My Year Studying Abroad in China: Part 1

One of the challenges of getting a degree abroad, or studying abroad during university, is the fear of going too far beyond your comfort zone.  Thorough research and high rankings alone will not settle this fear for you; an international university will always have more unknowns than a local one. 

So ask yourself, “Do I want an adventure, or not?”  I picked my American university, Mount Holyoke College, largely on the basis of its prestige, internationalism, and options for studying abroad in China.  As the oldest member of the esteemed Seven Sister’s Colleges, and sister school to the Ivy League, I would get all the benefits of a large research university but in a more intimate liberal arts college.  If studying abroad in China proved to be successful, then I planned to get a graduate degree from both America and Europe; if it was not successful, I would stay in China for only one semester, and get a graduate school degree only from the USA.

I started learning Mandarin, Chinese my Freshman year of university, and after two years I was, unfortunately, not very good.  I was too shy to ask for help, and painfully slow at speaking and reading Mandarin in a class of all Asian-heritage students.  Everyone tried to help me, but I had hit a plateau.  So rather than giving up I enrolled in an exchange program at Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) in Beijing, China for a year, with the notion that if I was surrounded by Chinese people and forced to operate daily in Mandarin I would get better, faster. 

Everyone was more impressed by the boldness of this decision than I was.  In fact it was not until I was sitting at Chicago O’Hare International Airport waiting to catch my flight that I realized the magnitude of what I had chosen to do.  How was I going to survive??  My Mandarin was just not good enough; I would be struggling every day for a year!!  (This is what can be called the pre-departure panic stage—most people have a moment like this before leaving semi-permanently for a new country.)

The departure gate was packed with Chinese and Japanese people—and with well over a hundred people milling about, that was a strange sight for a major American airport in the middle of the country.  To be fair, they could have all been Asian-American.  The issue though, is that I was unaccustomed to seeing only one ethnic group in an American setting, in this case “Asian”– normally there were at least a handful of ethnic groups in your sightline. 

Just when I was about to hyperventilate, I saw this 20-something, bald guy in a Hawaiian t-shirt, sunglasses and flip flops strolling casually up to my gate.  Then he saw the crowd waiting for the plane, and I saw the same thoughts of faltering confidence running through his mind until he happened to look my way and calmed down.  He sat down heavily next to me, his eyes still on the crowd around us, and said in a thick Southern accent, “Hey, I’m Brandon.  Please tell me you are also headed to Beijing…” 

As it turned out we were on the same program and moved quickly from strangers to the best of friends by the time we had touched down in Tokyo and finally Beijing, sixteen hours, and many time zones later.  Experiencing that first rush of hundreds of people speaking around us in Mandarin was very intense—it felt like we were the only outsiders in Beijing. 

Beijing is the London or New York of Asia—very intense and exciting for new arrivals, and you really ought to know the language before coming over.  The difference was that when I struggled to communicate my thoughts and questions, Chinese people waited politely for me to finish, and tried desperately to understand what I was trying to say.  And then all of sudden, a few weeks into my stay in Beijing, I was speaking quickly, and people could easily understand me. I felt as though I had finally shaken the monkey off my back, and with a little confidence it just kept getting better and better.

Read on for Part 2 to find out what happened in that year abroad in China.