The Stranger

Last weekend after our midterm exam, we headed out for the mid-summer trip. You could choose to go either to Xi’An, Shaolin Temple, or Shan Xi. All the teachers said that if you hadn’t gone to Xi’An, then you should definitely choose that option, but if you’ve already been then there’s really not anything more to see. What I think they meant to say was that there are few tourist attractions in Xi’An other than the 兵马俑，or the Terracotta Army, and since we were only going to spend a weekend there it was extremely unlikely that we would see anything but the tourist attractions.

We headed out on Friday night on an eleven hour train ride in a hard sleeper. In China there are three types of trains: soft sleeper, hard sleeper, and hard seats. Price varies accordingly with comfort level. I traveled in a soft sleeper last spring break with my father when we came to put some family to rest.

As any DSICP student will tell you, the mid-program train ride out is extremely fun and silly. Given that everyone just finished a two hour written and oral exam on a semester’s worth of Chinese, the copious amounts of not-so-secretly smuggled alcohol onboard, and the fact that there are six bunks per sleeping section, things are bound to get crazy. It was a great opportunity to get to know some of the other kids in third and second year. Stories were exchanged, heartfelt discussions took place, and euchre was played.

In Xi’An, unfortunately the entire trip was arranged as part of a tour-bus. So, we would drive out to a place, stay for a couple hours, get back on the bus, drive for a couple hours, to go another place, stay for a couple hours, get back on the bus, eat at a buffet style restaurant, get back on the bus, drive to another place….(repeat). It was much more structured and touristy than the life I’ve been living in Beijing for the last month, so it was a little disappointing. However, from the perspective of our guide, I understand that our unflexible schedule was to keep everyone together and to prevent anyone from getting lost.

This brought up an interesting point. Although all of us have taken at least a year and a half of Chinese by that time, in Xi’An we were a liability. If someone had gotten lost or left behind, the tour company worried that they would press charges. Although we are all college students, legally adults, in some senses I do think we are children that need to be looked after. We are picky and 挑三拣四 about food, living conditions, classes, transportation, entertainment…

Our guide was very kind and accommodating to us vegetarians, and I couldn’t help but feel a little bit bad for making him go to so much trouble for our diets. I think the bigger picture behind the tour-bus experience was that although we are students staying for two months in China, we are still very much foreigners in this country. The hotel we stayed at, the restaurants we ate at, the show we went to on Saturday night are all well above the price ranges of actual Chinese people. The little luxuries and amenities that we enjoy as a result of being American and living on American dollars I think alienates us from what it is actually truly like to live in China. Although (almost) everyone is making an effort to really learn the language, many students are also here to party in a developing country with currency from a developed country.

This kind of expat culture, which I am certainly not exempt from, is a bit elitist and in my opinion a bit arrogant. Instead of finding commonality and common cause with the Chinese people, we are, by our own actions and others, elevated to a privileged pedestal from which we freely criticize the mistakes we see around us without ever having to worry about being truly effected by any of them. Kids complain about the pollution here, but then turn up the air conditioning to the point of wearing sweaters in their rooms and don’t take the little extra effort to recycle their water bottles. They want to take pictures of themselves in a beautiful mosque in the Muslim Quarter of Xi’An, but then refuse at the gate to wear the shawl given them to cover their arms and shoulders, which are all exposed in a spaghetti-strap blinding-bright pink dress. (There is one particular girl whose total disrespect and spoiled behavior in China toward her teachers and everyone around her really irks me).

I guess our main purpose isn’t to raise the 生活水平of the Chinese people, but I would like to think that sometime in the future I can count myself as equal, not higher or lower, than the 人民 of China.

(I had planned to write about the things we saw in Xi’An, but I think this post didn’t turn out so badly.)