Light Fellowship End of Program Report

Note:

For any future Light Fellows reading this final report on IUP, please first read my midterm report found here: http://tothemiddlekingdom.blogspot.com/2010/12/iup-midterm-report.html

The midterm report contains a lot of basic (but important) information about IUP (academic structure, housing, etc) that is not repeated here because my assessment of these particular aspects of the program have not changed much throughout the spring term. This report mostly contains additional thoughts about the program and life in the program not covered in the midterm report.

Electives

For higher level students, IUP offers a number of elective classes.  I found that the IUP electives made for a great complement to the core textbook sequences.  IUP offers electives in a wide range of areas (business, law, film, conversational/idiomatic Chinese, etc).  I took classical Chinese and early 20^th century Chinese literature, two gems of the program.  Although I had no pragmatic reason for taking these courses, in some ways, they became highlights of my entire Chinese-learning career.

Classical Chinese turned out to be a very valuable and enjoyable class in ways I had not expected.  In contrast to the fast-paced, high-volume vocabulary approach of the core Mandarin classes, Classical Chinese was taught through slow detailed analysis of grammar and characters.  Every phrase and every sentence was a new puzzle to crack.  I immensely enjoyed this careful analytical approach, and soon found myself applying it to modern Chinese, especially when I would encounter phrases in books and newspapers that appeared to have been taken from Classical Chinese.  My basic understanding of Classical Chinese has also helped my ability to interpret chengyu, the (usually) four-character idioms taken directly from Classical Chinese stories.  Classical Chinese turned out not only to be a language class, but also a culture class.  Studying Classical Chinese inevitably entails learning the ancient Chinese states, capitals, sages, weapons, drinking vessels, and other aspects of ancient China’s rich cultural, political, and social fabric.  Regardless of the veracity of the stories, it was gratifying to learn the same stories that Chinese students have studied for generations.

The course on early twentieth-century Chinese literature also provided some contrast to the core Chinese classes at IUP.  In this class we studied classic short stories by authors like Lu Xun and Ye Shengtao.  This literature class, like the Classical Chinese class, was yet further exposure to the materials many Chinese middle and high school students read each year.  Although much of the vocabulary used in the stories was antiquated and not especially useful for communicating in modern Chinese, the stories offered priceless glimpses into China’s past.  It was the detailed images of a pub in “Old Beijing,” or the shipping docks in an impoverished rural rice-growing village that made the stories, and consequently the class, so memorable for me.  For anyone planning to attend IUP and has the chance to take these two classes (most likely anyone attending IUP for a year), I strongly recommend it.  These are the classes that make all the huffing and puffing through programs like PiB and HBA worthwhile.

Cailiao

In addition to elective classes, IUP gives advanced students (those who have completed Sixiang yu Shehui) the chance to design their own course (cailiao), using materials of their choice.  For one of these classes, I chose to read a Chinese version of Scientific American.  There’s a certain amount of overhead (in terms of time and effort) that goes into designing a course – choosing articles, creating vocabulary lists, etc. – so in that sense, self-designed classes may not be as efficient as courses using pre-fab textbooks.  However, I discovered that the ability to choose articles and vocabulary specifically tailored to one’s interests and level, respectively, is more than enough to compensate for this inefficiency.  It was exciting for me to read science articles in Chinese – an activity truly at the intersection of two of my greatest interests!  And other people at IUP designed classes tailored to their interests – economics, law, international relations, etc.  There is essentially no limit to the different possibilities to the self-designed classes.  The only caveat is that these courses tend only to work well when students are self-motivated and enthusiastic about their topic.

Housing Options

I’m writing about the IUP housing options because unlike most Light-approved programs, IUP does not directly provide housing.  There’s a certain amount of thought and effort that most students put in to finding their housing, and where one lives during IUP can largely define one’s IUP experience, so I thought I’d share my own experiences and opinions about this important process.  IUP students have three housing options:  Tsinghua foreign student dorms, host families, and off-campus apartments.

I didn't live in the foreign student dorms at Tsinghua, but from what I heard they’re quality is mediocre to OK.  The biggest problem I think people run into living in the dorms is that they’re inconveniently located for everything apart from IUP classes.  Tsinghua has a very large campus, only a small portion through which are cabs allowed to drive, and no portion through which buses may drive.  Most social activities (with or without other IUP students) take place outside of the Tsinghua campus, and those are less convenient to attend while living on campus, although the inconvenience did not seem to prevent those people living on campus from attending.  On the flip side, there were many extracurricular events at Tsinghua in the evenings that I might have attended if I were living on campus.  In short, there are few places where getting to on-campus and off-campus activities are both convenient.  If your highest priority is integrating into the Tsinghua campus and student life there, the foreign student dorms are perhaps a better choice.  However, to a certain extent, that choice comes at the expense of convenient access to all the social, cultural, and culinary offerings outside Tsinghua’s walls.  It is by no means an absolute decision between one or the other.  It is just a matter of relative ease of access.

