It’s quite sad to see this whole experience ending with me seeing my newfound friends one by one. In some ways, it seems just yesterday when we were all introducing ourselves adamantly to each other. Eagerly we traveled together as strangers and in the process quickly became friends. In some ways it was just yesterday—just four months ago. Was it enough time? I’d rather not think about that—I just have to keep telling myself that it had to end eventually.
I began packing up my things several weeks ago, yet today, the day before I leave, I still have items to stow, drawers that I don’t want to empty, last meals with friends that I wish were just meals. It had to end at some point, but in no way is this the conclusion to this blog, nor this chapter in my life.
Though it seems like we’ve moved beyond this, as Rhinesmith would point out, I’m now at stage seven. But I think that in his little analysis, either he got something slightly wrong or it doesn’t quite apply to exchange students in particular. Stage seven points out return anxiety, and honestly, I don’t think my anxiety levels are at a high right now. Quite the opposite, I’m not eager to return home.
It’s not that I’ve become adverse to home or anything. I love constant weather at livable temperatures as any friend of mine could quickly tell you. I love driving and speaking English as a part of every aspect of every day of my life. No matter where I go and how far I go, I will forever hold California in the very center of my heart, even if there’s nothing left for me to go back to.
I’ve realized that there is more now though to the world I suppose, as corny as it sounds, and I really want to see just how far away the edge of the planet is. I guess I’ve got my future to accomplish this, and accomplish this I will.
I am blessed and I understand that, because I know that while my life is not perfect and never will be, so many doors have been opened up to me. By chance or by higher power, so quickly and so definitely I have found my place in the absence of such a place. I regret ever having thought the world was against me, however long ago that was, and shall never feel that way again.
I am not psyched to go back. As much as I know that the longer I stay away, the more I will end up missing my home seven thousand miles away, I really want to stay here—stay studying here, stay traveling from here, stay experiencing other lives from here. But alas I cannot.
Due to the wisdom of past me, I decided not to file the proper paperwork to pre-approve my extension at the University of Hong Kong all the way to May. I understand why and I assumed that I would have an easier time accepting this preemptive decision on my past counterpart’s part.
Right now I’m not accepting it. Right now I feel like it wasn’t so necessary for me to graduate college in the three-year manner that I am. I know that until I finish my education (as if it’s ever done) I will flip back and forth between whether it was the right decision to plan my graduation so early.
I sit at my desk this last night of mine in Hong Kong at nineteen years of age—not yet two decades old, not yet old enough to ask for a beer on the airplane back to the United States. Who am I to do this at this age? I’m the youngest of the exchange students I know here, by as little as a few months to as much as six years. I understand that my mind is pliable, that I’m not in my own yet, that I may still have an inch in height to grow.
But on the other hand, not to sound old, but I know that my youth is closing up on me. For a good year and a half, I could read in cars without getting sick. I could stay on boats for hours on end and not feel the least bit nauseous. As silly as it sounds, I know times are changing. I know that my glasses are getting thicker, unevenly on different axes; I know that reading—even a bit—on a moving vehicle will get my head rolling for hours; I know that as much as I try, as hard as I try, certain things just aren’t so easy to learn anymore. And as much as I know not to let the future take all the brownies, I know that there’s only so much I can do—mind over matter only works to a certain extent.
This last night in Hong Kong is adding up to be a sentimental one. The number of friends still here I need not one hand to count. The number of hours until my plane leaves Hong Kong as I write this sentence stands at thirteen.
I finally got to taking the Star Ferry Night Harbour Tour and it was amazing. They circled Hong Kong as I took two hundred pictures with my new Nikon D90 camera. I got a good night as it wasn’t too hazy, and I knew I wouldn’t be seeing this skyline for quite some time.
As much as I know I'm coming back one day, someday, I also know that it’s going to be far in the future—I might have a different passport; I might have multiple passports.
But for now I’m moving back to the University of California, San Diego. Good old UCSD in the bubble that is La Jolla, California. I’ve already got my accommodation sorted and I know I’m moving in the day before classes start. I’ve already begun buying books for classes and filed plenty of paperwork to re-matriculate.
I’m set to continue with my life. I’ve laid my provisions out as I have since the end of middle school. I’ve kept watch on my own deadlines and made sure I’ve never been late on anything since I was twelve. The time to move on is now, and though the road has been paved for me by me, I know that not only am I going to be apprehensive getting on that asphalt for the first time in a long time, but also I’m not so sure I’m going to be emotionally ready for it. But as they say (though not usually in this context), life moves on.
Showing posts with label UCSD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UCSD. Show all posts
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Class Roundup: Chinese Society
Traditional Chinese Society ended yesterday, with my first final during finals week(s) and my fourth final overall. Being my first one during finals it was officiated in an authoritarian manner that I’m only used to for standardized tests. The professor had the exams on our desks when we came in then read verbatim off of an instruction sheet provided to him by the university. I know that it was provided to him because he laughed when he read aloud that you are allowed to have calculators out (since the only number we dealt with was the number of souls that a person has).
Out our class of twelve, I was given seat number twelve. For the large classroom, we were all squished onto the left side rather than spread out over the room, as would have been sensible from an administrator’s standpoint.
After we were read out loud the directions, the professor, who already had us down by name, seeing that he taught all the tutorials and the class was really small, had to verify all of our identities by means of our student identification cards.
I didn’t think the final examination was too hard. To study, I did all the readings again and went over our class discussions of the topics—both those online and those in the classroom. He specifically said not to stress specific details—so I didn’t.
We were given seven questions based on various topics that we covered in class and we had two hours to answer two of those questions in an extended in-class essay format. And I feel I answered those two questions well and completely, despite the fact that I was the first to finish. (I usually finish somewhere in the middle, though the fact that I finished first may be because I was the only native English speaker in the class.) We’ll see how I did.
Other assessments for this class included the weekly journal, online discussions, and project.
The weekly journal entries only had to be two hundred words long each, and I usually went past that. Many of my classmates, realizing that you can’t really say much in two hundred words went well over four times that. This blog has already added up to over one hundred thousand words, so I’ll attest to the fact that you can’t say much in two hundred words. We were to write on the topic of traditional Chinese society that we were covering that week. Whereas other classmates treated the entries as anthropological research assignments, I did less of that and instead had personal reflections on the topics. Often, I would through in the line or two about how I feel we’re exoticizing the subject too much, but I’ve talked about that a lot already.
The online discussions I contributed to more often than not. Some people had contributions several times a week. It was also apparent that some people had not contributed once to the discussions. I always tried to interact with other students on these online discussions rather than only summarizing articles as was prevalent at the beginning of the semester.
I can’t remember if I talked about the term project, but it consisted of a two thousand-word (field) research paper accompanied by a presentation to be made during tutorial. On the syllabus, it said that it was due week seven. To that effect, I got it done before the week seven tutorial, ready to present. I was the only one in the tutorial that had anything to show, not that the professor was expecting it. That week he decided to schedule in everybody’s presentations, and when it came to me, I asked if I could do it that day, since it was already done. He (reluctantly) said yes and I got it over with—meaning that I unintentionally lectured for forty minutes.
My topic was on the (Christian) religious beliefs of HKU students. My sample size was small, as he only required about ten interviews. Overall, my results fell in line with Hong Kong SAR statistics. I noted that I didn’t encounter as many self-described Christians as I imagined. My professor made the note (that I didn’t see) that the number of self-described Buddhists was higher at HKU than in Hong Kong SAR statistics. I felt that my report was well-researched and well-written.
On a different note about the same class, I’m planning on petitioning to have this course qualify for my minor in the Study of Religion for my degree back at UCSD. The undergraduate advisor told me I couldn’t because nothing in the syllabus mentioned directly “religion,” so I had to rebut by saying that religion in the modern, scholarly sense ultimately refers to one’s overall view on the world and what things are significant and how those things are significant. In addition, there is a class called “Chinese Society” at UCSD that has the same course description as the course I was about to take, and it happens to fulfill the requirement without petition. She then forwarded my request for preapproval to the director or the program, who decided that I did have a case and that I did receive preapproval. So hopefully everything falls in line.
Out our class of twelve, I was given seat number twelve. For the large classroom, we were all squished onto the left side rather than spread out over the room, as would have been sensible from an administrator’s standpoint.
After we were read out loud the directions, the professor, who already had us down by name, seeing that he taught all the tutorials and the class was really small, had to verify all of our identities by means of our student identification cards.
I didn’t think the final examination was too hard. To study, I did all the readings again and went over our class discussions of the topics—both those online and those in the classroom. He specifically said not to stress specific details—so I didn’t.
We were given seven questions based on various topics that we covered in class and we had two hours to answer two of those questions in an extended in-class essay format. And I feel I answered those two questions well and completely, despite the fact that I was the first to finish. (I usually finish somewhere in the middle, though the fact that I finished first may be because I was the only native English speaker in the class.) We’ll see how I did.
Other assessments for this class included the weekly journal, online discussions, and project.
The weekly journal entries only had to be two hundred words long each, and I usually went past that. Many of my classmates, realizing that you can’t really say much in two hundred words went well over four times that. This blog has already added up to over one hundred thousand words, so I’ll attest to the fact that you can’t say much in two hundred words. We were to write on the topic of traditional Chinese society that we were covering that week. Whereas other classmates treated the entries as anthropological research assignments, I did less of that and instead had personal reflections on the topics. Often, I would through in the line or two about how I feel we’re exoticizing the subject too much, but I’ve talked about that a lot already.
The online discussions I contributed to more often than not. Some people had contributions several times a week. It was also apparent that some people had not contributed once to the discussions. I always tried to interact with other students on these online discussions rather than only summarizing articles as was prevalent at the beginning of the semester.
I can’t remember if I talked about the term project, but it consisted of a two thousand-word (field) research paper accompanied by a presentation to be made during tutorial. On the syllabus, it said that it was due week seven. To that effect, I got it done before the week seven tutorial, ready to present. I was the only one in the tutorial that had anything to show, not that the professor was expecting it. That week he decided to schedule in everybody’s presentations, and when it came to me, I asked if I could do it that day, since it was already done. He (reluctantly) said yes and I got it over with—meaning that I unintentionally lectured for forty minutes.
My topic was on the (Christian) religious beliefs of HKU students. My sample size was small, as he only required about ten interviews. Overall, my results fell in line with Hong Kong SAR statistics. I noted that I didn’t encounter as many self-described Christians as I imagined. My professor made the note (that I didn’t see) that the number of self-described Buddhists was higher at HKU than in Hong Kong SAR statistics. I felt that my report was well-researched and well-written.
On a different note about the same class, I’m planning on petitioning to have this course qualify for my minor in the Study of Religion for my degree back at UCSD. The undergraduate advisor told me I couldn’t because nothing in the syllabus mentioned directly “religion,” so I had to rebut by saying that religion in the modern, scholarly sense ultimately refers to one’s overall view on the world and what things are significant and how those things are significant. In addition, there is a class called “Chinese Society” at UCSD that has the same course description as the course I was about to take, and it happens to fulfill the requirement without petition. She then forwarded my request for preapproval to the director or the program, who decided that I did have a case and that I did receive preapproval. So hopefully everything falls in line.
Friday, December 4, 2009
To Love Your University
“What class are you going to?” asked one of my friends, a fellow political science major.
“I’m going to my fine arts class,” I casually replied.
“Why do you take an arts class? Are you taking it for fun?”
“Well, yes and no. I have to take it to graduate, but I also enjoy it,” I said truthfully.
“Why would you have to take an arts class? You study political science,” he said.
“Yeah, and it’s part of my general education requirements.”
