Study Abroad

This column appeared in the April 8 issue of the Daily Princetonian

Cairo, Egypt and New York, N.Y.: two of the biggest economic and cultural centers of the world. One represents thousands of years of Middle Eastern history, while the other symbolizes the height of American wealth and business enterprise. A million factors distinguish these two cities, and while it is nearly impossible to determine which one holds the key to their distinct identities, I believe I’ve discovered at least one that is central.

Continue reading "Cheap sunglasses, cab drivers and community in Cairo" »

This column appeared in the February 6 issue of the Daily Princetonian

Imagine waking up one morning and finding out that the internet is down in 70 percent of the country. And could be down for the next two weeks. No e-mail, AIM or facebook.com. Imagine that.

Continue reading "Culture shock in a Cairo supermarket" »

This column appeared in the February 20 issue of the Daily Princetonian

Since I am a Princetonian studying in Cairo, part of my mission here is to improve my Arabic. Arabic is one of Princeton’s most popular foreign languages, studied by Arab Americans, Wilson School students aspiring to be State Department officials and those who simply want to learn more about Arabic culture and history.

Continue reading "Learning Arabic as a first language" »

(Instead of studying for finals…)

I recently met some Chinese people I didn’t know before and got asked the usual inevitable question: “Ni shi na li ren?” As usual, it took me awhile to think of an answer. The problem with this question is that it doesn’t ask me where I am from, though that might be the closest English translation; it basically asks me for an adjective that would describe what region of China I would identify myself with. The correct answer to such a question would take the form: “I am Cantonese/Shanghainese/Tibetan/whatever province or city-ese.” Yet my usual answer is the cryptic and ungrammatical: “I was born in Guangzhou (Canton).”

I mean, under the traditional definition of “jia xiang (hometown),” my hometown should be my father’s hometown, so maybe I should answer Hubei? Yet I’ve only been to Hubei 3 times in my life, and I can’t and have never been able to speak the Hubei dialect. I have even consciously chosen NOT to live in Hubei before, so how can I identify with it? Should I say Cantonese then? I was born in Guangdong, and I lived in Guangdong the entire time I was in China. Yet I’m in Hong Kong right now, and to say that I am Cantonese means that I speak Cantonese. I don’t speak Cantonese. Had I never immigrated to the United States, perhaps when people ask me that question, I could honestly say I am Cantonese, but my mother is a Hakka from Guangdong and my father is from Hubei, and since I started living in the US 12 years ago, I have not been subjected to a lot of Cantonese influence. Though I can’t say I’m from Hubei or that I’m Cantonese, I can’t even say that I’m Hakka either. I mean, 3 weeks ago when I went to my mother’s cousin’s wedding was the first time I found out that rice cooked in ashtray-like clay bowls was a Hakka specialty.

It’s not that the Chinese are regional, since I noticed that when I first came to Princeton, people would also ask each other “where are you from?” expecting a state or a city in the US as the answer, and yet it is even easier for Americans to move from one region to another. (Though it might be easier for Americans to just say where they currently live since American regional cultural differences are a bit smaller than Chinese ones.) It’s just interesting that although we hear all the time nowadays about increasing globalization etc., but people still place such a great importance on regionalism.

If Taiwan were a province of China, long-time residents in Taiwan would speak Taiwanese. This may seem counter-intuitive, but if you think about it, it would also be true. I met a Taiwanese immigrant to the US when I arrived in Princeton, and one day, he said something really interesting to me. He told me, “I want to learn Taiwanese.” I didn’t attach much importance to it at the time, though I was surprised that he didn’t know it, but now I think it’s a reflection of the problems of identity, history, and politics in Taiwan.

Of course, this Taiwanese friend is descended from a “mainlander,” those people who fled to Taiwan after the the CCP soundly defeated the Nationalists. So some would say it’s understandable that he doesn’t know Taiwanese.

