䷽小過 Small Surpassing. There will be progress and attainment in small affairs, but it will be advantageous to be firm and correct.

In this post, I look back at my time in China a month after I got back.

Since this won’t be structured chronologically like the last five posts, I’ll split this post into two parts: Goals, and general impressions of China. The later section will be most relevant to anyone trying to learn from my experiences.

Goals

Before I went to China in March 2018, I formulated three goals as a way to frame my time in the country:

1. Become comfortable speaking conversational Chinese with strangers
2. Form lasting relationships with some Chinese people
3. Learn to cook Chinese-style

While these were the primary goals, there were others too that I developed along the way:

• Learn about Chinese youth (16-25 y/o “gen z”) pop culture (music, TV, internet, slang, etc.)
• Learn about regional differences in China

I’ll go through these one-by-one. It’s hard to consider what the “successful completion of a goal” might look like so I’ll just put down my thoughts on how I did.

Comfortable Conversational Chinese with Strangers

I had to learn conversational Chinese, which required practicing vocabulary and actively listening to remember key conversation phrases. I was good enough at Chinese to survive and have limited conversations when I first arrived, but I improved rapidly.

As for becoming comfortable speaking Chinese with strangers, it required a mental shift in confidence. I had to become comfortable doing something I wasn’t extremely good at in a setting where a lot of people were paying attention to me. The phrasing of the goal might be confusing, but in my head this encompasses speaking conversational Chinese with non-strangers.

In the end, it really just took a lot of time and effort. There’s no getting around that. But it also took me finding opportunities to be thrown into these situations, like taking the initiative to join student organizations, getting in contact with friends to do something together, spend a night I would otherwise be alone at a dive bar talking with strangers, or starting conversations with randos that I might meet on the train.

Results: Compared to the beginning of my time in Nanjing, it went a lot better. Towards the end, I didn’t exhaust so many calories thinking about what I was saying, could respond quicker, learned how to work around gaps in my knowledge, and simply knew more vocab than before. This proficiency gave me confidence when talking to anyone, including strangers.

Relationships with Chinese People

The best thing I ever did in Nanjing was join AIESEC. I became vice minister but never remembered what the acronym stands for. The goal of the organization was to provide cross-cultural experiences to students, so it was a good way to meet globally-oriented, ambitious students from Nanjing University. I made a lot of friends here and met some of them outside of Nanjing.

The hard part now is keeping in touch! It’s so easy to meet up with people when you’re in the same few square kilometers, but now everybody is on the other side of the globe.

That all said, I definitely formed closer friendships with expats. Part of me feels regret since I went to China to learn Mandarin and should be maximizing my exposure to the language and culture, but over time I realized that as a lifetime member of a “western culture” you will go a bit insane if you don’t meet people that speak English. That, and they had more time than the hard-working Chinese students did!

Cooking, Chinese-Style

By Chinese style, I mean “how the Chinese do it.” This encompasses how they select food when shopping, cooking implements, technique, ingredients, seasonal dishes, and nutrition.

Most of the influence I’ve gotten from the food was how restaurant workers formed their menus and cooked food quickly to-order. This mostly means street vendors, noodle shops, and breakfast places.

Chinese Youth Culture

As a young guy myself, I was curious what other people my age were doing and what would be influencing the world in the next decades. I put myself in the shoes of a foreigner coming to the US for the first time. What would I consider youth culture in the US, and how would someone with limited English language and cultural proficiency discover it?

The first thing I did was install a bunch of social media apps on my phone. Weibo as a comparison to Twitter, Bilibili for Youtube, Douyin for Tik Tok, and iQiyi for Netflix.

I never really got into Weibo, but Bilibili, Douyin, and iQiyi helped me get a general overview, especially Douyin. It was here that I learned a lot of the more popular songs and memes, and even got some basic news. Kuaishou, the rural version of Douyin, also helped me understand what people outside of the cities found funny.

For my undergrad thesis, I wrote a paper on Chinese Hip-hop. This led me to stand around nearby universities and cold-interview random students about hip-hop. This led to some great conversations and artist recommendations.

Regional Differences

This was pretty hard for me to figure out. When I traveled to places like Sichuan or Beijing, I don’t think I had enough of a grasp on baseline Chinese culture to understand how people act differently. Food and language were easy enough to discern since they were straightforward sensory inputs, but the differences in social interaction are something I need to spend more time understanding if I go back.

Final Impressions

I loved living in a Chinese city. It feels dynamic and down-to-earth. Food is plentiful, things are closer together, public transport is convenient, and there is a sense of optimism and experimentation.

At the same time, you can see societal pressures making life harder for people beyond resource allocation: There seems to be more pressure on young people in terms of education, marriage, and jobs, and there’s a sense of rising nationalism that came with Xi Jinping’s extended stay as ruler of China. I never fully understood the mindset of the Chinese people and came out of it humbled and with more questions than when I started.

10/10 would do again