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.