Wrong. Let’s look at my personal history as a comparison. My father is from Hubei province, and my mother comes from a Hakka family in Guangdong, so they spoke Mandarin at home. I was born in Guangzhou and lived until I was 5 in a college campus, where everyone spoke the official dialect, Mandarin. Yet even then, I understood Cantonese. After that, I moved to Zhanjiang and went to a public school there. After one month, I could speak Cantonese even though the official language in school was Mandarin. My father never learned Cantonese because he went to Switzerland and then immigrated to the US after a few years in Guangzhou, but my mother, since she lived in Guangdong province her whole life, even though Hakka is her native dialect, spoke perfect Cantonese.

Now let’s look at my Taiwanese friend again. His GRANDPARENTS fled the Chinese mainland and went to Taiwan. If we make the same comparison with my life, then we can assume that it’d be at least reasonable if his grandparents never learned Taiwanese, but he is a second generation already, and he still doesn’t know.

If Taiwan were a real province and had been integrated into the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek would never have needed to suppress the Taiwanese dialect to such an extent. I mean, on the mainland, a lot of TV, all movies, music, government communications, and all schools use Mandarin, and yet people who live in a province that speak another dialect would learn that dominant dialect naturally in one generation.

The fact that some “mainlander” Taiwanese still don’t know Taiwanese is a testament to Taiwan’s legacy of suppression and Chiang’s own insecurity.

I hope that made as much sense written as it did in my head.

Being Chinese, even if not educated in China, and majoring in international affairs, I obviously care about the Taiwan issue. Being nationalistic, I think that Taiwan should be part of China and that it should return to China as soon as possible.

Having put that statement out there, I’d like to explain my view because I’ve recently been disgusted by the way some Chinese people have acted when discussing the Taiwan issue (loudly proclaiming Taiwan is Chinese, that they’re being unfilial, etc. without listening to the other side) and even more outraged at some of the things Americans and Taiwanese have said.

First of all, I don’t care how much Han (ethnic Chinese) blood is in the Taiwanese population. The fact remains that they speak Chinese, write in Chinese, celebrate Chinese holidays and otherwise share Chinese culture. That alone should make them Chinese. To say that they’re not is tequivalent to saying that I can’t call myself American because I don’t have American blood. Yes, Taiwanese culture might be distinct, but I really don’t see how they can say that those small variations are enough to make them non-Chinese. I mean, China is NOT a monolith as some people in the west might think. China is HUGE, and unlike the US, has had thousands of years to develop a culture, and in those thousands of years, each region has definitely developed its own variations. The difference between Taiwanese culture and Fukinese culture is probably about the same magnitude as the difference between Fukinese culture and the culture in Beijing.

Secondly, despite my thinking that Taiwanese people are Chinese people, I don’t think this should be the reason why Taiwan should be a part of China. Because otherwise, you can make arguments that are just as compelling for Singapore or other overseas Chinese enclaves in Southeast Asia, and this is often the counterargument of people who support Taiwanese independence.

Taiwan is such an important issue for the CCP and for other nationalistic Chinese people most probably because, had the Nationalists won, there would have been no question that Taiwan would have belonged to China. Furthermore, had it not been for US intervention because of the outbreak of the Korean War, the PLA would have long ago taken over Taiwan. Patriotic Chinese always feel a sense of shame in hearing about Chinese history in the late 19th and early 20th century because of the ease in which foreign governments intervened in national affairs, and this is simply another example. Dispite the CCP’s victory on the mainland, because America thought that Taiwan was important in the fight against Communism, the US easily deterred the PLA from invading and reclaiming territory that at the time had been there’s. To say nothing of Chinese people, to the CCP, it’s a reminder that they have not won, they have not made China “stand up.”

I was reading Crisis and Commitment by Robert Accinelli for my Cross-Strait relations class just now, and a quote in the book really angered me. It was something about “United States forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area [i.e. East Asia].” First of all, what law? And necessary by who’s standards? If China were a superpower and it randomly decided to patrol the Pacific up to the California and Mexican coast to keep the peace (say America and Mexico want to go to war or something) because that was vital to our strategic interests, then how would the US and Mexico feel? Weak and powerless I bet, and also somewhat humiliated.

I mean, international relations is all about the interplay of power amongst different states with their economies and armies. This is why I sympathize with Korea’s predicament, because if not for China’s intervention, it might be unified (though you can also say, if not for the intervention of US-led forces, it would also be unified).

