein lies my stage in life.
Well, I purchased my round-trip ticket from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Hong Kong International Airport (HKG) a couple weeks ago, and ever since my nervousness has been building steadily. I told my mother of this increase when she was here the other weekend. I received the response, “Why?” Simple and succinct, her one word said a thousand. Did you do something wrong? Did you miss a deadline…oh no, did you miss a housing deadline? It would have been a good thing she didn’t say it out loud, but her intonation gave her utterance meaning, possibly including meaning she didn’t mean to give.
My mother used to live in Hong Kong during her early childhood back in the day, so I’m not sure she understands the full gravity behind my nervousness. Previously, my family visited China for two weeks with a tour group. We visited Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou, all of which in central and northern China. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is in southern China (along with the good food, my mother tells me!). It was a good experience in every sense. Not only did we experience a slice of culture, we also got too see the developing country in development. There were construction cranes everywhere, and unfortunately the cities were masked in pollution. My brother and I realized the extent of our language barriers (my brother’s more than mine).
Will Hong Kong be enshrined in smog? Will it be hot and humid like the rest of China during most of the year? I already know I will have to give up my California weather—but to what extent? I suppose I will find out soon enough. How will the people be? Will the people spit all over the ground like they did in Beijing? Will the people lift their shirts halfway up their chests so as to mitigate the heat as the men did in Xian? Only time will tell I guess.
And back to my family—I will not likely see them during the four-month semester, nor will they likely see me. Whereas I do not think this is going to be a problem on my end, I know my mother has different feelings, to which I answer, “Well at least I’m not leaving for the whole year.” Little consolation, I know.
Recall that she is currently against the idea of me driving to San Diego myself—a distance of one hundred fifty miles. Hong Kong is seven thousand, two hundred miles away (or forty-eight times the distance), on a journey I will be taking by myself, crowded onto a Boeing 747 “Jumbo-Jet” with some four hundred fifty other people. I know that she will be worrying about me and my safety, and while I tell her that I’ll be okay and there’s nothing to worry about because I’ll watch myself, I know that she will remain worried until the whole episode is over and done with.
This is evidenced by the first time I came home by train. I had a 6:35 p.m. train from Oceanside going north to Los Angeles Union Station; and from there I had a bus leaving at 9:30 p.m. for arrival in Simi Valley at 10:40 p.m. Now, I am confident in my directional bearings more than the average bear, and my parents know of my keen abilities (such as being nocturnal). Nevertheless at 6:15 p.m. my father called me to see if I was at the train station yet. On a side note, I realize this whole time I’ve been focusing on my mother. That’s not to say that my father doesn’t care, I just don’t know if in his silent ways he worries about me in the same way. Because of this, I do not know whether he called me on his own accord or whether my mother had him call me. My parents claim to put up a unified front, so I’ll treat this matter as such.
Anyways, I told him yes, that I am at the train station, on the proper platform, and I will call him when I board the train. The train was late by five minutes. At 6:40 p.m., as I was entering the train, my father called me worried because I did not call him shortly after 6:35 p.m. I cleared things up, but before we hung up, he made sure I was on the correct train (keep in mind that trains don’t come any more often than three or four in any given hour on one of two platforms) and that I had my ticket still.
At Union Station in Los Angeles, I boarded the bus and called my parents again to update them. My father wanted to make sure I was on the correct bus again. I told him I was sure because it had the correct number on it as well as the destination Santa Barbara, along which was Simi Valley, the driver accepted my ticket without a problem, and the bus-loading lot was populated with one bus—the one I got on.
In Chatsworth (one stop before Simi Valley), I texted him to tell him of my whereabouts. I didn’t call because there were people on the bus sleeping.
“I’m in chatsworth. I should be in simi by 1045”
I was texting my brother’s phone, which my parents borrowed to pick me up. My parents, having never owned a cell phone personally except for a short stint in 1994, much less one with texting abilities, made an attempt to reply.
“O 2 n i k 2 m m m” I read it and lol-ed.
Anyways, I got there and saw my parents a couple hundred feet away. I began walking to them when I saw my mother flaring her hands about to get my attention, for fear that I may go the wrong direction, though I was clearly going towards them. It was like a corny movie, a scene that was bound to happen. In the car during the ride home they told me how they were so worried because the bus was fifteen minutes late and that it was night, to which I smiled.
