There and Back Again

After a year and a half of no posts, I'm finally headed back to Beijing. My flight isn't for another week, but because I am feeling bored and particularly nostalgic I have decided to revive my old blog. Many thanks to those who kept track of my personal-growth-through-rambling-idiocy last time around, and an even bigger thank you to the Light Fellowship staff for forcing me to record my adventures in the first place. I was incredibly honored and a little confused to find that after all this time my blog still gets more than one view per month, until I realized that Light applicants are more or less obligated to read through former fellows' accounts of their experiences before applying. And then if their parents are anything like mine, I'm sure they get excited, too, and want to get their hands on anything the Light Fellowship website has to offer. To all those current and future Light Fellows who may happen upon this blog, I hope you find it helpful, and I apologize that the content of my posts this summer will not be about what it's like to attend HBA.

I am not returning to China to study the language. I took another semester of upper-level Mandarin in the fall of my sophomore year before succumbing to the feeling that non-immersive study of a foreign language is simply not worth the time. I was still putting in the hours necessary to memorize characters and prepare for tests, but without a single opportunity to practice what I'd learned, my retention plummeted and I felt my progress slow to a crawl. A lot of my peers who'd attended immersion programs shared that feeling, and within a semester or two most had put their Mandarin studies on hold.

Instead, I'm going to be interning for a small, American-owned merchant banking firm called JFP Holdings. I don't know that much about what I'll actually be doing on a day-to-day basis, but I do know the company works with both American and Chinese clients, and for that reason I'm really excited to be contributing in some small way to the fabled economic exchange between the two countries. I'll write more about the details of my position when I know them, but for now I don't want to speculate too much.

The most obnoxious part of gearing up for another trip to Beijing has been the reactions I get from people who can't understand why I would want to spend a summer alone and half way around the world. No matter how hard I try to explain it, many simply can't overcome their entrenched understanding of China as the most alien of places, and it's easy to see why: American children digging on the beach know of China first and foremost as the place they'd reach if they journeyed through the center of the Earth. Academics, pundits, and professors make it a point to emphasize the differences between East and West in nearly every facet of life. The 2008 Olympic Games brought this kind of talk to the forefront of the public consciousness, to the extent that tropes about China's economic progress have become hackneyed and meaningless. 

It's easy to write a blog that panders to this type of audience, especially during your first experience in a foreign place. But now that I'm heading back for round two, my goal will be to share a story that paints China the way I see it: as just another place to visit, explore, or work. My hope is that anyone who follows my blog this summer will walk away from the experience as I have, with a slightly more open mind.

再见

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