IUP has connections with a certain number of host families in Beijing.  Usually emails describing the available host families come out one at a time, and I think students enrolled in IUP can claim them mostly on a first-come first-serve basis.  From what I’ve observed, living with an IUP host family can be a high-risk/high-payoff decision.  Some host families are inconveniently located.  Some people have no privacy from the children in their host family.  Some host families cook for you, and some don’t.  Some host families expect you to tutor their children.  Some host families consist of a single person letting you live in a spare bedroom.  I know people who have had bad experiences with their homestay, but I also know people who have had fantastic experiences with their homestay, and their spoken Chinese is all the better for it.  Living with a host family may be like taking on an entire commitment – possibly well worthwhile, but also something to think over carefully.  I don’t want to sound too negative about the IUP host families here – I think most people had overall good experiences with their host families.  It’s important, however, to find out as much as possible about your host family’s situation and expectations (talk to the former IUP student living there!) before signing up.

I chose to live in an apartment off campus, which is usually what most IUP students choose to do.  I wanted to have Chinese roommates, though, so I jumped when I saw an email from an IUP teacher looking for a third roommate to join her and her other roommate, a Chinese woman working at Google.  The arrangement worked out very well, and was a good compromise for me between the cultural experience of a host family and the convenience of having one’s own apartment.  Once the program mailing list is up and running (usually several weeks before the start of the term), there are also opportunities to search for housing with other future IUPers.  If you're looking to rent your own apartment, it's best to wait until you arrive in Beijing to look at apartments in person.  IUP has a helpful guide booklet about renting apartments in Beijing.

As an IUP student, finding housing can be a bit of a hectic and stressful process, but most people usually wind up in arrangements they are happy with, and most housing decisions can be changed if need be.

Final Result

Spending a year at IUP and in China has helped my Chinese to an unimaginable extent.  One of the most gratifying aspects of this improvement was the realization that I could finally read “real Chinese” at a reasonable rate and comprehension level.  Newspaper articles, books, short stories, and most other written communication forms are within my grasp.  The most direct evidence of this change was a tiny magazine of short stories I bought in the beginning of the year – stories I struggled with for hours in August 2010 I could breeze through by May 2011.  This is not to say I now know all of the characters and words I encounter when reading, but that my comprehension of characters and words has reached a threshold that enables reading for pleasure at a good comprehension rate.  (It was very exciting to discover I was able to read my way through the first Harry Potter book and 1984 in Chinese!  I am now working my way through and The Stories of the Sahara, a collection of short autobiographical stories by the Taiwanese author San Mao.)

In terms of spoken communication, IUP was also tremendously helpful.  It was difficult for me to gauge my progress in my own spoken Chinese because it was so incremental.  By the end of the year, though, I felt much more confident in conversations than at the beginning of the year.  Part of this increased confidence was due to greatly increased listening comprehension.  The vocabulary load at IUP is quite high, and even if I wound up incorporating only ten percent of the material into my actively used lexicon, a much higher percent was absorbed into my lexicon of words I understand passively.  At the beginning of IUP, I still frequently had difficulty understanding what Chinese people who were not my teachers were saying to me in conversation.  My listening comprehension is still very far from perfect, but this problem has greatly diminished.

Overall, I am very pleased with the progress IUP has enabled me to make in Chinese.  I now feel that IUP has brought me to a level that will allow me maintain and improve my Chinese on my own, a level where use of the language is more a pleasure than a struggle.  I thank the Light Fellowship and IUP for enabling me to pursue Chinese language at this level and for this duration.  These experiences have profoundly enriched my interests and expanded my modes of thinking.  It is indubitable that these acquired skills and experiences will play a large role in shaping my future.

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Module III Classes

Today concluded the first week of spring semester classes at IUP.  If this week has been in any way representative of what’s in store for this module, the next seven weeks will be a challenge, but in a refreshing and rewarding way.  The topics of my classes have started to turn from issues in every-day life and society to more academic topics.  For example, my main textbook, 学术中文漫步 (A Stroll through Academic Topics in Chinese), is a collection of real lectures given by Chinese professors in a range of fields.  It’s a fun textbook because not only are the lessons interesting in their own right, the vocabulary and sentence structures are also quite useful for discussing abstractions.

