Day 16: A Day in the Life

Thursday, May 22

Photo: Grabbed a late afternoon bite with our language partners! Across from me is my fudao (tutor).

It was the final question of Jeopardy, with one question that needed to be answered… in Chinese. I was on the verge to being set for life. I mumbled some gibberish Chinese, using words I had just learned in class, and somehow I managed to score the jackpot. Hooray! My friends and family ran up to me cheering for my victory, and we all took pictures holding up peace signs afterwards.

In the midst of all that cheering is the faint sound of an alarm growing louder and louder, and that’s when I realize it is just a dream and that I have to wake up to finish my essay and prepare for my presentation. 7:00 AM. My eyes are droopy, I only slept for around five hours because I stayed up studying and writing my essay, but I manage to muster up the strength to get up and get to work. Through the aggravatingly sluggish internet I manage to email the essay to my professor five minutes before class begins.

The clock ticks to 8 o’clock. That’s the sign for not only the start of class, but also the start of our language pledge today that lasts until 6 PM. It hasn’t really been a big deal since the first day though, after all, I am in the advanced Chinese class… -end sarcasm-. I still communicate perfectly fine (I get by somehow with a mix of body language) but I feel pretty immersed with China as a result of speaking Chinese so often, more often than I speak in English even. Yeah, it’s gotten to the point where I even dream in Chinese half the time.

Anyways, in my class of five students we start off by presenting what we wrote in our essays. The first two hour block of classes is led by Bao Laoshi, a graduate student who is our student-teacher. In the 10 minute break my class got in the middle of her class, we spend the entirety of the break talking to the teacher and even asking her personal questions, like her relationship status. I think it’s really cute how the Chinese females here get embarrassed so easily whenever you bring up the topic of romance. The dating culture here feels much more innocent than it does in America.

At the end of Bao Laoshi’s classes, we get a twenty minute break. My classmates and I spend the time available grabbing breakfast at Skyway Bakery, a German-owned and operated bakery in China. I go on what’s considered a splurged in Nanjing: 17 RMB for a chocolate croissant and a mini chocolate chip cookie. That’s enough for two huge bowls of chao mian (fried noodles)… but I am in a hurry to grab some easy breakfast. On the way back to class I stop by the convenience store and got a bag of chips too. Ever since coming to China I’ve been eating junk food all day long…

Back to class, this time with Yu Laoshi leading, I’m extremely tired but my magical bag of chips manages to get me through the day. Listening to the professor speak Chinese already required adequate effort to process everything in my head, and then it became a little harder with the sounds of the chips crunching…. It was worth it though.

Class ends at 12 PM and I go back to my dorm to take a quick nap and study a bit. The rest of my classmates as well as a few others on the trip decide to venture to McDonalds for some odd reason… Later on, according to them, it tastes practically the same as it does back in America. But now that they think about it, what reason was there for them to go to McDonalds when there is this plethora of delicious, shiny, and equally oily Chinese food in the nearby streets?

At 2 PM it’s time to meet with our Chinese language partners. My language partner is this really nice girl who’s going to be studying at Wisconsin for graduate school. I sit down and she surprises with me with pastries (dianxin) from a bakery!!! I am practically in love with her at this point… I told her yesterday I’ve been eating dianxin twice a day ever since coming to China (seriously) so I guess she wanted to do something nice… oh man I feel like Chinese people have been so good to me ever since coming here. Anyways, she helps me with my homework for the next two hours, and then we go to a café afterwards with the rest of the classmates and language partners. We have a good time and talk about random stuff.  My language partner and I are already pretty close after a week and we’ve been talking a variety of things: differences in culture between America and China, plans for the future, how we spent our lives in the past, favorite television shows, etc. Yes, all in Chinese! I think that my colloquial skills have improved quite a bit. And to think that coming into China, I thought I would say “Wo bu hui shuo zhongwen” (I don’t speak Chinese) half the time. 

My classmates and I ordered a bunch of food at the café thinking we were treating our tutors. When it was time for the tutors to go, my classmates and I decided to stay there to do our homework. Five minutes later, the tutors pop out of nowhere and say that our bill has been taken care of… and then they go. I think we all forgot about how slick the Chinese are when it comes to paying for the bill. We feel a little bad, but hopefully next time we will win the battle for the bill. I come up with plans in preparation for the future battles, like saying that I need to use the restroom… -evil laugh-.

We do our homework and then at 7 PM we have a speaker presentation by a lawyer that works for an NGO. He advocates freedom of speech and talks about issues his organization is working on solving, like food safety, anti-discrimination, and public interest law. It was interesting hearing from him and he gave me more insight on predominant issues in China. After this presentation, I go back to work on that pile of homework and I also study for a dictation tomorrow. I don’t think I am going to get much sleep tonight either, but tomorrow we will be embarking on a trip to Anhui, so there’s something to look forward to!