“That seems errr, stupid.”
You know, as education systems go, I’ve come to the knowledge that I like and prefer mine. Though I’m sure that many, many people back home would argue this point with me, the fact that the vast majority of university students in the United States receive liberal arts educations is a competitive advantage as critical thought goes as well as important to that development of critical thought.
Now, as I can foresee, there are two points of contention that can arise from this: first that most all higher education in the United States can be called liberal arts and second that it is actually something positive and advantageous in the long run.
Let me first define liberal arts as I see fit. I understand full well that in the United States, liberal arts on the layperson’s level almost always refers to the liberal arts colleges (not universities, because they don’t confer graduate degrees), wherein professors teach small classes and instead of researching, professors just teach. As such, liberal arts colleges tend to be small themselves. They pride themselves on learning for the sake of knowledge and having knowledge for the sake of knowledge, which I can and do fully believe in.
That’s where I’m going to break it off. Though a liberal arts college teaches liberal arts, not all institutions that teach liberal arts are liberal arts colleges—in fact, the whole higher education set up of the United States is based on the liberal arts education and continues to become more and more so—and I like it.
So what exactly is a liberal arts education? In my understanding, the result is that you get a well-rounded knowledge base upon which to draw from, but what is most important is that you come up with well-rounded (profound and thoughtful) opinions and decisions, based on the fact that nothing in the world it of itself with nothing else. Philosophically speaking, the liberal arts education gives students a real-world education with the ability to analyze relations better than say someone who went to a vocational school, which trains you only for your job.
And that’s the alternative, or one of the alternatives. Vocational school in the United States refers to professions that require more technical skill over critical thought. Don’t get me wrong, because I believe that people who go to vocational school and people who hold jobs of any sort make the world go round, but vocational school is for the nitty gritty professions, like those of mechanics and plumbers.
So where do the rest of us fit in? Well, we get well-rounded educations. This means that we have general education requirements and often areas of specialization (on top of majors). In addition, general education requirements are often done in the first two years, which means that the breadth of disciplines that a student is exposed to can help him or her decide what to major in. And before you say, well, doesn’t everybody have general education requirements?, that’s a no.
As I understand, here at HKU, there are hardly any general education requirements as we would understand in the United States. They have one broad set of classes labeled “GE: General Education” but notices that the word “requirements” is left off. GEs are not required it appears. In that sense, the university curriculum (in addition to the primary and secondary school curriculums) are based heavily on the English.
In this sense, you are forced into specialization soon after you enter university, which I find bizarre. To start, their major curriculums are three years, whereas in the United States the typical time to graduate with a bachelor’s degree is supposed to be four years.
And that’s not specialization in just major—it’s more like career. Take a look at professional degrees in the United States—most are graduate degrees that require an undergraduate degree to apply for. Architecture, as one of the few fields left whose professional degree is undergraduate, might become a graduate degree soon. I recently read an article that the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards was investigating making it so, much in the same way law was made a doctorate back in the day.
Lawyers are doctors too (at least in the United States). Since the late nineteenth century, you have to earn a Juris Doctor (JD) degree to be eligible to take the bar in any state and thereby become licensed to practice. This means that you have to first get an undergraduate degree, and then go to law school for six semesters.
In England, as I understand, as well as many historically English-ruled countries, law is firmly an undergraduate (albeit professional) degree. Straight out of high school, English students can (if so accepted) go straight into law. After for studying for three years in a classroom and a doing year of practical (the substitute for the American bar), you become a fully qualified lawyer. Similarly, medical students study for five years as undergraduates (four in the United States), and then do their practical for however many years. Because of this, both physicians and lawyers start out younger in England than in the United States.
Some would say “Yay! More money for retirement!” but I think that if you spent so many fewer years on education, you’re inherently less educated than someone whose spent more. It’s like child prodigies who end up graduating college at the age of 13. They may have the same practical knowledge as a 21-year-old of the same qualifications, but do they really have an equal amount of life experience that truly enhances your education? I think not.
On a related note, in the last lecture of my Hong Kong and the World class, we had the pro-vice-chancellor of the university at our disposal as a guest speaker, and the main topic of the discussion was the education reform currently underway in Hong Kong.
As a background note, secondary education is becoming one year shorter and university education is becoming one year longer (in a timed manner). This means that in fall 2012, the nine universities of Hong Kong will be taking in two classes (for two different curriculums), or a 40% increase in students over the previous term and the previous year. The universities are all expanding their campuses as able to accommodate this increase.
Current university students overall seem to be pretty apathetic, since it’s not immediately affecting them. But in any situation like this one, students who have opinions tend to harbor strong feelings.
I love my university, and I appreciate what is being done for me. I wish that more often more people would be appreciative just of the air around them. I love my university, but besides reasons of gratitude, I couldn’t tell you why. The university isn’t a person, but a group of people, so I suppose my love would be for the environment, for (the majority of) the people.
In our last Hong Kong and the World class, one local student expressed a very strong dislike (or at least severely neutral) opinion of the University of Hong Kong. Now, HKU isn’t my university per say (though I registered with the alumni office at their request), but I see no reason not to love it. Though it is structured differently than UCSD, I can firmly see that a university is a university. I’m not so sure she can quantify her lack of affection for HKU either, much in the same way that I cannot quantify my affection for UCSD.
There are plenty of UCSD students who hate UCSD, but they tend to back up their feelings or opinions based on the liberal arts classes that they are forced to take, Making of the Modern World that one day I hope they will appreciate having taken.
In all honesty, I can’t really fully appreciate that student’s lack of affection for the university. Though I never asked her personally, she said to the pro-vice-chancellor that she believes her workload is far to heavy. (Although I have been here for only one semester, I can say that my full course load is producing far less work that I’ve had back at UCSD.)
So there’s haters everywhere I suppose, and it doesn’t matter whose grass your on. I think though that the ultimate reason why I love my university is that I’m an appreciative, positive person who tries to see everything and tries to see everything with an open mind.
And let the statement never disappear that many UCSD professors notice the difference in writing and critical thought in papers from Eleanor Roosevelt College students.
In the development of the person, it would appear that time is more important than money.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
“I’m going to my fine arts class,” I casually replied.
“Why do you take an arts class? Are you taking it for fun?”
“Well, yes and no. I have to take it to graduate, but I also enjoy it,” I said truthfully.
“Why would you have to take an arts class? You study political science,” he said.
“Yeah, and it’s part of my general education requirements.”
“That seems errr, stupid.”
You know, as education systems go, I’ve come to the knowledge that I like and prefer mine. Though I’m sure that many, many people back home would argue this point with me, the fact that the vast majority of university students in the United States receive liberal arts educations is a competitive advantage as critical thought goes as well as important to that development of critical thought.
Now, as I can foresee, there are two points of contention that can arise from this: first that most all higher education in the United States can be called liberal arts and second that it is actually something positive and advantageous in the long run.
Let me first define liberal arts as I see fit. I understand full well that in the United States, liberal arts on the layperson’s level almost always refers to the liberal arts colleges (not universities, because they don’t confer graduate degrees), wherein professors teach small classes and instead of researching, professors just teach. As such, liberal arts colleges tend to be small themselves. They pride themselves on learning for the sake of knowledge and having knowledge for the sake of knowledge, which I can and do fully believe in.
That’s where I’m going to break it off. Though a liberal arts college teaches liberal arts, not all institutions that teach liberal arts are liberal arts colleges—in fact, the whole higher education set up of the United States is based on the liberal arts education and continues to become more and more so—and I like it.
So what exactly is a liberal arts education? In my understanding, the result is that you get a well-rounded knowledge base upon which to draw from, but what is most important is that you come up with well-rounded (profound and thoughtful) opinions and decisions, based on the fact that nothing in the world it of itself with nothing else. Philosophically speaking, the liberal arts education gives students a real-world education with the ability to analyze relations better than say someone who went to a vocational school, which trains you only for your job.
And that’s the alternative, or one of the alternatives. Vocational school in the United States refers to professions that require more technical skill over critical thought. Don’t get me wrong, because I believe that people who go to vocational school and people who hold jobs of any sort make the world go round, but vocational school is for the nitty gritty professions, like those of mechanics and plumbers.
So where do the rest of us fit in? Well, we get well-rounded educations. This means that we have general education requirements and often areas of specialization (on top of majors). In addition, general education requirements are often done in the first two years, which means that the breadth of disciplines that a student is exposed to can help him or her decide what to major in. And before you say, well, doesn’t everybody have general education requirements?, that’s a no.
As I understand, here at HKU, there are hardly any general education requirements as we would understand in the United States. They have one broad set of classes labeled “GE: General Education” but notices that the word “requirements” is left off. GEs are not required it appears. In that sense, the university curriculum (in addition to the primary and secondary school curriculums) are based heavily on the English.
In this sense, you are forced into specialization soon after you enter university, which I find bizarre. To start, their major curriculums are three years, whereas in the United States the typical time to graduate with a bachelor’s degree is supposed to be four years.
And that’s not specialization in just major—it’s more like career. Take a look at professional degrees in the United States—most are graduate degrees that require an undergraduate degree to apply for. Architecture, as one of the few fields left whose professional degree is undergraduate, might become a graduate degree soon. I recently read an article that the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards was investigating making it so, much in the same way law was made a doctorate back in the day.
Lawyers are doctors too (at least in the United States). Since the late nineteenth century, you have to earn a Juris Doctor (JD) degree to be eligible to take the bar in any state and thereby become licensed to practice. This means that you have to first get an undergraduate degree, and then go to law school for six semesters.
In England, as I understand, as well as many historically English-ruled countries, law is firmly an undergraduate (albeit professional) degree. Straight out of high school, English students can (if so accepted) go straight into law. After for studying for three years in a classroom and a doing year of practical (the substitute for the American bar), you become a fully qualified lawyer. Similarly, medical students study for five years as undergraduates (four in the United States), and then do their practical for however many years. Because of this, both physicians and lawyers start out younger in England than in the United States.
Some would say “Yay! More money for retirement!” but I think that if you spent so many fewer years on education, you’re inherently less educated than someone whose spent more. It’s like child prodigies who end up graduating college at the age of 13. They may have the same practical knowledge as a 21-year-old of the same qualifications, but do they really have an equal amount of life experience that truly enhances your education? I think not.
On a related note, in the last lecture of my Hong Kong and the World class, we had the pro-vice-chancellor of the university at our disposal as a guest speaker, and the main topic of the discussion was the education reform currently underway in Hong Kong.
As a background note, secondary education is becoming one year shorter and university education is becoming one year longer (in a timed manner). This means that in fall 2012, the nine universities of Hong Kong will be taking in two classes (for two different curriculums), or a 40% increase in students over the previous term and the previous year. The universities are all expanding their campuses as able to accommodate this increase.
Current university students overall seem to be pretty apathetic, since it’s not immediately affecting them. But in any situation like this one, students who have opinions tend to harbor strong feelings.
I love my university, and I appreciate what is being done for me. I wish that more often more people would be appreciative just of the air around them. I love my university, but besides reasons of gratitude, I couldn’t tell you why. The university isn’t a person, but a group of people, so I suppose my love would be for the environment, for (the majority of) the people.
In our last Hong Kong and the World class, one local student expressed a very strong dislike (or at least severely neutral) opinion of the University of Hong Kong. Now, HKU isn’t my university per say (though I registered with the alumni office at their request), but I see no reason not to love it. Though it is structured differently than UCSD, I can firmly see that a university is a university. I’m not so sure she can quantify her lack of affection for HKU either, much in the same way that I cannot quantify my affection for UCSD.