What’s even more exciting for me is my cailiao (individualized) class. Twice a week, I select a new article to read from the Chinese translation of Scientific American (“科学美国人”).  It’s a class I always feel motivated to put effort into, because I’m always reading articles that I’ve selected (and, naturally, am interested in). It’s also partly the excitement of reading “real” and up-to-date materials that makes this class so refreshing.  The topics I’ve selected range from chimpanzees and Jane Goodall, to internet freedom, to predictions of how video games will change our lives.  One night while reading the Yale Daily News, I stumbled across an article about New Haven’s recent acquisition of dynamically priced parking meters.  This was essentially the same topic of the article I had read in Scientific American earlier that day in Chinese – complete with references to the same scientists!  It’s no incredible accomplishment, but it still made for an exciting and satisfying realization, nonetheless.  The other aspect of the class I like is that, since my teacher knows I’m interested in math and science, she will frequently seize tangents in our conversation to teach me simple, but highly useful, mathematical or scientific terms, like “inversely proportional,” “multi-dimensional,” or “solid/liquid/gaseous state.”

On another note, I went to Hong Kong a few weeks ago.  I have lots to say about the trip, so I will try to write a post on that in the near future.

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Module II: Adventures in South Korea and Classical Chinese

South Korea

In November, I traveled to Korea with my friend Krystal, a friend from Yale who is studying at Renmin Daxue (just a few subway stops away from me) for the year. In Seoul, we stayed in a cozy hostel run by an adorable middle-aged Korean woman who helped us find our way around. My immediate impression of Seoul was this is China 2.0. In terms of road conditions, traffic moves mostly within marked lanes. The vehicles that occupy the roads are quite similar to those you would find in any American city. There is a notable lack of bicycles, three-wheeled vehicles, motorized bicycles, overloaded carts, and the plethora of other not-pedestrian-yet-not-quite-car traffic that so characterizes Chinese roads. I also found that public restrooms more resemble western bathrooms, with flushing toilet bowls in favor of the squat toilets native to China. The subway, I soon discovered, is mercifully spacious and uncrowded, with an extensive network of lines and stops that boggled my mind. The tap water is drinkable and served at every meal. People don’t spit all over the place as if swallowing their own saliva would somehow harm their health, and sanitation in restaurants, as far as I could tell, is reasonably high. Though poverty certainly exists in Seoul, I rarely came by any evidence of it. I hesitate to bring such subjective and judgmental words as “civilized” and “cultured” into this discussion, but suffice it to say, the most notable difference between Seoul and Beijing, as far as a western visitor is concerned, is the presence (or lack) of those characteristics common to cities in most wealthy and developed countries. (And similarly, the presence or lack of those features common to most cities in developing countries.)

Fortunately, I adjusted to the shock of being in a developed Asian country very quickly. Krystal and I had a great time exploring the city, visiting palaces, meandering bustling commercial alleyways and hopping student neighborhoods, admiring block upon block of gorgeous lit lanterns (for Seoul’s annual lantern festival), and absorbing the general atmosphere of excited preparation in the days before hosting the G20 Summit.

The culinary delights of South Korea were not lost on us either. Although we frequently were forced to order items off menus literally at random, I cannot remember eating a single dish I did not like. Without specific knowledge of ingredients or preparation style (which we were helpless to communicate), it is very difficult to convey the different kinds of foods we encountered, but I will try anyway. On our first night, our random pointing brought us a brothy soup filled with many different large pieces of spongy tofu and fish-flavored chunks, which our waitress promptly cut up with a pair of scissors. We also got large tortilla-esque dish covered in a tuna salad-esque spread, topped with French onion ring-esque flakes. It tasted like none of those. On the street, we ate battered and fried vegetables similar to Japanese tempura, sticky rice cylinders covered in the sweet red sauce universal to Korean cuisine, and a pancake-like dessert with a gooey cinnamon sugar or green tea filling. Of course, we indulged in Korean barbecue (duck and beef bulgogi) which was, unsurprisingly, better than the Korean barbecue restaurants sprinkled throughout Wudaokou (my neighborhood in Beijing). (For the uninitiated, Korean barbecue is kind of like Hibachi, minus the acrobatics.) A friend of Krystal’s living in Seoul introduced us to a kind of curry chicken also cooked at the table, followed by a spicy cheesy fried rice. This was perhaps my favorite of all the foods we tried. We were also happy to discover that the 2010 kimchee shortage seemed to have eased by the time we arrived. (The Koreans swallowed their pride and started importing the cabbage from China.) The most memorable meal, however, was on our last night when we gave in to curiosity and ate at one of the many restaurants in Seoul that proudly display all manner of sea creature in tanks in the front window. Playing it safe, we ordered a squid and an eel, but neglected to specify our preferred form of preparation, falsely assuming the cook would just pick one we’d like well enough. Our order came out very fast. A plate of suspiciously glistening squid tentacles. We slowly realized these tentacles were still moving! I poked one gently with a chopstick and it wiggled. Then Krystal, upping the level of experimentation, took her fork and stabbed a tentacle, which proceeded to writhe as if in pain. The tentacles were fascinating, but neither one of us was quite prepared to eat food that was still protesting as it went down. So we sent the plate back to be cooked, and had a more or less normal dinner from there out.

