Senior+Project+Papers

Mike Huntington Senior Project Paper This morning I awoke in a cold sweat from an absolutely crazy dream. A few of my friends were in it, and some teachers were there too. As unbelievable as it sounds, I dreamt we all went to China together for two weeks, and we met a bunch of awesome Asian people who all wanted to take pictures with us and ate tons of strange food. While we were there, we met a girl named after Ronald Reagan, and we became best friends forever. At the end of the dream, I lost my passport and didn’t think I would be able to get out of the country until all of a sudden the teachers grew wings and flew into outer space to get a new one. I woke up right before we got on the plane to go home. Still reeling from this, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, shower, and think about the tricks my mind was playing on me. As soon as the hot water hit my face, however, I was visited by a revelation: it had all actually happened! It was all real, and it was arguably the most amazing experience of my life.

I can say with absolute honesty that nothing I’ve ever watched on television, read in a novel or textbook, or seen on the internet even came close to preparing me for what China would actually be like. Sure, people will tell you it’s dirty, smoggy, and communist, and there was no denying these three things as we stepped off the plane in Beijing to posters of Mao Zedong and a view of a hazed out sky that obscured objects only hundreds of feet in the distance on a typical day. When we first stepped out of the airport into that oppressive humidity, the pessimist in me had already been aggravated by a fourteen hour flight, and I began to think I was about to experience all of the negative things I’ve heard about the country first-hand. This first impression probably lasted from then until we boarded our mini-bus and met Reagan, the greatest person in the world. As soon as she’d politely introduced herself and begun to wax poetic on the history of the 6,800 square mile city she called home, I was in love, and I knew I was in for a totally different People’s Republic of China from what others had envisioned for me.

Here is a laundry list of the historical places I visited: Tian’anman Square, where the Chinese government massacred thousands of anti-communism protestors in 1989; the Forbidden City, home to the Ming dynasty emperors and their excessive amount of concubines; the site of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing; a hutong, which is the term for a tiny village community within Beijing that has its own cultures and adheres to its own set of rules; the Bell Tower in Xi’an; an army 8,000 strong of clay, kiln-fired soldier sculptures know as the Terracotta warriors; and finally, the Lotus gardens of the Tang Dynasty.

I may have missed a few places, but the essence of the trip was not at all in the dry facts about the country, which in this day and age anyone can easily commit to memory after looking them up on a computer from their bedroom in the American suburbs (and then proceed to talk your ear off about on a 14 hour international plane flight). Our odyssey through China was true immersion in the past, and perhaps more importantly, the absolute present of a country vastly different from and with a much longer history than our own. In the overcrowded Chinese capital city, we walked among throngs of people living impoverished but still dignified lives, and we witnessed streets utterly engulfed by the feisty entrepreneurial spirit of thousands of upstarts whose ideas and ambitions twisted together into beautiful, no-holds barred, fully functional chaos. Spicy food restaurants, bars, souvenir shops, massage therapy spas, and countless other business endeavors stood shoulder to shoulder as they formed narrow alleyways and overlooked sunflower seed shell-littered sidewalks that quadrupled as thru-ways, bike paths, and parking spaces.

I’m convinced that no one who has ever said anything bad about China has met a native Chinese person in their homeland. Allow me to present a hypothetical situation: you, the reader, are suddenly feeling very friendly. You get in your car, and drive to the T stop in Braintree. As soon as you step on the train, you say hello to everyone. You get a few dirty looks, but no response. After getting off at Park Street, you start walking towards Boston Common, and on your way, you try to say hello to every passerby, and even attempt to start small talk with people who don’t look like they’re busy trying to get somewhere. Five minutes later, your knee is skinned because someone tripped you, your jaw is broken because you got elbowed in the face, and you feel generally terrible about humanity. China is different, especially in Beijing.

It may just have been because we were very obviously foreigners, but in Beijing nearly everyone will stop to say hello. Nearly everyone will stop to talk, and will try to help you if you’re in need, even if they don’t know a single word of English and you don’t know a single word of Chinese. We must’ve started at least three friendly conversations on those streets with groups of total strangers that only have one person among them with even the slightest bit of knowledge of the English language. It wasn’t quite the same in Xi’an, and we didn’t see enough of Shanghai outside of Wei-Yu High School to tell for sure, but from what I’ve seen, I like Beijing much more than I like Boston.

History is most interesting when told from the mouths of those it most directly affects. It may not have the same unbiased, pinpoint accuracy of a scholarly historians account, but that may, in fact, be a point in its favor. A complicated, well written passage in a textbook containing the phrase “the emperor had 3,000 wives,” can’t hold a candle to listening to our excitable tour guide/Beijing resident plugging away at the extravagant and wasteful ceremonies that were regularly organized by the emperor in the most beautiful and perfect broken English ever spoken, as we stand //in// the Forbidden City. Reading about the shear size of the Great Wall of China and about all of its turrets and the windows through which watchmen and archers kept a keen lookout for barbarian armies is fascinating for a moment, but actually standing on it on a clear, sunny day and looking to the right to see //all// of China, then to the left to see //all// of Mongolia is truly unforgettable, and the sweat broken and breath lost from climbing its steep, unforgiving ramps and stairs will never truly be washed off or regained.