There are plenty of UCSD students who hate UCSD, but they tend to back up their feelings or opinions based on the liberal arts classes that they are forced to take, Making of the Modern World that one day I hope they will appreciate having taken.
In all honesty, I can’t really fully appreciate that student’s lack of affection for the university. Though I never asked her personally, she said to the pro-vice-chancellor that she believes her workload is far to heavy. (Although I have been here for only one semester, I can say that my full course load is producing far less work that I’ve had back at UCSD.)
So there’s haters everywhere I suppose, and it doesn’t matter whose grass your on. I think though that the ultimate reason why I love my university is that I’m an appreciative, positive person who tries to see everything and tries to see everything with an open mind.
And let the statement never disappear that many UCSD professors notice the difference in writing and critical thought in papers from Eleanor Roosevelt College students.
In the development of the person, it would appear that time is more important than money.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Notes on a Close
Eventually all things come to an end. Eventually I will have to go back to the United States, finish my university degree, find my life, and establish my career. And I know that eventually will start to take place around noon on December 21, when I have to board a plane back to Los Angeles via San Francisco.
It all had to end eventually, I keep telling myself, but somehow it’s just not enough. I didn’t even come here that long ago. I now have just under three weeks left here and I arrived only fifteen weeks ago. Though I keep telling myself that I couldn’t’ve extended for a year, I know that my biggest piece of advice to others will be take the whole year—because now I wholeheartedly believe that it is.
I know that there are people who disagree with me. I’ll wait until they go back to their home countries and see if they still feel the same way, and if they do, so be it. I know I still feel like I’m learning every day, but I know some of the people I talk to remain close-minded and naïve. I guess I wouldn’t be the best to judge naïveté, but the fact that many of them haven’t made the slightest attempt (but a phrase or two) to learn Cantonese is a huge indicator.
I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side, though, as cliché as that is. I have one friend who attends Berkeley in the States but is studying abroad at HKU like me this semester because she felt like I do now. She filed to extend and was accepted, and now that she is staying, she’s not going home for the holidays, and she feels that she misses her family.
So the best thing to do is to reserve judgment I suppose. I’ll wait to get back home, I suppose. I’ll see the wide roads and giant cars (one of which I’ll likely be transported in), I suppose. I’ll see the wastefulness that Americans are so known for possessing and realize that people in Hong Kong aren’t all that different. Maybe by the time I get back, I’ll understand intuitively and subconsciously in addition to consciously that we are all just people, and that everything else really doesn’t matter.
I'm not ready just yet to go back—but then again, who is really ready for anything?
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
It all had to end eventually, I keep telling myself, but somehow it’s just not enough. I didn’t even come here that long ago. I now have just under three weeks left here and I arrived only fifteen weeks ago. Though I keep telling myself that I couldn’t’ve extended for a year, I know that my biggest piece of advice to others will be take the whole year—because now I wholeheartedly believe that it is.
I know that there are people who disagree with me. I’ll wait until they go back to their home countries and see if they still feel the same way, and if they do, so be it. I know I still feel like I’m learning every day, but I know some of the people I talk to remain close-minded and naïve. I guess I wouldn’t be the best to judge naïveté, but the fact that many of them haven’t made the slightest attempt (but a phrase or two) to learn Cantonese is a huge indicator.
I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side, though, as cliché as that is. I have one friend who attends Berkeley in the States but is studying abroad at HKU like me this semester because she felt like I do now. She filed to extend and was accepted, and now that she is staying, she’s not going home for the holidays, and she feels that she misses her family.
So the best thing to do is to reserve judgment I suppose. I’ll wait to get back home, I suppose. I’ll see the wide roads and giant cars (one of which I’ll likely be transported in), I suppose. I’ll see the wastefulness that Americans are so known for possessing and realize that people in Hong Kong aren’t all that different. Maybe by the time I get back, I’ll understand intuitively and subconsciously in addition to consciously that we are all just people, and that everything else really doesn’t matter.
I'm not ready just yet to go back—but then again, who is really ready for anything?
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Class Roundup: Asian Art History
Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present (coded FINE1008) was my first and only class to end thus far. I took the final this past Monday and now have but to wait and see what I get in the class. This class roundup serial is for me to conclude my posts about the classes that I’m taking here. It’s odd in a way that everything’s ending. I’ve echoed this before and I will still talk about it later in more detail, but I feel like I’m just not ready to go back yet.
This class was comprised of three assessments apart from general participation in tutorials and attendance at lectures. (I didn’t miss a single class or tutorial for this class). The three assessments consisted of two medium-sized papers and one final examination.
The two term papers were different for me. It was a challenge in that I’d never written a paper for any humanities subject before. Writing for political science, much is quantitatively based, more so at UCSD than at HKU (where we seem to be more on the philosophical side of things), I was constantly unsure of whether what I was doing was right. Furthermore, I wondered whether what I was doing was wrong.
The first paper, we had to choose any one object from either the HKU Art Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, or Sotheby’s art auction house. Not really opting for traveling, I chose a Buddhist statue in the university’s art gallery. It was of Weitou, guardian of the Dharma (named Skanda in Sanskrit). The statue was gilt wood, but I could find hardly anything on Weitou or wood gilding. I was forced to deduce more than I was comfortable with and rely heavily on my own opinions and observations without having published scholars to back me up. When it was all said and done, I got an A-, which considering that she said she doesn’t grade easy, was a relief.
The second paper, we had a choice between two tasks. The first was do create a piece of art ourselves using the techniques talked about in class. This had to be accompanied by a paper describing your own work, telling why and how you used certain techniques. And I preferred to do this assignment. However, seeing that I had about a week to do this assignment (which is no time by my anti-procrastination standards), along with the fact that I had no idea where to get the resources to paint, I felt pressured to do the second task.
The second task was to compare two particular handscrolls, one a copy of the other. My thesis was something to the effect of the techniques used in the copy bring more meaning to its basis in the original. I got a B+ on it.
As for the final, the jury (of one member) is still out. I won’t likely find out my grades until January at the earliest, late March at the latest. All things considered though, I felt I did reasonably well.
It was organized into three parts: image identification, unfamiliar object identification, and short essay.
Image identification consisted of four pictures of works we studied in class. To each we were to place with applicable names and titles as well as a general time frame. In addition, we were to describe the significance of the presented works and analyze their importance, preferably with a sociohistoric emphasis.
To study for this, I printed out all the images from the Fine Arts Interactive Visual Archive (or FAIVA for short), and took extensive notes on them in lecture and in tutorial, as well as on the side, like information on the time period in general and background information on the author and such. As a rough estimate, there were between thirty and forty images that I went through over and over.
Out of the four of them, I probably did a bang-up job on like two and a half of them. The other one and a half I believe I knew enough to earn most of the points.
For the second part, we were to be presented with a (replica) ancient Chinese object. In all honesty, the only reasonable object that she would have given us was an ancient Daoist vessel—and it was.
For this, we had to describe the technique behind making it (basically bronze into a clay mold) and its significance. I figure I did pretty well. I had a lot to say about it, especially because she talked about it extensively in the last tutorial (and I took extensive notes which I studied over).
The last part was a short essay question. We were given the topics beforehand—to describe the function, significance, and perception of a place of leisure either in Ming China or Japan. I went over the Ming Garden, since the professor reviewed that one as well the day before in tutorial.
I have reason to believe that I did decently well in the class. Hopefully I got at least a B+, which they say will round up a third to an A- when grades transfer back to UCSD.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
This class was comprised of three assessments apart from general participation in tutorials and attendance at lectures. (I didn’t miss a single class or tutorial for this class). The three assessments consisted of two medium-sized papers and one final examination.
The two term papers were different for me. It was a challenge in that I’d never written a paper for any humanities subject before. Writing for political science, much is quantitatively based, more so at UCSD than at HKU (where we seem to be more on the philosophical side of things), I was constantly unsure of whether what I was doing was right. Furthermore, I wondered whether what I was doing was wrong.
The first paper, we had to choose any one object from either the HKU Art Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, or Sotheby’s art auction house. Not really opting for traveling, I chose a Buddhist statue in the university’s art gallery. It was of Weitou, guardian of the Dharma (named Skanda in Sanskrit). The statue was gilt wood, but I could find hardly anything on Weitou or wood gilding. I was forced to deduce more than I was comfortable with and rely heavily on my own opinions and observations without having published scholars to back me up. When it was all said and done, I got an A-, which considering that she said she doesn’t grade easy, was a relief.
The second paper, we had a choice between two tasks. The first was do create a piece of art ourselves using the techniques talked about in class. This had to be accompanied by a paper describing your own work, telling why and how you used certain techniques. And I preferred to do this assignment. However, seeing that I had about a week to do this assignment (which is no time by my anti-procrastination standards), along with the fact that I had no idea where to get the resources to paint, I felt pressured to do the second task.
The second task was to compare two particular handscrolls, one a copy of the other. My thesis was something to the effect of the techniques used in the copy bring more meaning to its basis in the original. I got a B+ on it.
As for the final, the jury (of one member) is still out. I won’t likely find out my grades until January at the earliest, late March at the latest. All things considered though, I felt I did reasonably well.
It was organized into three parts: image identification, unfamiliar object identification, and short essay.
Image identification consisted of four pictures of works we studied in class. To each we were to place with applicable names and titles as well as a general time frame. In addition, we were to describe the significance of the presented works and analyze their importance, preferably with a sociohistoric emphasis.
To study for this, I printed out all the images from the Fine Arts Interactive Visual Archive (or FAIVA for short), and took extensive notes on them in lecture and in tutorial, as well as on the side, like information on the time period in general and background information on the author and such. As a rough estimate, there were between thirty and forty images that I went through over and over.
Out of the four of them, I probably did a bang-up job on like two and a half of them. The other one and a half I believe I knew enough to earn most of the points.
For the second part, we were to be presented with a (replica) ancient Chinese object. In all honesty, the only reasonable object that she would have given us was an ancient Daoist vessel—and it was.
For this, we had to describe the technique behind making it (basically bronze into a clay mold) and its significance. I figure I did pretty well. I had a lot to say about it, especially because she talked about it extensively in the last tutorial (and I took extensive notes which I studied over).
The last part was a short essay question. We were given the topics beforehand—to describe the function, significance, and perception of a place of leisure either in Ming China or Japan. I went over the Ming Garden, since the professor reviewed that one as well the day before in tutorial.
I have reason to believe that I did decently well in the class. Hopefully I got at least a B+, which they say will round up a third to an A- when grades transfer back to UCSD.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The Storm that Passed without a Fight
Yeah, I’ve been traveling a lot, I know. This latter half of the semester, I’ve been jetting off to different cities, with my last conquest being Phuket, Thailand, four hours away. There is less than a month left, and though deadlines are looming and finals are approaching, I remain calm and look forward to a few more excursions before my departure back to the States.
It’s funny how people think that something has to give for something else to happen—and it’s true. It’s like you can’t be in two places at once (not yet, though I believe not ever), or how matter can’t just disappear. The funny thing then is that people don’t realize that there’s no need to give because there already is so much give—and by give I mean time, of course.
Back at UCSD, the normal course load is about four classes. The minimum is three to be a full-time student. I took five—and there’s a couple reasons for that. The first quarter, I took the standard four. I was bored out of my mind. I caught up with many different television shows (including the nine-season Scrubs and the now-ten-season CSI) and at the end of the year I took to reading a lot.
Because of my boredom, I decided why not take an extra class? I can handle it well and I’ll graduate earlier and spend less of my parents’ money on my education. After all, the UCSD levies tuition against all full-time students equally, regardless of actual credit hours. And after that happened, I was still bored. I started a blog for my upcoming study abroad trip and started brainstorming ideas for extended prose.