Of all the activities we did while in South Korea, the one that will stay with me for the rest of my life was our trip to the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), which took us right up to the border with North Korea at Panmunjom, where the 1953 armistice agreement was signed. At the Joint Security Area, where current day talks between the two sides take place, we were technically able to step across the border into North Korean territory. It was an incredibly eerie experience, standing on “the most heavily guarded border in the world.” The fact that busloads of tourists visit the DMZ every day doesn’t make the experience any less real, or necessarily more safe, even. The entire day, at some points more than others, we were under very strict orders. Do not stand on the bus. Do not take pictures. Do not talk. Do not point, lest a North Korean soldier think you are pointing a gun. Do not wave or make exaggerated expressions, lest you become the object of North Korean propaganda. In retrospect, it is terrifying to think that while at the JSA, I could have been shot just for breaking into a dance. (It was probably a wise decision to only inform my parents of the day’s activity once it was over.) It was only a few weeks after our tour that the worst hostilities between the North and South in decades broke out. Nobody knows the future of North and South Korean relations, but it seems likely that, in the distant future, for reasons either good or bad, having straddled the border of these two countries will seem unimaginable.

Before flying to Seoul, I took on the task of learning the Korean writing and phonetic system, with, at best, partial success. The process, though, just hit me over the head with the contrast between the learning curves of Chinese and Korean, at least in the very beginning stages. One could argue about how Korean has more difficult grammar and whatnot, but when it comes to reading, there is no comparison. After just a few days, I could slowly sound out (probably not very accurately) pretty much any written Korean word. Of course, this is not very helpful when one doesn’t know the meaning of the word one is pronouncing, but it wasn’t a complete waste either. Korean has many borrowings from both English and Chinese, so, with a little bit of context, I was able to figure out the meanings of some words I could sound out (Coca Cola, bank, crispy crunch, etc.) I’d like to learn more Korean, but for now, it’s probably wisest for me to just focus on Chinese.

Ever since this trip, I have had a heightened interest in Korean culture, history, and current day affairs. If any readers have recommendations for books relating to any of these aspects of Korea, please leave a comment! (I have a kindle, so I can probably download it.)

Classical Chinese

At the start of IUP’s second module (of four), I elected to study classical Chinese. It’s hard to describe what classical Chinese actually is, since English really has no equivalent. According to Wikipedia (give me a break, it’s my blog), “Classical Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese.” In fact, classical Chinese was always different from spoken Chinese, even at the time many of the great classical texts were written. It was only ever used and understood by scholars, but partly for this reason, knowledge of classical texts was able to be passed down even as the spoken language evolved. In spite of its lofty origins, classical Chinese is still highly relevant to anyone who is serious about learning Chinese, or gaining a deeper understanding of Chinese culture, history, and philosophy. Many of the stories we read in this class are stories every Chinese person knows, whether they have studied it formally in school or not. Each story reveals something about Chinese thought, whether Confucian, Daoist, or Legalist. The titles and terms of address are indirectly informative about traditional Chinese social structures and relations. Most importantly, there are vestiges of classical Chinese found all over modern Chinese. Set idioms in Chinese (called chengyu) all derive from classical Chinese. Knowing the grammar of classical Chinese, and the meaning of different characters in their classical context is extremely helpful in interpreting the meanings of different chengyu and understanding formal written Chinese, especially the style of writing found in Chinese newspapers.

Aside from these benefits, I’ve found classical Chinese to just be an enjoyable class on the whole. It really serves to break the monotony of the modern Chinese classes, which all have the same basic structure. With the greater emphasis on grammar, I also get to exercise a different part of my brain. In modern Chinese, besides sentence word order (S-V-O), and memorizing some different sentence structures, there is not much grammar to worry about. In classical Chinese, we focus on a lot of nitty-gritty grammar rules, which can be an analytical challenge and fun change of pace.

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