Multiply that by 48 for the difference in distance and 4 for the difference in time gone without seeing each other, and we’ll see where we are then.
*
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The Gist of It: General Orientation
The UCSD Programs Abroad Office held their mandatory general study abroad orientation for summer and fall departures this last Wednesday, and to my surprise it was more about cultural adjustment and health issues than anything else. As expected, the country-specific orientation focuses on our specific programs and the logistics of the whole thing. Hong Kong’s is set for May 16. Two things from this first orientation in particular that really stuck out were the “cultural iceberg” and Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment, both illustrated in the packets distributed at the meeting. Though out of the discussion I don’t believe I learned anything particularly new, the fact that it brought much possible elation about the whole experience back down to earth was probably necessary.
The cultural iceberg is a succinct representation of how we think about other countries and other cultures. The idea is that just as you can only see the top tenth of an iceberg, with the lower nine-tenths indiscernible from above water (Titanic, anyone?), most people only see the superficial aspects of culture and do not realize the other nine-tenths of a culture until later (maybe not until it’s too late?). To anyone that knows about and or feels a sense of belonging to more than one culture, this idea, possibly in a different metaphor, likely exists at a profound level. So above water is what we all see—in a word, pop culture: river dancing for Ireland, videogames and high technology for Japan, Shakespeare for England, ABBA for Sweden (thanks, Dad!), etcetera. It’s what our main interests are in as foreigners, as observers. The lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is comprised of things like “notions of modesty,” “ideals governing child raising,” “conception of status mobility,” “roles in relation to status by age, sex, class, occupation, kinship, etc.,” and many, many more. This lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is where we find fundamental differences in with our own culture, where we can easily explain a difference in culture through morality and ethics though the reality is much more complicated than that.
Despite this, in the classes I’ve taken, and not from orientation, I have learned that a big problem with studying “them” or “other” cultures exists in the notion that we consider ourselves to be normal, or relatively normal to others. An example of this is the common utterance “I don’t have an accent,” which is so common among people with many different accents that anyone who’s thought about it has to wonder, so who doesn’t have an accent? The only logical conclusion is that everyone has an accent, because linguistically speaking, no language, dialect, or accent is more neutral than another by human physiology. Therein lies the problem. In putting distance between us and them, we fail to see the similarities between people, instead emphasizing the differences. As cliché as it sounds, we are all more alike than we are different. And in the end we all share 99.9% of the same DNA, with scientific research showing that there is more genetic variation within (the artificially constructed) races than between them.
Therefore, while it was important that this iceberg theory brought our expectations regarding our cultural change to light, it is equally important that we not make a big fuss about all of this and simply open up to the host culture with an open and clear mind.
The second thing that stuck out to me was Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment. Though the concept is legitimate and well accepted, the illustration is accurate but comical, making us students studying abroad look bipolar.
It looks like radio frequency, with it constant ups and downs. As an emotional representation, the lows are emotional lows and the highs are emotional highs, representing different milestones in our study abroad (and subsequent reintegration into American society.
The points are as follows:
1. initial anxiety
2. initial elation
3. initial culture shock
4. superficial adjustment to host culture
5. depression-frustration with host culture
6. acceptance of host culture
7. return anxiety
8. return elation
9. re-entry
10. reintegration
So right now, I’m probably at number 1. Assuming this model is true, 1 is actually the only feasible stage I can be at, because I haven’t arrived yet. I’ll undoubtedly be in that stage through my 14-hour plane ride, and even in exiting their relatively really new airport.
Some colleges offering reorientation programs to students returning from study abroad
By Jean Cowden Moore, Ventura County Star, Monday, March 9, 2009
My father sent me a link to this article shortly after I found out that I had gotten into the University of Hong Kong program. It outlines stages 7-10 of the model and shows how some universities, such as California Lutheran University in my hometown, Thousand Oaks, California, offer and sometimes require reorientation programs to ease the transition back into American life. Outlined in the article are some details of why many students have trouble upon return, include seeing life in the United States as being wasteful and or fondness for their host culture abroad. In addition, any excitement held by the returnee, as pointed out in orientation, can be exploded onto one’s family and friends, causing them to lose interest in the experience, bottling up any nostalgic feelings with others’ annoyance at perseverance of the topic.