Here is not all that different. Each class that I attend here is about three hours per week in duration, except Cantonese, which is about two. Add it all up and I go to class 17 hours per week. With studying, it probably works out to 48 academically-focused hours. A seven-day week is 168 hours long. I sleep off around 56 of those. So 168 minus 56 minus 48 leaves me with 64 spare hours per week.
Last weekend, the Thailand trip lasted about three full days—that’s 72 hours, and two of the three nights I spent studying for my Fine Arts final that I got over with yesterday.
So the time is there—it’s just how you use it, I suppose. I found that working on deadlines early, getting projects done a few days before they’re due (at a minimum) keeps me at rest. That way if I find something (fun) to do, I can easily be spontaneous. Last week, I turned in an essay due Friday at 7:00 p.m. on Monday at 9:00 a.m. The professor hadn’t even given the department office instructions to collect it yet.
I found out that I hate procrastination, and it’s been keeping me afloat ever since I discovered this little preference of mine. At UCSD it was the same way. My first quarter, I had a paper due week eight of the term. The week before, we were to do a peer review in tutorial/section, so I finished it in the middle of week six. I found that my paper was the only one in the class that was really able to be peer-reviewed, so nearly everybody read it. Cool.
So that’s how I do what I do—good ol’ hard work—and it really works. But that’s just one side of the coin. The other is the realization of many of us here—where does the time go at home?
I know the answer for my own situation. It drains into the tube (though my computer functions as my television). I don’t mind reading—in fact, I really like reading, but the television usage can go down. That would renew my spare time.
The funny thing is that while I’ve seen more of the United States than the average American (by means of a thirty-state road trip when I just got my driver’s license in 2006), there is still so much that I’ve never seen. I would struggle to say that I’ve been to New England. I’ve still not been to New York City. I’ve been to many, many national capitals now, yet my own isn’t on that list. Most sad (though common) is that I’ve not been thirty miles south of UCSD. Admittedly, there’s a current travel warning from the Department of State advising travel to Mexican border areas because of recent increases in drug-related violence, but the fact that I can’t say that I’m not well traveled makes it pathetic that I’ve never been to Mexico.
I’ve been to Canada quite a few times, actually, which can be construed as ironic seeing as Mexico is but thirty miles south and Canada is more than a thousand miles north. So I’ve made a personal pact to see more around North America (and South America), time, money, and parent permitting. (Though that’s not to say I wouldn’t love to travel some more with my family).
We’ll see where life takes me when I get back to California.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
It’s funny how people think that something has to give for something else to happen—and it’s true. It’s like you can’t be in two places at once (not yet, though I believe not ever), or how matter can’t just disappear. The funny thing then is that people don’t realize that there’s no need to give because there already is so much give—and by give I mean time, of course.
Back at UCSD, the normal course load is about four classes. The minimum is three to be a full-time student. I took five—and there’s a couple reasons for that. The first quarter, I took the standard four. I was bored out of my mind. I caught up with many different television shows (including the nine-season Scrubs and the now-ten-season CSI) and at the end of the year I took to reading a lot.
Because of my boredom, I decided why not take an extra class? I can handle it well and I’ll graduate earlier and spend less of my parents’ money on my education. After all, the UCSD levies tuition against all full-time students equally, regardless of actual credit hours. And after that happened, I was still bored. I started a blog for my upcoming study abroad trip and started brainstorming ideas for extended prose.
Here is not all that different. Each class that I attend here is about three hours per week in duration, except Cantonese, which is about two. Add it all up and I go to class 17 hours per week. With studying, it probably works out to 48 academically-focused hours. A seven-day week is 168 hours long. I sleep off around 56 of those. So 168 minus 56 minus 48 leaves me with 64 spare hours per week.
Last weekend, the Thailand trip lasted about three full days—that’s 72 hours, and two of the three nights I spent studying for my Fine Arts final that I got over with yesterday.
So the time is there—it’s just how you use it, I suppose. I found that working on deadlines early, getting projects done a few days before they’re due (at a minimum) keeps me at rest. That way if I find something (fun) to do, I can easily be spontaneous. Last week, I turned in an essay due Friday at 7:00 p.m. on Monday at 9:00 a.m. The professor hadn’t even given the department office instructions to collect it yet.
I found out that I hate procrastination, and it’s been keeping me afloat ever since I discovered this little preference of mine. At UCSD it was the same way. My first quarter, I had a paper due week eight of the term. The week before, we were to do a peer review in tutorial/section, so I finished it in the middle of week six. I found that my paper was the only one in the class that was really able to be peer-reviewed, so nearly everybody read it. Cool.
So that’s how I do what I do—good ol’ hard work—and it really works. But that’s just one side of the coin. The other is the realization of many of us here—where does the time go at home?
I know the answer for my own situation. It drains into the tube (though my computer functions as my television). I don’t mind reading—in fact, I really like reading, but the television usage can go down. That would renew my spare time.
The funny thing is that while I’ve seen more of the United States than the average American (by means of a thirty-state road trip when I just got my driver’s license in 2006), there is still so much that I’ve never seen. I would struggle to say that I’ve been to New England. I’ve still not been to New York City. I’ve been to many, many national capitals now, yet my own isn’t on that list. Most sad (though common) is that I’ve not been thirty miles south of UCSD. Admittedly, there’s a current travel warning from the Department of State advising travel to Mexican border areas because of recent increases in drug-related violence, but the fact that I can’t say that I’m not well traveled makes it pathetic that I’ve never been to Mexico.
I’ve been to Canada quite a few times, actually, which can be construed as ironic seeing as Mexico is but thirty miles south and Canada is more than a thousand miles north. So I’ve made a personal pact to see more around North America (and South America), time, money, and parent permitting. (Though that’s not to say I wouldn’t love to travel some more with my family).
We’ll see where life takes me when I get back to California.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
The Point of No Return
Two months in I stand; two months in I see. Like a ship halfway to its destination, I know I have so much behind me now and yet there’s so much in front of me as well. In a way it’s misleading. I don’t really want to go back at the moment. I look forward to my return, just not this December, not in two months. However, in no way am I home scot-free. My experience here still has the very real possibility of being a naufraga in the same way that I don’t know if I’ll still be alive tomorrow. It requires constant maintenance, and more often than not, it’s an uphill battle.
I arrived August 21, confused, dazed, and fresh off a thirteen-hour flight without sleep. My passport was then used just a few times. Upon entering the country, I was given a student entry stamp on the page opposite my student visa. The square, black stamp looked to take up most of the page to my surprise. The airport gave false impressions of Hong Kong—not false as in better or worse, but false as in different. Getting off the train on Hong Kong Island, I was greeted with lots of noise, winding roads, and my first experience seeing traffic move on the left.
With time, I adjusted. The sweltering heat and humidity lessened slightly as my tolerance increased. The bus system that once confused me became manageable and I could successfully ask to get off the minibus in Cantonese—a skill than increased to requesting stops in specific locations. I found where the better food is and how to deal with copious amounts of rice.
I guess you could say that I’ve now plateaued culturally. While there still is room to grow, there will always be, and I will continue to progress, just slower. As I went from being nervous, I can now say I’m quite the opposite. Whereas at first I missed home and was counting down the days to go back, I find myself now trying to maximize the rest of my time here. I’ve lost count and already I want to do this again somewhere else next fall semester, money and time permitting, of course.
So where am I to go from here? I’ve not yet reached the top of the mountain, though I’ve been to the Peak twice. My finals schedule is starting to shape up, though I don’t care for it to end. With my eyes perpetually towards the future, I’ve decided to take the time to enjoy the present.
To this effect, I’ve begun a project that won’t be done until the end of the year. The idea hatched as I went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art for my Introduction to the Arts of Asia class to research for a paper. The topic was hand scrolls, which have an aesthetic to them that requires observation beyond that of any western painting I’ve seen.
To read a hand scroll properly, you roll it open section by section, right to left. At several meters long, each tends to tell a story, accompanied often by deeper meaning. Many are accompanied with poetry, but the use of motifs and themes allow the artist to tell the story in an abstract fashion. By story, I mean journey, and there is usually a path in the scroll guiding the reader’s eyes through this journey.
For this art paper, we were to observe Qiu Ying’s 清明商河图 or “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” as it is usually translated. We were to compare this Ming Dynasty scroll to Zhang Zeduan’s original of the same name, which was painted during the Song Dynasty. I won’t get into the specifics, though it is clear that Qiu Ying’s is not merely a copy of Zhang Zeduan’s.
To aid my paper, I bought a scaled reprint of the hand scroll at the museum’s bookstore, realizing later that it was in postcard format—fifteen postcards to be exact. Later I realized that this painting, divided into sections by the creases into postcards, being a journey, could be parallel to my journey here.
So I decided to cut apart this scroll replica into the postcards that were on the reverse. Sending them all back to my home in California, I addressed them as such, and stamped them all. As a representation of my journey here in Hong Kong, I’m sending them off from fifteen different post boxes, noting the location and its significance, as well as the date and time at which I sent it.
When I get back home, hopefully all fifteen will have arrived. At that point, I’m going to reattach them back together. This scroll reprint, in postcard/booklet format will then show the journey to the city center of Kaifeng on the front and my journey to Hong Kong on the back.
There are now four weeks of instruction left, so with deadlines looming and a push for more travels to look forward to, I shall resume my studying.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
I arrived August 21, confused, dazed, and fresh off a thirteen-hour flight without sleep. My passport was then used just a few times. Upon entering the country, I was given a student entry stamp on the page opposite my student visa. The square, black stamp looked to take up most of the page to my surprise. The airport gave false impressions of Hong Kong—not false as in better or worse, but false as in different. Getting off the train on Hong Kong Island, I was greeted with lots of noise, winding roads, and my first experience seeing traffic move on the left.
With time, I adjusted. The sweltering heat and humidity lessened slightly as my tolerance increased. The bus system that once confused me became manageable and I could successfully ask to get off the minibus in Cantonese—a skill than increased to requesting stops in specific locations. I found where the better food is and how to deal with copious amounts of rice.
I guess you could say that I’ve now plateaued culturally. While there still is room to grow, there will always be, and I will continue to progress, just slower. As I went from being nervous, I can now say I’m quite the opposite. Whereas at first I missed home and was counting down the days to go back, I find myself now trying to maximize the rest of my time here. I’ve lost count and already I want to do this again somewhere else next fall semester, money and time permitting, of course.
So where am I to go from here? I’ve not yet reached the top of the mountain, though I’ve been to the Peak twice. My finals schedule is starting to shape up, though I don’t care for it to end. With my eyes perpetually towards the future, I’ve decided to take the time to enjoy the present.
To this effect, I’ve begun a project that won’t be done until the end of the year. The idea hatched as I went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art for my Introduction to the Arts of Asia class to research for a paper. The topic was hand scrolls, which have an aesthetic to them that requires observation beyond that of any western painting I’ve seen.
To read a hand scroll properly, you roll it open section by section, right to left. At several meters long, each tends to tell a story, accompanied often by deeper meaning. Many are accompanied with poetry, but the use of motifs and themes allow the artist to tell the story in an abstract fashion. By story, I mean journey, and there is usually a path in the scroll guiding the reader’s eyes through this journey.
For this art paper, we were to observe Qiu Ying’s 清明商河图 or “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” as it is usually translated. We were to compare this Ming Dynasty scroll to Zhang Zeduan’s original of the same name, which was painted during the Song Dynasty. I won’t get into the specifics, though it is clear that Qiu Ying’s is not merely a copy of Zhang Zeduan’s.