Xi’an ended up being just as great, but in different ways. Xi’an is a bustling metropolis that seems to have evolved along the same path as New York, whereas Beijing feels like the larval form of a city that is poised to offer something new and different to the world. However, that same magic is present in Xi’an; it’s just buried a bit deeper. It’s most evident in the historical sites, many of which were built by the Tang Dynasty. The Wild Goose Pagoda though now teeming with camera-happy tourists, maintains its dignity as a place of Buddhist worship in both structure and serene atmosphere, and the Terracotta Warriors are an extraordinarily impressive monument to human intelligence and dexterity, despite being over two millennia old.

In other instances, we stumbled upon the charming, exotic side of the city by accident. At first glance, the street our hotel was on could easily be mistaken for a street in any large city in the U.S. if the signs were in English. However, walking down it brought a number of surprises. In between our hotel and another high-rise building was an alleyway narrow and unassuming enough to be overlooked. We decided to explore it one night, just for kicks, and were astonished to find it opened up into an intricately woven grid of streets with myriad competing shops all cramped together, as the odors from the many restaurants and vendors of different types of meat and dried fruit, equal parts delicious and repugnant, permeated throughout.

It is also important to note that I found the same faith in humanity in Xi’an as I did in Beijing, but it once again was hiding just below the surface. Admittedly, I left the bag containing my passport in a shop and some lowlife stole it. At that very moment I felt pretty down on myself, and everyone else. Then we paid a visit to the police station, and it seemed as if every cop in the building had taken an interest in my plight. A man who was apparently some sort of officer involved in filing reports like mine gave me a wide smile and said in sparse but understandable English “I love Americans!” and then said the name “Obama,” and accompanied it with the same happy, sincere grin and a thumbs up. They got the report in, then sped us on our way to getting me aboard our flight from Xi’an to Shanghai (with the help of Reagan ♥ ♥ ♥ and Sherry ♥).

Speaking of which, the loss of my passport taught me one of the most trying and powerful lessons I’ve learned in my entire life: DON’T LOSE YOUR PASSPORT. I think the hoops we had to jump through and the despairing moments we all endured are the most powerful reminder I’ll ever have of the importance of keeping your passport safe. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Dunne, Ms. Lee, Ms. McNeilly, Mr. Levinson, Reagan, and Sherry for all of your help. If it hadn’t been for your combined talents and indomitable spirit, I would’ve been doomed. You are all heroes to me.

Except for the somewhat anti-climactic last two days at Wei-Yu, our trip came to a phenomenal conclusion. The homestay portion was what mattered the most to me, and it didn’t disappoint in the least. I met three good friends that I hope to keep in touch with, and I saw some amazing places. It might’ve been better to attend the Shanghai World Expo earlier that week, but it still was a fun atmosphere to hang out with and get to know my hosts Tian Yu and Yao Zhen, despite the long lines. We went to Nanjing Road and saw the Bund that evening; a sight that I hope is in all of those cheesy “1000 places to visit before you die” books. I moved from the cramped apartment of Tian Yu’s family to the equally cramped apartment of Yao Zhen’s family that night, and although her parents didn’t speak English the way Tian Yu’s had, I was still treated with unprecedented hospitality.

The next day we visited a crowded Water Town, which looks like a miniature Venezia, and rode on a boat through the lazy canals, soaking in the beautiful weather and taking in the sights on either side of the water. That afternoon at lunch, I tried eel, and thoroughly disliked it, but can now tell people I’ve eaten //eel// in freaking //China// at parties. That Sunday ended with a trip up to the top of the Oriental Pearl, and a visit to a Karaoke bar with Tian Yu, Yao Zhen, her friend (whose English name is Ria), and the two tri-lingual German girls she was hosting (they spoke German, perfect English, and roughly conversational Mandarin). After dinner that night, we closed out the weekend with heartfelt goodbye hugs, an exchange of email addresses, and as shy Yao Zhen walked me back to my dorm in silence, I began to realize with great sorrow that my time in the Land of the Rising Sun was coming to an end.

I had such an amazing time in China, which is why it pains me so to bring up the one blemish for me. It tells me that we need to improve our communication with Wei Yu’s administration, Due to a string of misunderstandings between us, meaning the American students and faculty, and whichever department in the school was in charge of handling our exchange, we were pretty much trapped inside its electrified and barbed wire fences with nowhere to stay but our rooms during the last two days. The tedium was only broken by one 40 minute Kung Fu class the first day, and a 40 minute Chinese language class the next day, both of which contained no one besides the six of us Americans. We didn’t even get any instruction about meals, such as when or where to go for them.

This was the one element of the trip that truly left a bad taste in my mouth, and I’d like to wrap up with a suggestion for //our// school born of the overwhelmingly positive experience my friends and I had in the Orient: we need to start serious Chinese classes! I’m well aware that there’s already a few classes in the upper school, but I think Thayer should go even further. I might even be so bold as to claim it should take the place of Latin in the middle school in 6th grade as one of the three languages students are introduced to. Of course Latin would still be in option in 7-12, but Mandarin is such a prolific and useful language that I think America should be making a push to communicate with the people of China equal to the push they’re making to communicate with us. So many of them know English, but so few of us know Chinese, and especially during my homestay I felt as though I wasn’t doing my part to reach out to those people around me who were treating me with so much care and respect. This could be a huge sep for our country, and Thayer could be a pioneer in that regard. I know that sounds lofty, but it seems totally possible to me.

In closing, I cannot stress enough how great and culturally shocking an experience the China Trip was for me, and how much fun I had on it. Thanks again to Reagan and Sherry, all the chaperones, and all my friends, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing the latter two groups at graduation!