Though I wrote this post in Italy over a week ago, I’m only posting it now because I didn’t have internet access in Italy, and because here at Yale I’ve been pretty busy unpacking and running errands.

I meant to write another post before I left China, but I ended up being very busy with work. So instead, this post is from Italy, where I am on vacation with my family. In some ways, this is actually a nice way to finish the blog – I can reflect on my experience in Beijing from a place that really seems to be its opposite. The Tuscan countryside is slow-paced, calm, lush, and clear-skied, everything that Beijing is not. I was almost in shock the first few days we were here, since even the towns seemed eerily empty to me.
Another big adjustment for me since leaving Beijing has been the change in language. Speaking English on the last day of the program felt extremely bizarre, especially when we were spending time with the teachers. Even though they were supposed to only use English for our graduation lunch, we ended up speaking a lot of Chinese just because we were more comfortable with the teacher-student dynamic that way. To make things even more confusing, the next day I flew off to Pisa by way of Munich, where I was suddenly confronted with huge amounts of German. Though I could understand all the German I heard perfectly, I couldn’t speak it at all. When I tried to produce very simple German sentences, Chinese came out instead. I also had to think for a very long time about certain grammar structures, especially those for which Chinese was more similar to English than German was. Since I had so much trouble speaking German, I actually had to speak English with all the Germans in the airport, which was quite embarrassing. In one case, I asked a Chinese passenger for advice about something rather than a German airport official, just because I felt so much more comfortable speaking Chinese.
The last week of HBA sped by as quickly as I expected it would. I didn’t have extracurriculars, so I took advantage of the extra time by doing a bit of exploring and last-minute gift shopping. One of the highlights of the week was a quick trip to Peking University, which is quite beautiful. It’s very large, and a lot of it seems to be a pretty park, with no university buildings at all. Other than that, the strangest thing about the week was that it was business as usual for the most part. We did, however, get to ask our teachers questions about themselves for a change on our last Thursday afternoon.
I promised last time that I’d write a quick description of each of the fun and interesting things I did during my second semester. Our first weekend HBA activity after we got back from the social study project was an acrobatics show. Most of the things the acrobats did were absolutely jaw-dropping – balancing themselves on each other in very contorted positions, balancing on tiny wooden boards stacked on piles of precariously positioned chairs, riding a bicycle twenty at a time, and so on. I’d already seen a lot of these sorts of acrobatic performances at a Cirque du Soleil show a few years back, but that didn’t make the show any less amazing. The next weekend, we went to a famous tea house in Beijing. Though they served us pretty good green tea and some small snacks, the main attraction was a series of performances including traditional music, martial arts, more acrobatics, and, of course, ceremonial tea pouring. It was a lot of fun, and I particularly enjoyed hearing some of the traditional folk music.

So that’s it! (Well, besides the post entirely filled with pictures I’ll put up after this.) I can’t believe I’m about to start up Chinese classes again, but I think I’m more excited about it than I was a week ago (when I wrote this post). I’m so, so grateful to the Light Fellowship for giving me the amazing opportunity to learn Chinese in Beijing at such a fantastic program. And thanks to everyone for reading!

It's been a while since I last posted! In fact, it's been so long that I only have a week left of HBA! This is sort of hard for me to believe, but at the same time I have to admit I'm ready to be done with classes (if only so I can go have adventures in Italy!). I think I mostly feel this way right now because the past week has been such a challenging one. My whole week has been completely consumed by preparations for the events of this weekend: HBA has a talent show of sorts on Saturday evening, during which I will be participating in four programs, and then I have to be up bright, early, and prepared for the speech competition the next morning. Though I did a lot of the important creative stuff last weekend (arranging a Chinese pop song for four-part a cappella and writing a completely new report for the competition because my first one wasn't "suitable"), the stress has carried through into the week. I have spent countless hours in rehearsals, as well as a lot of time preparing on my own. Needless to say, I've been kicking myself for being so overcommitted, but I also have had moments of satisfaction when I think about how much I've done.
Originally, I was planning to memorize my social study report that I wrote after my trip to the countryside and use that as my speech for the competition. Only after I had spent three days memorizing and polishing it did my teacher tell me that I should probably write an entirely new speech instead. Luckily, I was still able to incorporate some of my experiences in the Hebei elementary school into the new speech, since I decided to focus on the ways in which studying a foreign language makes us more like children, and the things we can learn from children to help us study a foreign language. At this point, I'm actually glad that I had to write it, not only because I think this speech is more fun and interesting than my social study report, but because writing it gave me even more practice with the language. I've clearly learned so much Chinese this summer: when I came here, I was scared to say even very basic sentences, and now I'm about to give a speech that includes fairly nuanced concepts and complicated sentence structures.
One thing that intrigued me during the editing process was a difference in style between Chinese and English writing. When I showed my teacher the first draft, she said that it was okay, but that it would be much better if I added more chengyu, or four-character idiomatic expressions that are very important in Chinese. I explained to her that I hadn't included certain chengyu I knew applied, because I've been taught that it's important to avoid cliche in writing, and they seemed very much like cliches to me. To this, she basically replied that the Chinese think very differently about this: if you use chengyu, you seem more educated and your writing seems more formal than if you don't. I found this very interesting, and I wish I knew more about the reasoning and history behind it. One interpretation that occurred to me is that since Chinese people apparently like to think that they have mostly the same opinions on everything (explanation for this observation later!), they enjoy referring to the common wisdom when presenting their own thoughts. My mom also came up with another plausible explanation: maybe the appeal is partly the way a writer artfully integrates these old expressions into her own writing.
So now I'll quickly defend my rather startling assertion in the last paragraph that Chinese people want to believe they have very few differences in opinion from one another. A few weeks ago when I was eating lunch at one of our Tuesday Chinese tables, I took the opportunity to ask my teachers a few questions (usually, we just have to answer their questions, so the one chance we get to have a genuine two-sided conversation with them is Chinese table). I can't remember everything I asked, but the answer to one of my questions caught me completely off-guard. My question was (translated as closely as I can): What are some of the issues Chinese people most commonly have differing opinions on? The teachers looked at each other for a couple seconds, seemingly at a loss. To help them, I gave them examples of divisive issues in America, yet they still couldn't come up with anything. They finally said something like (I kid you not), "Chinese people mostly have the same opinion on everything." Of course I didn't believe this, so I followed up again, but got basically the same response. Though I'm still sure Chinese people actually differ in their private opinions almost as much as people of any culture do, I still think it's extremely interesting that they might believe that they don't.
In my next post I plan to tell you about some of the fun things I've done in Beijing since I got back three weeks ago. In the meantime I'd love to hear your thoughts on these interesting cultural discoveries.