To aid my paper, I bought a scaled reprint of the hand scroll at the museum’s bookstore, realizing later that it was in postcard format—fifteen postcards to be exact. Later I realized that this painting, divided into sections by the creases into postcards, being a journey, could be parallel to my journey here.
So I decided to cut apart this scroll replica into the postcards that were on the reverse. Sending them all back to my home in California, I addressed them as such, and stamped them all. As a representation of my journey here in Hong Kong, I’m sending them off from fifteen different post boxes, noting the location and its significance, as well as the date and time at which I sent it.
When I get back home, hopefully all fifteen will have arrived. At that point, I’m going to reattach them back together. This scroll reprint, in postcard/booklet format will then show the journey to the city center of Kaifeng on the front and my journey to Hong Kong on the back.
There are now four weeks of instruction left, so with deadlines looming and a push for more travels to look forward to, I shall resume my studying.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
To Extend or Not To Extend
That is the question, isn’t it?
It’s something that I knew that I would have to decide sooner and later, and I have to say that though I have come to it, I can’t help thinking the decision was made before me.
I applied to study here for one semester in substitution for one quarter back home. I chose not to file the departmental preapproval form for extension, in hopes that that would force myself to come back home for the latter two quarters of the year.
The reason for doing this was that because this university runs on two semesters per year and UCSD runs on three quarters per year, my substitution of two semesters for three quarters would delay my graduation substantially, making me miss several required classes that are only offered once a year.
So I found out after I was accepted that I can actually petition to bypass that preapproval to allow me to study here for a full year. I realize that to graduate on time though, I can’t.
Though when I arrived, I practically began counting down the days to when I leave, I’m growing to love Hong Kong. Though I still look forward to going home, I still want to make sure that these next ten weeks (yeah, I only have ten weeks left here) are the best.
In Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment, I’m most definitely at the sixth stage, where I’ve fully accepted my host culture. After this last trip to Beijing, I realized that my Mandarin isn’t half bad, and I’m ready to put my Cantonese learning into a higher gear.
In some ways, it is a race to the finish line, with me trying to get my travels in, learn languages, and get good grades at the same time. Right now, I’d rather be the turtle though rather than the hare, and unfortunately I presently feel like the latter.
Ready, set, go.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
It’s something that I knew that I would have to decide sooner and later, and I have to say that though I have come to it, I can’t help thinking the decision was made before me.
I applied to study here for one semester in substitution for one quarter back home. I chose not to file the departmental preapproval form for extension, in hopes that that would force myself to come back home for the latter two quarters of the year.
The reason for doing this was that because this university runs on two semesters per year and UCSD runs on three quarters per year, my substitution of two semesters for three quarters would delay my graduation substantially, making me miss several required classes that are only offered once a year.
So I found out after I was accepted that I can actually petition to bypass that preapproval to allow me to study here for a full year. I realize that to graduate on time though, I can’t.
Though when I arrived, I practically began counting down the days to when I leave, I’m growing to love Hong Kong. Though I still look forward to going home, I still want to make sure that these next ten weeks (yeah, I only have ten weeks left here) are the best.
In Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment, I’m most definitely at the sixth stage, where I’ve fully accepted my host culture. After this last trip to Beijing, I realized that my Mandarin isn’t half bad, and I’m ready to put my Cantonese learning into a higher gear.
In some ways, it is a race to the finish line, with me trying to get my travels in, learn languages, and get good grades at the same time. Right now, I’d rather be the turtle though rather than the hare, and unfortunately I presently feel like the latter.
Ready, set, go.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Some Notes Before I Go
Tomorrow, I leave for Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong, where I will spend the next four months studying and sightseeing. I’ll leave for Los Angeles International Airport at 6 a.m. for my first leg to San Francisco. From there I have a thirteen-and-half hour flight direct to Hong Kong. I’m all packed but not necessarily ready to go.
I’m still nervous as ever as I anticipate my long journey and longer transition. But already I am confident that I will quickly make Hong Kong my home away from home. At UCSD I served as an American student to help orient international students and in the same manner, HKU has set me up with a Hong Kong student to help me, now the international student, find my way. While I’ll mosey my way to the university from the airport, she has graciously offered to show me the campus the day after.
I arrive on August 21 and have orientation the following Friday, August 28. Class begins on September 1. Maybe by then I’ll get used to British English orthography and the metric system. Surely by then I’ll have bought blankets and a pillow.
Next time, I’ll be writing from Hong Kong.
I’m still nervous as ever as I anticipate my long journey and longer transition. But already I am confident that I will quickly make Hong Kong my home away from home. At UCSD I served as an American student to help orient international students and in the same manner, HKU has set me up with a Hong Kong student to help me, now the international student, find my way. While I’ll mosey my way to the university from the airport, she has graciously offered to show me the campus the day after.
I arrive on August 21 and have orientation the following Friday, August 28. Class begins on September 1. Maybe by then I’ll get used to British English orthography and the metric system. Surely by then I’ll have bought blankets and a pillow.
Next time, I’ll be writing from Hong Kong.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Quality v. Quality
Somehow I wanted to insert this aspect of my college experience into this blog by making it relevant somehow. Here’s my shot. I have full confidence that I may express certain feelings without upsetting certain people, mostly because I am sure that most of those people are not reading my blog. Some will be glad to read this post and some might think I’m just being bitter. Please believe me when I say that I have no intention of either.
It goes back to when I was real, real little. I think it was my father who gave me an “I’m going to Harvard” rattle. Whether or not he was the giver is irrelevant. My father is one of those who “only wants the best” for me, he would say; and I do so believe in his intentions.
Entering middle school I was poised to get straight As, no doubt. In the big jump from sixth to seventh grade I guess I found myself at a crossroads. At the time it would have sounded silly to say this, and it sounds only a little less now that I’m 19, but I like (as in prefer) to think that that was the end of my formative years in a sense. From then, my opinions have changed; I grew a few feet (I think); I learned how to drive—but nothing unlike that in the course of one’s adult life. I was poised to get into Stanford and remained so until I was rejected in 2007, in December.
Was it stubborn optimism that turned (what I like to think was) misfortune into hope?
Needless to say, I didn’t get straight As in middle school, nor high school for that matter. On the bright side, I didn’t get any Cs (or lower), nor did my GPA ever dip below 3.6.
And here we get to the topic of today’s post. Yes, the two sides are both qualities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking that I have had to make some difficult decisions over the years between two (or more) perfectly and equally equitable situations. In my case, I was caught up by quantity due to my inability to make chose but a few of the many existing scenarios before me.
Was it a good decision on my part? My mother asserted to me, after it was all set and done, “You probably should have done less. I think you stretched yourself out too thin. You couldn’t concentrate on grades and now you aren’t going to be going to your top choice school.”
I replied, “I honestly wouldn’t have done anything different.” And true to my words, my mind didn’t and still doesn’t think anything different.
My seldom-existent inner romantic would say that the heart wants what the heart wants and the brain could not, at that time, overcome the wishes of the heart, for rationality was gone. The heart had become one with the brain and there was nothing to be done.
So in this post I plan to pose three major decisions of quality versus quality (with many minor ones) that I went through. You may disagree; you may agree. All I hope is that my logic shows in my actions, hopefully culminating in relevance to my upcoming study abroad experience.
My first was in middle school.
When I was approaching fifth grade, there was a decision of whether or not to go to middle school. State legislation had just promoted the sixth grade to middle school (junior high school) status. However, there was a large enough group of parents who wanted to keep their kids in elementary school for sixth grade that Westlake Hills Elementary School kept sixth grade.
Why not stay in elementary school for sixth grade? My parents, with my consent kept me at Westlake Hills for sixth grade.
A third of the way across the school district (and Thousand Oaks), a good friend of mine went to Meadows Elementary School. Their parents had voted to get rid of sixth grade entirely there. As such, my friend went to middle school one year before I did.
I got to middle school as a seventh grader in the fall of 2002. My good friend and I were still pretty chummy and I ate lunch with his group of friends for the first week or so. With good intentions (in middle-school sense) he told me that I was not to get all problems correct on a math test or homework, because that’s not cool. I was told to deliberately work every tenth problem or so wrong to this effect.
I decided not to follow this piece of advice. If I wanted a good circle of friends, they first would not fall for gimmicks that make me supposedly look cool. If they did, then they could be considered shallow, at least in part. Because of this decision, I worked hard throughout middle school. So much that I kept a full load of honors courses with a workload to match. In eighth grade, I found myself in honors science, a relatively hard class with a good teacher.
Back in the day we would get assigned seats, of course, and for one rotation I sat next to this kid who needed a bit of help. The bit turned into a lot of help, for which I was perfectly glad to assist, for we had become pretty good friends.
The next seating rotation, we did not sit next to each other any more. That was it for our friendship. I saw him outside of class one day and said hi to him, for which he ignored me in the presence of his cool friends and pretended not to know me.
Because I have chosen not to name this individual, I’ll finish out why I mentioned him. So seeing how he had befriended me for the help, I judged him as being dim-witted and in need of plenty of help. Two incidents thereafter solidified this opinion.
The first was at a dry Christmas party senior year of high school. All the party people, including myself, were seated outside in comical conversation circles. Within our own circles we were conversing with each other.
Now many of my good friends are female, so my conversation circle was pretty much girls plus me and this other guy. In an adjacent circle was a group of football and baseball jocks. With most all sports being segregated by sex, their conversation circle was comprised only of guys, if memory serves me right. In that group was the aforementioned science class “friend,” if you will. Now a star football player, he received a scholarship to (the) Cornell University in New York.
The group began poking fun at me behind my back. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was nasty and I do not care to elaborate for sake of word choice, if you catch my drift. They persisted and then moved on to the other guy in my conversation circle, another friend of mine. He wasn’t so good at hiding that he was hearing the entire insult and controlled himself to stay seated in his chair.
What transpired between the aggressors and the aggressees is irrelevant, so I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome.
The second incident regarding this individual did not happen but half a year ago. By this time, he was in attendance at Cornell and knowing fully well that he was, as my dad likes to call people, an idiot, I was curious as to how he was faring.
It just so happens that I’m friends with his ex-girlfriend, who also attends UCSD. Knowing that they’d broken up because of his infidelity, I asked how he’s doing at Cornell. She said that he feels really stupid there, to which I was not surprised and suddenly finding trouble containing my running laughter.
My second was in high school.
Many of my old friends may sense what’s to come in this second major decision. They would always remark to me stuff like: “You’re so busy!” “I never see you outside of class,” or “Do you have any free time?”
At the end of eighth grade we were led through registration of classes for freshman year of high school—the upcoming year. I talked to a counselor there. She said that if I wanted to get into Stanford, I would have to work extra hard and find a passion that you revolve around. I did both, definitely, but what pushed my chances of getting over the edge to the other side of the curve was a little thing I like to call community service.
My parents used to tell me that I’m really spoiled. When they would utter it, I would hate it. Now, I would say that was somewhat true. While I did not receive everything I wanted, I received everything I needed plus more. I never received stuff like big screen TVs or video game consoles for free, as did many of my classmates, but I never had to fight for food or had to find shelter like so many 40 miles southeast of Thousand Oaks. I was not given a car when I turned 16 (or ever for that matter) but I was given near unlimited access of my parents’. Being a teenage male, my driver’s insurance rates were sky high, but my parents never asked me to get a job to help pay for it.
So I took a look at the world, so to speak. Knowing full well what many of the underprivileged do with their lives—starting on a low note and ending on a high—I should be expected to end on an even higher note, having started from a relatively high note to begin with.
From this basis, I changed in two ways. One is ongoing and the other has already pretty much happened.
