So today just happens to be the end of my sixth week here in China. I thought I’d offer up some reflections of my stay here:

Sickness, ups and downs, cold weather

While I wouldn’t characterize my experience here as being negative, restlessness, pressure, and slight depression would be appropriate adjectives (or nouns) to describe my overall mood since coming here. A big contributing factor has been the fact that I’ve been continuously off and on sick since the fourth day I’ve been here. I first heard about this program when I was doing my junior year of college abroad in 1998, and I’d been wanting to do this ever since. After applying to and getting accepted last spring, and especially after the program (in China) got delayed by the semester in Hawaii, I’ve built up a lot of aspirations, goals, and hopes of what I would get out of the program during my “year” in China. It’s hard to go after what you’ve been anticipating for a long time when you’re in sick or half-sick states.

In fact, most everyone (at least the foreign students) have been sick to varying degrees since we’ve arrived. For that reason, there are a lot of bugs floating around. Our immune systems are just not used to the environment here, including the relatively high levels of pollution, the food, and a multitude of other factors, and probably especially since coming from Hawaii, where the air was clean, and it was always warm and sunny. I’ve been feeling a lot better actually these last few days, probably due in no small part to my second set of antibiotics I’m taking (thanks Dad!). The weather doesn’t help either. The temprature her in Nanjing has been going through wild mood swings, being sunny and warm one day, and being almost freezing and rainy the next.

Work has been kinda light, and I’ve been off and on productive (it’s hard to be productive when you’re sick). I get depressed when there’s a lot that I want to do, and I’m not productive. My Chinese still needs a lot of work, which requires a lot of initiative on my part. I’ve wanted to get out into the community more, but that’s difficult when your language is not that good, and you feel like crap.

I’m getting a good handle on my day to day tasks and activities, and a I’m making progress on a lot of my initiatives. My big point of stress right now is on the job front, finding a summer internship, making contacts, and thinking about a career path, all of which I have not been doing, at all.

On the whole, things are on the up-and-up. As I said, I’m back on top of my stuff, the weather is getting better, flowers are starting to bloom. I have a break in a week, when I get to see Dad and Dawn – and Amy is coming in less than a week and a half now J

China
China has gone through dramatic changes. You read that everywhere, but I think you really need to be here, and come back, to really understand the extent of that statement.

The last time I spent any appreciable time here in China was 1998. In the 5 and a half years since, China is a completely different place. When I was last here, almost nobody owned cars. Roads were mostly empty, save the taxies, busses, a couple of tractors from the countryside, and I believe I once saw a cow on the third ring road of Beijing. Now there are cars everywhere, and nobody seems to know how to drive. There are more late-model BMW’s, Mercedes, Volkswagens, than your comparable mid-sized US city. China recently surpassed the United States in severity of income disparity (according to the Gini statistic), and it’s really starting to show. There’s a sense of style here now. Before people either dressed in Communist cultural-revolution style gear, poorly-made suits/dresses, or poor imitation of “stylish” clothing. It’s no Tokyo, Japan yet, but people here are starting to have a sense of style, and some of it admittedly looks not too shabby. Really, that’s just scratching the surface. The whole feel of the place is different.

Nanjing
I first came to Nanjing the spring of 1998. It was my favorite city in China when I last came. It was a small city, narrow tree lined streets, calm and quiet (for Chinese standards), and was, well, chill. This is not the city I live in today.

Apparently a few years ago, the new mayor, in a modernization program, decided to widen all the major roads, knocking down all the storefronts and trees lining the streets. Together with the continuous construction of modern tall buildings virtually throughout the city, Nanjing now has a small-town-trying-to-be-a-big-city feel. It’s a small town forced to try to be a modern big city but failing (mind you, that the population of Nanjing is 6.5 million, approximately that of NYC, but it’s still considered a mid-sized city, and really should feel that way). There’s posh shopping malls now, and neon lights everywhere.

Shanghai and Beijing


The two out-of-town trips I’ve taken since I’ve been here was one weekend in Shanghai, and one weekend in Beijing. I don’t like Shanghai. I don’t like Shanghai in a similar way to how I don’t like New York. It’s too big, too crowded, to chaotic, and too confusing. The constant construction, much like Nanjing, makes it seem like an incomplete city, a half-finished city. This actually is a problem in every city. Nanjing is the worst, because there’s relatively more construction in a smaller area, so there’s more that’s in a half-finished state. Shanghai has quite a bit too, but is a bigger city too.


Beijing I really enjoyed when I went back. There’s probably equally as much construction, but it’s such a huge city, area-wise, that the ratio of under-construction buildings to buildings not under construction is much smaller, so I felt more stability and regularity when I was there. In Beijing, there also seems to be a healthier balance between the new modern and shiny, and the old and traditional. The one thing that really bothered me about Beijing, though, was the ex-pat scene. Possibly because where we hung out, but the ex-pats I saw were predominately students, who seemed to be in China only so they could get cheap beer, act stupid and inappropriately, and feel like they own the place because they’re white and rich. Anyways, that’s a story for another day.

Anyways, that’s an overall broad sweep of my time here. I’ll try to write more specifics and stories as they come along. I hope everybody who is reading this, especially my friends and family, are all doing well. You know I love all you guys.