Through the Hole in the Earth

When I was little, I used to joke about digging a hole in the earth and ending up on the other side of the world. I may as well have just entered a parallel universe via a hole in the earth after 24 hours of traveling and 12 hours of wandering around this city in amazement.  Night is day and day is night.  All of a sudden, I am the foreigner on spectacle, rather than being the American walking past confused tourists blocking my path to class in Harvard Yard. Water which I usually drink cold is served to me boiling hot.

I love Chengdu. The campus is gorgeous and I doubt I will ever get over the wonder of it all. The north gate (“bei men”) is straight out of a movie.

And one need not wander long to find dozens and dozens of delicious – and extremely cheap – restaurants.    It helps that our accommodations are the standard of a hotel and that I have my American group to walk around with.  Even so, I have spent the day adjusting to my new surroundings. It is just the right amount of adventure; I am not so shocked that I want to dig a hole right back where I came from, but shocked enough that I am being pushed to expand my comfort zone.

The culture shock began even before arriving in China. On my flight to Chengdu, I arrived at the gate and could instantly find the other students on my trip because we were pretty much the only non Chinese people on the flight. I wasn't able to communicate at all with the man next to me, and so he elbowed me when he needed to get out of his seat. I also observed quite a sight, literally termed “exercise gymnastics.” In the middle of the flight, the lights suddenly switched on (I had been sleeping) and the TV started playing what seemed to be an exercise video. It consisted of a woman doing various stretches while sitting down in her seat, including moving her head from side to side and stretching out her arms. Almost everyone on the flight did the stretches along with this video in their seats, in unison. I found the whole thing a bit ridiculous, but maybe that's just because it's unfamiliar. When I asked a Chinese student about this, he was surprised that other flights DON'T have exercise gymnastics! After all, you never move around on a long flight and so it makes some sense to stretch. I guess it's a matter of perspective.

The biggest shock is not speaking the language. Everywhere that I've travelled in the past has been touched enough by American/British culture so that I can get by with English.   Especially India.   Since getting here, however, I've found myself learning Mandarin phrases for a very practical reason – I want to know how to order from a menu, how much to pay the cashier (“jiu kuai”), and how to ask for directions. A few students in our group speak Mandarin very well, but I also hope to get by without them by the end of the program.

The other big shock is being on spectacle. Basically everywhere we go, people stare at us. One woman nearly crashed her bike because she was staring at me and my friend as she drove past and couldn't stop. Apparently even in a city of 20 million people, seeing a non ethnically Chinese person is rare. And if seeing one is rare, than seeing multiple must be an anomaly.  I understand, woman on the bike: two ethnically Indian looking girls in the middle of the sidewalk are about as rare as a pair of dancing ballerinas.