The first is that I became addicted to community service. I figured that I should use my ability and good health to assist others and those less fortunate. This is still going on as I try hard to find time perform my passion for service. I donate blood whenever I can (and so should you!) though I won’t be able to donate again until January 2011 due to my recent trip to Europe and my upcoming trip to Hong Kong.
The other is liberal (in the American sense) views (much to the covert dismay of my Republican father). No one person is inherently better than another in the same way that no one country is inherently better than another. In no way should making money be the primary goal for anyone’s life. Why should one person live with $10,000 drapes on every window in every room when someone not halfway across the globe works tirelessly every day for basic necessities? How can the United States call itself a Christian nation and claim to be accepting people of all faiths at the same time? Or for that matter how can the United States claim to be accepting and fail to insure every individual the same civil rights as the next?
While I claim a dislike for the Republican Party, I do not claim a dislike for its individual members, nor conservatism as an ideology.
I included this because as I am a political science major, I intend to write heavily about politics, political economy, and globalization from Hong Kong.
So by the time I was finishing high school I had been involved with at least six organizations. I did community service throughout Boy Scouts of America, including a 440-man-hour, $2,500-budget project for Eagle Scout rank; American Red Cross (of Ventura County), where I was involved as Youth Services Chair on the Board of Directors and Westlake High School Club President; National Honor Society, which does service with a variety of local organizations; Ambassadors Club, for service to the school; Los Robles Hospital, where I assisted the friendly pharmacist with inventory and paperwork; and Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, which gave me an award.
Even though all this organizations dominated nearly every day after school, this alone did not cause me to not get the best of grades.
I had another addition—school. I know it sounds silly, but I had a thing for taking extra classes. Each and every year I took seven classes. Junior and senior years I took an additional class at Moorpark Community College. My final semester of senior I took two classes at Moorpark Community College for a grand total of 9 classes at during my final semester at Westlake High School.
At graduation I was not going to Stanford, I had a ton of community service hours (probably literally), I had a respectable GPA (though not respectable enough for the Ivys), and I was set to go to UCSD with a combined AP-community college transfer of 86 credits (4 shy of junior standing).
My third was in college.
I guess this last major decision was not so much of a decision as a justification. I had not gotten into Stanford or the Ivys. I came to Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, to make a name for myself with expectations and disappointments.
Now that I’ve spent my first year at UCSD people ask me how I like it. My response it always the same: my biggest problem with it is that too many people don’t think they belong there. Out of all the first-years I’ve talked to, I can only name a handful that say they want to and plan to graduate from UCSD. In fact, this past year I’ve had two roommates because my first transferred out after the first quarter.
The part that bothered me was that the reason they didn’t feel they belonged was because they felt they should have gotten into college elsewhere. I got plenty of Berekeleys and UCLAs as responses.
At first, I was poised to become one of the many who didn’t “belong.” But what good would that do? UCSD is a perfectly good school and actually turned out to offer a really good education in my interests.
As I’ve explained in previous posts my majors, I have been unable to find comparable programs at other universities; and at none have I been able to find a program as enriching as Making of the Modern World.
Which brings me to my next point. Students are lazy. Well, that’s not my point, but not only are students at UCSD feeling as if they don’t belong, my classmates feel like they’ve had an injustice done to them by being placed in Eleanor Roosevelt College.
Most of the hate for ERC (from those who hate) is directed at MMW. As I explained earlier, I really appreciate MMW. Most complain about its length. One spiteful Wikipedia author claimed that at six quarters, MMW is by far the longest core writing class of all of UCSD’s six colleges.
I dispute that claim. It is indeed the longest, but not by far. Revelle College has five quarters of Humanities (HUM), which appears to be a western cultures and literature course, and an additional quarter of American cultures, making their grand total six. Sixth College has three Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) lower division classes plus a colloquium for a total of four. Marshall College has three quarters of Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which many Marshall students say is useless, and the administrators are considering adding a fourth. Warren College has two writing courses plus Ethics for a total of three. And Muir College has two writing courses plus American cultures for a total of three as well.
So where is this all going? Rarely in my actions and choices have I been overall lazy. The decision to study abroad was no exception. The mountain of paperwork, multiple applications, and the money, just to name a few things. So why do it? I guess ironically going away to another university for a while would enhance the quality of my education at UCSD.
It goes back to when I was real, real little. I think it was my father who gave me an “I’m going to Harvard” rattle. Whether or not he was the giver is irrelevant. My father is one of those who “only wants the best” for me, he would say; and I do so believe in his intentions.
Entering middle school I was poised to get straight As, no doubt. In the big jump from sixth to seventh grade I guess I found myself at a crossroads. At the time it would have sounded silly to say this, and it sounds only a little less now that I’m 19, but I like (as in prefer) to think that that was the end of my formative years in a sense. From then, my opinions have changed; I grew a few feet (I think); I learned how to drive—but nothing unlike that in the course of one’s adult life. I was poised to get into Stanford and remained so until I was rejected in 2007, in December.
Was it stubborn optimism that turned (what I like to think was) misfortune into hope?
Needless to say, I didn’t get straight As in middle school, nor high school for that matter. On the bright side, I didn’t get any Cs (or lower), nor did my GPA ever dip below 3.6.
And here we get to the topic of today’s post. Yes, the two sides are both qualities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking that I have had to make some difficult decisions over the years between two (or more) perfectly and equally equitable situations. In my case, I was caught up by quantity due to my inability to make chose but a few of the many existing scenarios before me.
Was it a good decision on my part? My mother asserted to me, after it was all set and done, “You probably should have done less. I think you stretched yourself out too thin. You couldn’t concentrate on grades and now you aren’t going to be going to your top choice school.”
I replied, “I honestly wouldn’t have done anything different.” And true to my words, my mind didn’t and still doesn’t think anything different.
My seldom-existent inner romantic would say that the heart wants what the heart wants and the brain could not, at that time, overcome the wishes of the heart, for rationality was gone. The heart had become one with the brain and there was nothing to be done.
So in this post I plan to pose three major decisions of quality versus quality (with many minor ones) that I went through. You may disagree; you may agree. All I hope is that my logic shows in my actions, hopefully culminating in relevance to my upcoming study abroad experience.
My first was in middle school.
When I was approaching fifth grade, there was a decision of whether or not to go to middle school. State legislation had just promoted the sixth grade to middle school (junior high school) status. However, there was a large enough group of parents who wanted to keep their kids in elementary school for sixth grade that Westlake Hills Elementary School kept sixth grade.
Why not stay in elementary school for sixth grade? My parents, with my consent kept me at Westlake Hills for sixth grade.
A third of the way across the school district (and Thousand Oaks), a good friend of mine went to Meadows Elementary School. Their parents had voted to get rid of sixth grade entirely there. As such, my friend went to middle school one year before I did.
I got to middle school as a seventh grader in the fall of 2002. My good friend and I were still pretty chummy and I ate lunch with his group of friends for the first week or so. With good intentions (in middle-school sense) he told me that I was not to get all problems correct on a math test or homework, because that’s not cool. I was told to deliberately work every tenth problem or so wrong to this effect.
I decided not to follow this piece of advice. If I wanted a good circle of friends, they first would not fall for gimmicks that make me supposedly look cool. If they did, then they could be considered shallow, at least in part. Because of this decision, I worked hard throughout middle school. So much that I kept a full load of honors courses with a workload to match. In eighth grade, I found myself in honors science, a relatively hard class with a good teacher.
Back in the day we would get assigned seats, of course, and for one rotation I sat next to this kid who needed a bit of help. The bit turned into a lot of help, for which I was perfectly glad to assist, for we had become pretty good friends.
The next seating rotation, we did not sit next to each other any more. That was it for our friendship. I saw him outside of class one day and said hi to him, for which he ignored me in the presence of his cool friends and pretended not to know me.
Because I have chosen not to name this individual, I’ll finish out why I mentioned him. So seeing how he had befriended me for the help, I judged him as being dim-witted and in need of plenty of help. Two incidents thereafter solidified this opinion.
The first was at a dry Christmas party senior year of high school. All the party people, including myself, were seated outside in comical conversation circles. Within our own circles we were conversing with each other.
Now many of my good friends are female, so my conversation circle was pretty much girls plus me and this other guy. In an adjacent circle was a group of football and baseball jocks. With most all sports being segregated by sex, their conversation circle was comprised only of guys, if memory serves me right. In that group was the aforementioned science class “friend,” if you will. Now a star football player, he received a scholarship to (the) Cornell University in New York.
The group began poking fun at me behind my back. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was nasty and I do not care to elaborate for sake of word choice, if you catch my drift. They persisted and then moved on to the other guy in my conversation circle, another friend of mine. He wasn’t so good at hiding that he was hearing the entire insult and controlled himself to stay seated in his chair.
What transpired between the aggressors and the aggressees is irrelevant, so I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome.
The second incident regarding this individual did not happen but half a year ago. By this time, he was in attendance at Cornell and knowing fully well that he was, as my dad likes to call people, an idiot, I was curious as to how he was faring.
It just so happens that I’m friends with his ex-girlfriend, who also attends UCSD. Knowing that they’d broken up because of his infidelity, I asked how he’s doing at Cornell. She said that he feels really stupid there, to which I was not surprised and suddenly finding trouble containing my running laughter.
My second was in high school.
Many of my old friends may sense what’s to come in this second major decision. They would always remark to me stuff like: “You’re so busy!” “I never see you outside of class,” or “Do you have any free time?”
At the end of eighth grade we were led through registration of classes for freshman year of high school—the upcoming year. I talked to a counselor there. She said that if I wanted to get into Stanford, I would have to work extra hard and find a passion that you revolve around. I did both, definitely, but what pushed my chances of getting over the edge to the other side of the curve was a little thing I like to call community service.
My parents used to tell me that I’m really spoiled. When they would utter it, I would hate it. Now, I would say that was somewhat true. While I did not receive everything I wanted, I received everything I needed plus more. I never received stuff like big screen TVs or video game consoles for free, as did many of my classmates, but I never had to fight for food or had to find shelter like so many 40 miles southeast of Thousand Oaks. I was not given a car when I turned 16 (or ever for that matter) but I was given near unlimited access of my parents’. Being a teenage male, my driver’s insurance rates were sky high, but my parents never asked me to get a job to help pay for it.
So I took a look at the world, so to speak. Knowing full well what many of the underprivileged do with their lives—starting on a low note and ending on a high—I should be expected to end on an even higher note, having started from a relatively high note to begin with.
From this basis, I changed in two ways. One is ongoing and the other has already pretty much happened.
The first is that I became addicted to community service. I figured that I should use my ability and good health to assist others and those less fortunate. This is still going on as I try hard to find time perform my passion for service. I donate blood whenever I can (and so should you!) though I won’t be able to donate again until January 2011 due to my recent trip to Europe and my upcoming trip to Hong Kong.
The other is liberal (in the American sense) views (much to the covert dismay of my Republican father). No one person is inherently better than another in the same way that no one country is inherently better than another. In no way should making money be the primary goal for anyone’s life. Why should one person live with $10,000 drapes on every window in every room when someone not halfway across the globe works tirelessly every day for basic necessities? How can the United States call itself a Christian nation and claim to be accepting people of all faiths at the same time? Or for that matter how can the United States claim to be accepting and fail to insure every individual the same civil rights as the next?
While I claim a dislike for the Republican Party, I do not claim a dislike for its individual members, nor conservatism as an ideology.
I included this because as I am a political science major, I intend to write heavily about politics, political economy, and globalization from Hong Kong.
