2 months in

It has been an interesting almost two months. I think that two months is a pretty long time, but the past 60 days have been one of the longer sets that I can remember. I arrived in Beijing and played for a week, then I cowered in a hole and was scared and lonely for a week. I arrived in Shanghai and refused to immerse myself for a week. I stayed on the edges and didn’t really let myself put both feet on the ground. Since then, life has been … well, life has been full.

I’ve been very happy over all. Really happy. I think I am a little bit more confused that usual, I’m not always sure which way is up. For once now, I don’t mean that in the context of language confusion, but rather just in terms of feelings. The work load has been extremely difficult – that has been one of my biggest concerns. The Chinese classes are too hard for me, and I struggle to catch up to a point where I am merely behind. The process of avoiding Chinese work, and struggling with the work that I manage to do is one that is slightly upsetting, because I feel like it is something important to me, but I find frequent excuses to act on it.

I don’t want this to be a list of things I have done, I believe I want to write about my emotions. One emotion that makes at least a daily appearance is questioning my intelligence. In talking people who know me well, are close to me, and so important to me, I have learned that I am being hard on myself. I’ll try to take this advice into consideration, but for now I’m still going to put my feelings on “paper”.

Lately I have been critical of how I dedicate my time, both past and present. I think that for most of sophomore year I ignored academics, got lucky in a few places, and got both slightly lower grades and significantly less knowledge than I would like. This is, in retrospect a very small complaint to have – so much so that I would not be surprised to have some people with far larger problems roll their eyes repeatedly in my direction. For those folks, I know I’m splicing minor details, but most people worry about something.

I think the best way I can phrase my concern is that I want to be “legitimate”. I want to have tangible skills, and I am more worried than confident of my capabilities to acquire them. Learning Chinese for a practical setting often appears out of my reach. The lesson that I would take away from investing 5 semesters of Chinese courses, a summer in Hangzhou, and a semester in Shanghai for the sake of learning Chinese with out “succeeding” is one I don’t quite know yet.

It seems undeniable that my favorite way to spend time is to invest in the relationships I have with friends and family, and/or to do random acts of kindness for acquaintances and strangers. I don’t “dislike” this in me, don’t expect it to change, and don’t particularly want it to – but I do want to make sure it doesn’t come at the opportunity cost of me working on my goals of helping others on the scale of millions rather than dozens.

There is a lot that I have gained by being mostly alone. I don’t mind it, being alone – and it helps that the people in my program are more than welcoming to me. It seems that each and every day has at least a few people come to my room to invite me to join a group in some activity. In a near inverse of how I act in America, I usually say no 80% of the time. I miss the people I love back home. When I am not missing them, there is a lot of time for me to try and sort out what is important to me: what I want to learn, how I want to treat others, which things I think should be prioritized.

The students in this program are a WORLD different from those who I go to school with back home. Perhaps that is part of the experience of studying abroad. I cannot easily label people here. There have been some of the most self-less acts and some of the most shockingly insensitive ones. The nature of camaraderie, friendship, pettiness, and ignorance have all opened my eyes. I have learned a lot just by watching.

My experience so far has been an incredibly valuable one. I think I would like to find some answers, though I don’t feel that I am close to reaching any. It seems like the questions that are worth asking, whether they are about how to solve the financial crisis, how to learn a language, how to spend one’s life, how to treat despicable dictators, or how to respond to a situation with other people involved when you don’t have all of the information don’t have an answer that you can find “the” great solution that no one else has seen. Certainly this is nothing that everyone else doesn’t already know. Its tough, these are all my thought for now, but I don’t want to try and conclude them with a moral.



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