My Adventures in China
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My Adventures in China

This spring break, I got a culture shock instead of a sunburn.

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My Adventures in China
Laura DePinho

This past spring break, many of my peers boarded their flights to Jamaica, Miami or Puerto Rico for some fun in the sun and came back to Bloomington with tan lines. I’ve been studying Chinese media and culture all semester, so I spent my spring break in Beijing, studying abroad, and came back with bronchitis from the pollution, but I wouldn’t trade the experience I had for the world.

I can’t possibly sum up how incredible my week was in a 500 word article, but I will certainly try my best. China has always seemed to me to be a distant land that is often referenced in American politics and pop culture or where most of my clothes are made, but I never thought I’d actually have a chance to see it firsthand. Walking out of the airport, the first thing I noticed was the difference in air. I was fortunate enough that the week my class was there was when the People’s Congress was meeting and the pollution had been temporarily turned off, but still, the air smelled different and was dry as a bone. The weather is really hard to predict as well; the temperature could read 70 degrees, but it could feel like 57.

Our first night, we explored Wangfujing Snack Street just to get out and stretch our legs a bit after the 14 hour flight. Prior to departing for Beijing, my professor had mentioned that some Chinese people have never seen foreigners before, but I didn’t pay much mind to that detail. It was only when I was chowing down on my fried ice cream from a street vendor when three Chinese girls who looked to be about my age asked to take a picture with me, that I realized how rare foreigners are to China. Not only do they flatter you by taking pictures of or with you, but they use their very minimal English vocabulary to pay you compliments by saying how beautiful you are and pointing to their eyes, perhaps to indicate their envy of Western looking eyes. We were truly spoiled with attention and made to feel like celebrities with cameras pointed at us as we toured the city’s sights, such as Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the Great Wall.

Whenever I travel anywhere, I expect that the people of that country will have a negative outlook on Americans and not be very welcoming because I’ve worked in Times Square and I know that Americans can be very rude to foreign tourists. That was not the case at all in China. Everyone is so accommodating. I went to China knowing how to say four phrases in Mandarin and I was hoping to practice them and also learn more words, but everyone wanted to showcase their English, in the hopes of impressing us or making us feel more comfortable. When you buy a souvenir from a shop, it’s very common for them to give you something for free, either because they want you to come back or they just want to thank you for your business. Probably my favorite material thing I took back to the states with me from this trip is a wooden bracelet with the Chinese character for “peaceful” inscribed on it that a shopkeeper put on my wrist after I bought incense for my best friend.

I think Americans have this preconceived notion about Chinese people that they are oppressed by their government or unhappy because of environmental factors such as the smog. Yet every night when we walked out of the hotel to go explore, we saw people dancing on the streets. We had no idea what was going on the first night, we thought perhaps it was a national holiday we hadn’t been informed about, but when we saw crowds gathered in dance routines every night, we knew it was a regular phenomenon. It could’ve been because we were in an urban area, which usually means people are generally wealthier and more progressive, but Chinese people are happier than you might think, despite having to wear a mask every time they go outside. We accidentally explored the south side of Beijing (as a result of getting lost) which is known for being poorer and we were able to see a substantial difference in living quarters compared to the more flourishing parts of the city. No one was dancing on the south side, but I didn’t see any homeless people and throughout my entire week in China, I never heard a baby cry. The children are just more well behaved, perhaps because of the Chinese family values, known as xiào, or filial piety.

The food was not at all what I expected. When people say “authentic Chinese food,” I imagine better tasting Orange chicken or General Tso’s, but what they mean is bean sauce dumplings and goat’s stomach (it looks like squid, tastes like beef). Even the McDonald’s is different in China, although KFC is the biggest hit because it was the first Western fast food joint to open in China. When you go out to eat, water can often cost more than a can of soda because the tap water is not drinkable and fancy bottled water is a pretty penny. For tables of about eight or more people, everything is served on a Lazy Susan, which makes you wonder why Americans haven’t caught on to this trend yet because it makes everything easier to just spin the glass wheel rather than reach over people and pass dishes around the table.

Everywhere you go in Beijing, you are bound to run into a huge mall. In the downtown area by our hotel, we found a Forever 21 and a Zara, but it was only until we walked into them that we realized they were connected to a two tower, six floor mall. This is the case with almost every clothing store you see though. And finding a restaurant to eat at is not as easy as walking down the street and looking at the menus on the windows before deciding whether to go in. Almost all restaurants are inside malls, even high end ones. My guess is that this has a lot to do with space; Beijing is a city of 21 million people. There is simply no room to have the streets lined with individual restaurants and clothing stores, so they must be condensed into six story malls. And personal space is not a concept either. When people are trying to pass by you in a store, they just move and don’t say anything. Or if you’re opening a door for yourself, they’ll just walk through it without acknowledging you. This is not to say that Chinese people are rude, they just probably don’t know any other way because it’s fast paced and there’s tight space. The roads are indicative of that as well. There are bikes, cars, busses, mopeds, motorcycles and pedestrians and after a week of walking and riding around Beijing, I still have no idea who has the right of way. The traffic just moves and flows in a way that would never work in America, yet while I was there, I never saw a traffic accident or heard too many sirens. People drive up and park on the sidewalks; a lot of times we were walking through bikes and mopeds to get into buildings. The city itself is not dirty, but if you look at the vehicles, you can see a layer of filth from the pollution that has settled on them.

The architecture of the buildings really blew me away and the sights are so beautiful and the views so breathtaking that all of the pictures my iPhone could store could not come close to capturing the beauty of the city.

I can’t talk much about what I was studying in China because all of our meetings with media companies were off the record, but I will say that the biggest takeaway was that especially in today’s political climate, American media is starting to look a lot more like the Chinese Communist Party’s controlled media. I went into this trip expecting to find more differences between America and China, but I left recognizing more similarities. Be the similarities good or bad, I think Americans should stop treating China as if it exists on another planet, because we are more alike than we think.

I would 100% suggest traveling to China. If you can get past the air quality and the long, arduous flights, it is a beautiful, friendly, amazing country to visit, deep in history and rich in culture. I don’t mind that I came back from spring break without a tan, I came back with an invaluable cultural experience.
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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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