So by the time I was finishing high school I had been involved with at least six organizations. I did community service throughout Boy Scouts of America, including a 440-man-hour, $2,500-budget project for Eagle Scout rank; American Red Cross (of Ventura County), where I was involved as Youth Services Chair on the Board of Directors and Westlake High School Club President; National Honor Society, which does service with a variety of local organizations; Ambassadors Club, for service to the school; Los Robles Hospital, where I assisted the friendly pharmacist with inventory and paperwork; and Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, which gave me an award.
Even though all this organizations dominated nearly every day after school, this alone did not cause me to not get the best of grades.
I had another addition—school. I know it sounds silly, but I had a thing for taking extra classes. Each and every year I took seven classes. Junior and senior years I took an additional class at Moorpark Community College. My final semester of senior I took two classes at Moorpark Community College for a grand total of 9 classes at during my final semester at Westlake High School.
At graduation I was not going to Stanford, I had a ton of community service hours (probably literally), I had a respectable GPA (though not respectable enough for the Ivys), and I was set to go to UCSD with a combined AP-community college transfer of 86 credits (4 shy of junior standing).
My third was in college.
I guess this last major decision was not so much of a decision as a justification. I had not gotten into Stanford or the Ivys. I came to Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, to make a name for myself with expectations and disappointments.
Now that I’ve spent my first year at UCSD people ask me how I like it. My response it always the same: my biggest problem with it is that too many people don’t think they belong there. Out of all the first-years I’ve talked to, I can only name a handful that say they want to and plan to graduate from UCSD. In fact, this past year I’ve had two roommates because my first transferred out after the first quarter.
The part that bothered me was that the reason they didn’t feel they belonged was because they felt they should have gotten into college elsewhere. I got plenty of Berekeleys and UCLAs as responses.
At first, I was poised to become one of the many who didn’t “belong.” But what good would that do? UCSD is a perfectly good school and actually turned out to offer a really good education in my interests.
As I’ve explained in previous posts my majors, I have been unable to find comparable programs at other universities; and at none have I been able to find a program as enriching as Making of the Modern World.
Which brings me to my next point. Students are lazy. Well, that’s not my point, but not only are students at UCSD feeling as if they don’t belong, my classmates feel like they’ve had an injustice done to them by being placed in Eleanor Roosevelt College.
Most of the hate for ERC (from those who hate) is directed at MMW. As I explained earlier, I really appreciate MMW. Most complain about its length. One spiteful Wikipedia author claimed that at six quarters, MMW is by far the longest core writing class of all of UCSD’s six colleges.
I dispute that claim. It is indeed the longest, but not by far. Revelle College has five quarters of Humanities (HUM), which appears to be a western cultures and literature course, and an additional quarter of American cultures, making their grand total six. Sixth College has three Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) lower division classes plus a colloquium for a total of four. Marshall College has three quarters of Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which many Marshall students say is useless, and the administrators are considering adding a fourth. Warren College has two writing courses plus Ethics for a total of three. And Muir College has two writing courses plus American cultures for a total of three as well.
So where is this all going? Rarely in my actions and choices have I been overall lazy. The decision to study abroad was no exception. The mountain of paperwork, multiple applications, and the money, just to name a few things. So why do it? I guess ironically going away to another university for a while would enhance the quality of my education at UCSD.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Moving out of UCSD
Spring quarter ended last week so now I’ve moved out of La Jolla. I won’t see UCSD again for seven months. It took some five trips between my room and the car for my dad and me to move all my stuff out. I didn’t think I had that much, but I guess I did.
I guess I can’t do this for Hong Kong University. I shouldn’t have too much trouble with this because my program is for four months whereas I was living at UCSD for eight months. At orientation, some students mentioned that they had to leave stuff there. After all, I paid for one flight there and just one flight back.
I’ll try to add to this post later. I’m tired from preparing to go to Europe. I leave tomorrow with my mom and brother. We won’t be back until July 7, so I won’t be able to update again until after then.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
I guess I can’t do this for Hong Kong University. I shouldn’t have too much trouble with this because my program is for four months whereas I was living at UCSD for eight months. At orientation, some students mentioned that they had to leave stuff there. After all, I paid for one flight there and just one flight back.
I’ll try to add to this post later. I’m tired from preparing to go to Europe. I leave tomorrow with my mom and brother. We won’t be back until July 7, so I won’t be able to update again until after then.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Applying to Go Abroad
Now is when I get into the nitty gritties of my application. I’ve already told my reasons for going abroad and my reasons for choosing Hong Kong of all places. So now I will explain the Education Abroad Program (EAP) through which I am going and why I chose it.
There was a lot of lead-time involved in the application process. I had to submit my application on January 5, almost a full eight months before the start of the program. Programs to Hong Kong had one of the earliest application due dates I believe, but the latest one that I knew of was the program to Vietnam, to which a friend (and fellow International Studies major) of mine is going. For technical reasons, I could not turn in my application any earlier than January 5, which was risky since the my EAP website was down nearly all of winter break, with January 5 being the first day of classes for winter quarter. One copy of the application had to be submitted electronically through the website and one had to be submitted in person to the Programs Abroad Office, here on campus.
Before then, I had to meet up with country advisors. Mine was Tonia and she oversaw most of the East Asia programs. She looked over the basics with me, informed me of the dates, and laid out the scholarships (of which I was qualified for two). She said until further notice, I would not need letters of recommendation.
There, I decided to apply through EAP for a couple of reasons. First, I would pay tuition to the Regents of the University of California, so I would not have to deal more than I had to in HKU’s unfamiliar system. (It’s still unfamiliar). I would pay in United States Dollars and the EAP office would coordinate finances with my host university. If I had gone through a third party, I would still pay in USD, but to an organization that has no affiliation to UCSD. This way, I hope any problems that arise can be dealt with easier, as they would be with one bureaucracy than multiple ones.
And being affiliated with the University of California, I get direct UC credit for classes I take abroad. There are pros and cons to this set up, but I went with the pros. Advantages are that the classes count towards my GPA, so they have to potential to reflect my work abroad, and that credit is directly transferred without having to send transcripts to the UCSD Office of Admissions (and Relations with Schools). Recalling that I had to send transcripts from my high school, my community college, and the College Board (AP tests) there, the experience was not good. They had few people working, and they could not tell me if my transcripts arrived, even if they had not inputted the grades. Because of this, I sent multiple transcripts from each institution at different times to ensure that they did not lose my transcripts, nor could they say I did not meet deadlines.
Cons are that since the grades I earn abroad would be counted towards my UC GPA, if I do poorly, my GPA will reflect it. In addition, UCSD and HKU would not have a relationship in my interest, as I would have to go through a third party. In the end, I recommend, as I did, that if there is an EAP program going where you want to go, opt for that one rather than a third party.
From there, I had to go to a half-hour “First Steps” session, where we discussed the logistics of the application process. There we were given access to my EAP and reminded of due dates.
In mid-December I finished the bulk of my application. It consisted of a few essays, including questions asking, “Why did you choose this country and this school?” “What motivates you to do well abroad?” and “Why are you choosing to study abroad?” I had to also include my academic history and a list of classes that I was planning to take before I left.
Perhaps the most important part at the time was the pre-approval form. It had me list classes that I planned to take abroad based off of a database that EAP compiled of classes previously transferred. I chose classes such as “Hong Kong Politics” and “China and the World” for my first major (International Studies-Political Science) and Bilingualism for my second major (Linguistics). At the time of application, I had not yet taken on my minor in the Study of Religion, so I am not planning on taking any classes abroad to apply to it. I am also planning to take my non-western Fine Arts requirement class there. To this effect, I had to get department approval from my two (at the time) departments plus my college.
Unfortunately, my classes chosen were based on the database and not the listing of classes actually available (which is still not completely online). So I would later find out that I had to revise my class list and after that find out that I had only been accepted for two of those. Because of this, I am going to have to register for the rest of my classes when I arrive (during the first two weeks of class). But I’ll write more about that later.
So I turned in my application the morning of Monday, January 5. It was then that I was told that I needed a letter of recommendation. I had not been told earlier. It was not unreasonable, for there were 30+ applicants to the program at HKU for which there were eight available spots. However, as I had only been told then, Tonia gave me extra time to get those.
Scrambling through my coursework I decided on asking two TAs in hopes that one would give me one. They were both for classes that I had received my A+s in fall quarter. For MMW 1, I asked an anthropology graduate student, to which he graciously agreed, though the only writing samples of mine that he had were short answers and short essays on three exams. On the other hand, I asked my TA from INTL 101 Languages in Competition, a communication graduate student to write my second letter of recommendation, to which he also agreed. I figured he would know more about me and attest to my qualifications because I wrote a 4,700-word term paper on Hong Kong’s bilingual-trilingual society for that class, on which I earned an A.
As they were both kind enough to write letters, I walked into the Programs Abroad Office on Friday morning with two letters of recommendation, thereby completing my application.
Two or three weeks later (before many of my study abroad friends even had to submit their applications) I received my acceptance. To my shame, I let out a brief, high-pitched scream, but I was elated. I feel that I was accepted because I was to have senior standing by the time of the program, I submitted a 3.925 GPA (which was later adjusted to 4.0), and most of all because I submitted a letter of recommendation attesting to my knowledge and interest in Hong Kong itself.
To that effect, I owe much thanks to these two graduate students who so graciously aided my admission on such short notice. I also thank my departments and my college who support and encourage study abroad. My host country’s advisor, Tonia, was also extremely helpful and knowledgeable throughout the whole process. Of course the student workers, one of which my first roommate’s sister, at the Programs Abroad Office deserve mentioning for their work ensures the productivity and success of the entire operation. In fact, if one of them didn’t go over my application with me before I turned it in, I would have forgotten to sign a certain very important line.
Lastly I thank my family for their support in my endeavors. I know I spend a lot of their money (though with discretion), so I’ll be sure to do my best in this program in appreciation of their love of and faith in me. As it has now come to my attention that my mother is afraid of what I’ll do next, I’ll have to keep my future plans a secret from them (and most of you, the readers) for the next seven months (when my program ends) before unveiling the next chapter in my life.
What happens after I got accepted? That’ll be in a later post. Thanks for reading!
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
There was a lot of lead-time involved in the application process. I had to submit my application on January 5, almost a full eight months before the start of the program. Programs to Hong Kong had one of the earliest application due dates I believe, but the latest one that I knew of was the program to Vietnam, to which a friend (and fellow International Studies major) of mine is going. For technical reasons, I could not turn in my application any earlier than January 5, which was risky since the my EAP website was down nearly all of winter break, with January 5 being the first day of classes for winter quarter. One copy of the application had to be submitted electronically through the website and one had to be submitted in person to the Programs Abroad Office, here on campus.
Before then, I had to meet up with country advisors. Mine was Tonia and she oversaw most of the East Asia programs. She looked over the basics with me, informed me of the dates, and laid out the scholarships (of which I was qualified for two). She said until further notice, I would not need letters of recommendation.
There, I decided to apply through EAP for a couple of reasons. First, I would pay tuition to the Regents of the University of California, so I would not have to deal more than I had to in HKU’s unfamiliar system. (It’s still unfamiliar). I would pay in United States Dollars and the EAP office would coordinate finances with my host university. If I had gone through a third party, I would still pay in USD, but to an organization that has no affiliation to UCSD. This way, I hope any problems that arise can be dealt with easier, as they would be with one bureaucracy than multiple ones.