UCSD neither requires nor offers a reorientation program, but instead encourages students coming back to attend returnee group meetings, where students get to share their experiences with one another. Besides, everyone I’ve met has told me that studying abroad is supposed to be a positive experience, so these “support groups” after the fact wouldn’t be bad to take advantage of.
Just some thoughts…and thanks for reading.
*
The cultural iceberg is a succinct representation of how we think about other countries and other cultures. The idea is that just as you can only see the top tenth of an iceberg, with the lower nine-tenths indiscernible from above water (Titanic, anyone?), most people only see the superficial aspects of culture and do not realize the other nine-tenths of a culture until later (maybe not until it’s too late?). To anyone that knows about and or feels a sense of belonging to more than one culture, this idea, possibly in a different metaphor, likely exists at a profound level. So above water is what we all see—in a word, pop culture: river dancing for Ireland, videogames and high technology for Japan, Shakespeare for England, ABBA for Sweden (thanks, Dad!), etcetera. It’s what our main interests are in as foreigners, as observers. The lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is comprised of things like “notions of modesty,” “ideals governing child raising,” “conception of status mobility,” “roles in relation to status by age, sex, class, occupation, kinship, etc.,” and many, many more. This lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is where we find fundamental differences in with our own culture, where we can easily explain a difference in culture through morality and ethics though the reality is much more complicated than that.
Despite this, in the classes I’ve taken, and not from orientation, I have learned that a big problem with studying “them” or “other” cultures exists in the notion that we consider ourselves to be normal, or relatively normal to others. An example of this is the common utterance “I don’t have an accent,” which is so common among people with many different accents that anyone who’s thought about it has to wonder, so who doesn’t have an accent? The only logical conclusion is that everyone has an accent, because linguistically speaking, no language, dialect, or accent is more neutral than another by human physiology. Therein lies the problem. In putting distance between us and them, we fail to see the similarities between people, instead emphasizing the differences. As cliché as it sounds, we are all more alike than we are different. And in the end we all share 99.9% of the same DNA, with scientific research showing that there is more genetic variation within (the artificially constructed) races than between them.
Therefore, while it was important that this iceberg theory brought our expectations regarding our cultural change to light, it is equally important that we not make a big fuss about all of this and simply open up to the host culture with an open and clear mind.
The second thing that stuck out to me was Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment. Though the concept is legitimate and well accepted, the illustration is accurate but comical, making us students studying abroad look bipolar.
It looks like radio frequency, with it constant ups and downs. As an emotional representation, the lows are emotional lows and the highs are emotional highs, representing different milestones in our study abroad (and subsequent reintegration into American society.
The points are as follows:
1. initial anxiety
2. initial elation
3. initial culture shock
4. superficial adjustment to host culture
5. depression-frustration with host culture
6. acceptance of host culture
7. return anxiety
8. return elation
9. re-entry
10. reintegration
So right now, I’m probably at number 1. Assuming this model is true, 1 is actually the only feasible stage I can be at, because I haven’t arrived yet. I’ll undoubtedly be in that stage through my 14-hour plane ride, and even in exiting their relatively really new airport.
Some colleges offering reorientation programs to students returning from study abroad
By Jean Cowden Moore, Ventura County Star, Monday, March 9, 2009
My father sent me a link to this article shortly after I found out that I had gotten into the University of Hong Kong program. It outlines stages 7-10 of the model and shows how some universities, such as California Lutheran University in my hometown, Thousand Oaks, California, offer and sometimes require reorientation programs to ease the transition back into American life. Outlined in the article are some details of why many students have trouble upon return, include seeing life in the United States as being wasteful and or fondness for their host culture abroad. In addition, any excitement held by the returnee, as pointed out in orientation, can be exploded onto one’s family and friends, causing them to lose interest in the experience, bottling up any nostalgic feelings with others’ annoyance at perseverance of the topic.
UCSD neither requires nor offers a reorientation program, but instead encourages students coming back to attend returnee group meetings, where students get to share their experiences with one another. Besides, everyone I’ve met has told me that studying abroad is supposed to be a positive experience, so these “support groups” after the fact wouldn’t be bad to take advantage of.
Just some thoughts…and thanks for reading.
*
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