And being affiliated with the University of California, I get direct UC credit for classes I take abroad. There are pros and cons to this set up, but I went with the pros. Advantages are that the classes count towards my GPA, so they have to potential to reflect my work abroad, and that credit is directly transferred without having to send transcripts to the UCSD Office of Admissions (and Relations with Schools). Recalling that I had to send transcripts from my high school, my community college, and the College Board (AP tests) there, the experience was not good. They had few people working, and they could not tell me if my transcripts arrived, even if they had not inputted the grades. Because of this, I sent multiple transcripts from each institution at different times to ensure that they did not lose my transcripts, nor could they say I did not meet deadlines.
Cons are that since the grades I earn abroad would be counted towards my UC GPA, if I do poorly, my GPA will reflect it. In addition, UCSD and HKU would not have a relationship in my interest, as I would have to go through a third party. In the end, I recommend, as I did, that if there is an EAP program going where you want to go, opt for that one rather than a third party.
From there, I had to go to a half-hour “First Steps” session, where we discussed the logistics of the application process. There we were given access to my EAP and reminded of due dates.
In mid-December I finished the bulk of my application. It consisted of a few essays, including questions asking, “Why did you choose this country and this school?” “What motivates you to do well abroad?” and “Why are you choosing to study abroad?” I had to also include my academic history and a list of classes that I was planning to take before I left.
Perhaps the most important part at the time was the pre-approval form. It had me list classes that I planned to take abroad based off of a database that EAP compiled of classes previously transferred. I chose classes such as “Hong Kong Politics” and “China and the World” for my first major (International Studies-Political Science) and Bilingualism for my second major (Linguistics). At the time of application, I had not yet taken on my minor in the Study of Religion, so I am not planning on taking any classes abroad to apply to it. I am also planning to take my non-western Fine Arts requirement class there. To this effect, I had to get department approval from my two (at the time) departments plus my college.
Unfortunately, my classes chosen were based on the database and not the listing of classes actually available (which is still not completely online). So I would later find out that I had to revise my class list and after that find out that I had only been accepted for two of those. Because of this, I am going to have to register for the rest of my classes when I arrive (during the first two weeks of class). But I’ll write more about that later.
So I turned in my application the morning of Monday, January 5. It was then that I was told that I needed a letter of recommendation. I had not been told earlier. It was not unreasonable, for there were 30+ applicants to the program at HKU for which there were eight available spots. However, as I had only been told then, Tonia gave me extra time to get those.
Scrambling through my coursework I decided on asking two TAs in hopes that one would give me one. They were both for classes that I had received my A+s in fall quarter. For MMW 1, I asked an anthropology graduate student, to which he graciously agreed, though the only writing samples of mine that he had were short answers and short essays on three exams. On the other hand, I asked my TA from INTL 101 Languages in Competition, a communication graduate student to write my second letter of recommendation, to which he also agreed. I figured he would know more about me and attest to my qualifications because I wrote a 4,700-word term paper on Hong Kong’s bilingual-trilingual society for that class, on which I earned an A.
As they were both kind enough to write letters, I walked into the Programs Abroad Office on Friday morning with two letters of recommendation, thereby completing my application.
Two or three weeks later (before many of my study abroad friends even had to submit their applications) I received my acceptance. To my shame, I let out a brief, high-pitched scream, but I was elated. I feel that I was accepted because I was to have senior standing by the time of the program, I submitted a 3.925 GPA (which was later adjusted to 4.0), and most of all because I submitted a letter of recommendation attesting to my knowledge and interest in Hong Kong itself.
To that effect, I owe much thanks to these two graduate students who so graciously aided my admission on such short notice. I also thank my departments and my college who support and encourage study abroad. My host country’s advisor, Tonia, was also extremely helpful and knowledgeable throughout the whole process. Of course the student workers, one of which my first roommate’s sister, at the Programs Abroad Office deserve mentioning for their work ensures the productivity and success of the entire operation. In fact, if one of them didn’t go over my application with me before I turned it in, I would have forgotten to sign a certain very important line.
Lastly I thank my family for their support in my endeavors. I know I spend a lot of their money (though with discretion), so I’ll be sure to do my best in this program in appreciation of their love of and faith in me. As it has now come to my attention that my mother is afraid of what I’ll do next, I’ll have to keep my future plans a secret from them (and most of you, the readers) for the next seven months (when my program ends) before unveiling the next chapter in my life.
What happens after I got accepted? That’ll be in a later post. Thanks for reading!
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Career Plans
“What do you call 5,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?”
Most know the answer to this joke is “A good start.” It is commonly perceived that in the professional world, lawyers are sly and conniving, always looking for a reason to sue, exploiting people for their hard earned money. This is the stereotype played off of in television, movies, and other media; it is also what I had in mind up until I started college. I never wanted to be a lawyer, involved in corporate politics, drowning in the multiplicity of personalities. It wasn’t appealing.
There are lawyers who exist like this, of course. But most lawyers supposedly have never been on the inside of a courtroom and are low-profile men and women who are hardworking and live middle-class lifestyles. So less lawyers are as exploitative as is commonly thought.
On the other hand, physicians are thought of as lifesavers. And I suppose it is true for the most part. After all, they do receive much more education that lawyers. A mistake by a doctor could cost a life but a mistake by a lawyer could lose some money. Alternatively, a skilled doctor can maintain life where wanted whereas a skilled lawyer can get settlements or the accused exonerated. However, I have reason to believe that proportionally speaking there are just as many bad doctors as bad lawyers.
So when people tell me this joke like it’s new news I chuckle a little. But when I decided that I wanted to be an international law attorney (hopefully humanitarian or human rights) it took awhile because of the stigma surrounding it. When I was younger, I absolutely hated politics. It looked like backstabbing and corruption to me. However, I now realize that politics, while seemingly superficial on the surface, is the main way for the government to make changes for the people. For the last couple years, I have been really interested in international affairs, and for that reason I have my first major International Studies-Political Science.
Because of my interest in learning languages and the mechanics involved in language acquisition and language itself, I found myself with my second major in Linguistics, To tailor it to my other major so that I could use skills more easily from both in the same context, I chose the Language and Society specialization, which is basically a mix of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Hence, my second major in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society).
Because of my love of humanities and Making of the Modern World, Eleanor Roosevelt College’s core course sequence, I’ve take up the Study of Religion as my minor.
If I get accepted into departmental honors programs and succeed, I will graduate with the following degree:
Bachelor of Arts in International Studies-Political Science with highest distinction, Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society) with highest distinction, with a minor in the Study of Religion.
Now is when most people would ask me what I plan on doing with my degree. Well, as said before, I would like to be an attorney in international law, hopefully humanitarian and or human rights. How I get there is a different story.
So currently I attend University of California, San Diego, and plan on graduating in winter or spring as part of the Eleanor Roosevelt College Class of ’11. During which time, I will study abroad for half a year in Hong Kong at the University of Hong Kong and hopefully find some governmental and or legal internships. (I’m currently eyeing the Department of State or the San Diego County or Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office).
When I graduate, I originally planned graduate school. This is the part where is gets confusing for some people. I personally appreciate specialization, so I hope to go to a top-ten law school whose parent school also offers a Ph.D. in Political Science. Many schools, such as Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia, offer joint programs to overlap courses and reduce time to achieve both degrees significantly. Northwestern in particular offers a combined six-year program as follows:
Year 1: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 2: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 3: Law School (L1) and advancement to C.Phil. status
Summer: graduate and law research
Year 2: Law School (L2)
Summer: submission of prospectus
Year 5: Research and Teaching Fellowship
Summer: dissertation research
Year 6: Completion of Dissertation
By this original plan, I would have my bachelor’s degree at age 20 and my J.D. and Ph.D. at 26—noticeably young and without much real-world experience, unfortunately. The positive side is that the program is fully funded for those six years, so I wouldn’t need to find employment (if I were to have time for outside work).
So after that, I would like to teach as a law or political science professor while practicing law on the side. I know it sounds corny but I hope I can do something good for the world in the future.
The reason I say "original" plan is because I have something in mind that would set graduate school back about two or three years. I have told just a few people what this is, but I'll be sure to go through this experience first before I affirm any other plans.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Most know the answer to this joke is “A good start.” It is commonly perceived that in the professional world, lawyers are sly and conniving, always looking for a reason to sue, exploiting people for their hard earned money. This is the stereotype played off of in television, movies, and other media; it is also what I had in mind up until I started college. I never wanted to be a lawyer, involved in corporate politics, drowning in the multiplicity of personalities. It wasn’t appealing.
There are lawyers who exist like this, of course. But most lawyers supposedly have never been on the inside of a courtroom and are low-profile men and women who are hardworking and live middle-class lifestyles. So less lawyers are as exploitative as is commonly thought.
On the other hand, physicians are thought of as lifesavers. And I suppose it is true for the most part. After all, they do receive much more education that lawyers. A mistake by a doctor could cost a life but a mistake by a lawyer could lose some money. Alternatively, a skilled doctor can maintain life where wanted whereas a skilled lawyer can get settlements or the accused exonerated. However, I have reason to believe that proportionally speaking there are just as many bad doctors as bad lawyers.
So when people tell me this joke like it’s new news I chuckle a little. But when I decided that I wanted to be an international law attorney (hopefully humanitarian or human rights) it took awhile because of the stigma surrounding it. When I was younger, I absolutely hated politics. It looked like backstabbing and corruption to me. However, I now realize that politics, while seemingly superficial on the surface, is the main way for the government to make changes for the people. For the last couple years, I have been really interested in international affairs, and for that reason I have my first major International Studies-Political Science.
Because of my interest in learning languages and the mechanics involved in language acquisition and language itself, I found myself with my second major in Linguistics, To tailor it to my other major so that I could use skills more easily from both in the same context, I chose the Language and Society specialization, which is basically a mix of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Hence, my second major in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society).
Because of my love of humanities and Making of the Modern World, Eleanor Roosevelt College’s core course sequence, I’ve take up the Study of Religion as my minor.
If I get accepted into departmental honors programs and succeed, I will graduate with the following degree:
Bachelor of Arts in International Studies-Political Science with highest distinction, Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society) with highest distinction, with a minor in the Study of Religion.
Now is when most people would ask me what I plan on doing with my degree. Well, as said before, I would like to be an attorney in international law, hopefully humanitarian and or human rights. How I get there is a different story.
So currently I attend University of California, San Diego, and plan on graduating in winter or spring as part of the Eleanor Roosevelt College Class of ’11. During which time, I will study abroad for half a year in Hong Kong at the University of Hong Kong and hopefully find some governmental and or legal internships. (I’m currently eyeing the Department of State or the San Diego County or Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office).
When I graduate, I originally planned graduate school. This is the part where is gets confusing for some people. I personally appreciate specialization, so I hope to go to a top-ten law school whose parent school also offers a Ph.D. in Political Science. Many schools, such as Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia, offer joint programs to overlap courses and reduce time to achieve both degrees significantly. Northwestern in particular offers a combined six-year program as follows:
Year 1: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 2: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 3: Law School (L1) and advancement to C.Phil. status
Summer: graduate and law research
Year 2: Law School (L2)
Summer: submission of prospectus
Year 5: Research and Teaching Fellowship
Summer: dissertation research
Year 6: Completion of Dissertation
By this original plan, I would have my bachelor’s degree at age 20 and my J.D. and Ph.D. at 26—noticeably young and without much real-world experience, unfortunately. The positive side is that the program is fully funded for those six years, so I wouldn’t need to find employment (if I were to have time for outside work).
So after that, I would like to teach as a law or political science professor while practicing law on the side. I know it sounds corny but I hope I can do something good for the world in the future.
The reason I say "original" plan is because I have something in mind that would set graduate school back about two or three years. I have told just a few people what this is, but I'll be sure to go through this experience first before I affirm any other plans.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
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.
*
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.
*
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