I think an even better example is Israel and Palestine though. I mean, Israel did not exist in modern memory until a bunch of powerful countries with advanced militaries decided to create it from Palestinian territory. If I were Palestinian, I would totally be pissed. Unfortunately however, if I were Palestinian, I would also be too weak to take back my land because of a lack of good military.

It’s the same reasoning with China and Taiwan. Taiwan has an independent government right now simply because China’s military is not strong enough to risk a confrontation with the US.

Of course everyone wants peace, but everyone also wants peace that’s favorable to them. The US wishes that the Iraqi insurgency would die down and restore peace because the success of the democratic government established by the US is beneficial to the US. I didn’t hear a lot about wanting peace before the US invaded Iraq.

Whenever I’m in Asia, it always strikes me as weird that there seems to be a pervasive lack of tissue paper. Restaurants never give you any unless you ask for it (and all my relatives bring their own), and public bathrooms don’t even have toilet paper dispensers. Last summer, while in Beijing, I ketp on seeing signs all over Beijing Normal University asking us to conserve water and recycle and not to throw trash on the streets.

You would think, just from this, that China and Hong Kong would much more environmentally friendly than the US. Yet according to my history professor, pollution is so bad in some parts of China that some of the famous beautiful places in China can never be recovered (like Lake Tai for instance). Plus, Hong Kong wastes SO much energy on air conditioning every year. It just occurred to me how wasteful air conditioning really is in the United States and Hong Kong after coming back from southern China.

In my home town, my relatives thought that 26 degrees Celsius was too low for sleeping, and wanted to turn it up to 27 instead. And even with AC, everyone wears shorts and t shirts. In Hong Kong and the US for example, I would have to sometimes bring a sweater with me to work in the summer because the AC would be so high that I would be freezing in the summer. I think part of the reason is that offices normally have people wearing suits, and the AC temperature probably is just good enough for people to comfortably wear suits to work in the summer. If this small cultural stupidity were changed, we’d save SO much energy!

Furthermore, I remember reading a semi-joking column in the Prince complaining about the one-ply toilet paper in Princeton. I think that’s a legitimate environmental concern. People are less likely to waste so much toilet paper if it’s one-ply. Plus, CUHK does this really devious thing where they only supply toilet paper in the bathrooms once, at the beginning of the semester, and gives every student two rolls to use for the semester. I think this really encourages people to conserve, if only because we’re cheap.

Although classes haven’t started yet, I’ve already been in China for almost two weeks and experienced all the indignities associated with being a Chinese citizen not on the mainland.

Before I came to Hong Kong, I had thought that the “one country, two systems” thing was merely propaganda. For example, the currency would be different, Cantonese would be spoken, the school system would remain different from China’s, and the government would be quasi-independent. Unfortunately, mainland China and Hong Kong take it much more seriously than I thought.

First of all, I had to take a bus to Zhanjiang (in Guangdong province) to visit my relatives shortly after I arrived in Hong Kong, and I was forced to go through customs twice. Going to China was ok since Hong Kong has no problem getting rid of me and China has no problem accepting back a citizen, but leaving was hellish. The entire bus was behind schedule because they were waiting for me. On the Shenzhen side, I thought I could go through the line for Chinese citizens since I am one, but after waiting for my turn, I was told that I needed to go to the visitors line instead since I don’t have a resident card. Fine, except the visitors line is 10 times longer. Next, I was suddenly told I need to fill out a customs form because I have a Chinese passport and I’m leaving China. Fine, get off line a second time, fill it out, get back on…

I feel like a second class citizen in my own country, and I thought that would only happen in the US!

Seriously, I understand why Hong Kong being separate is necessary for now, but speaking as a Chinese citizen from the mainland, I absolutely hate it. It’s like anyone who happens to live in Hong Kong is better than us, even though we’re in the same country. Hong Kong citizens are SO lucky. They get to keep their own dialect with an abundance of TV and movies in their dialect, and they get a LOT more freedom of speech and internet access than mainlanders. Although, obviously, having all Chinese citizens get these benefits would be great, but in the mean time, it feels like Hong Kong citizens are first class, and the rest of us are second.

And the most galling thing is that the Hong Kong people don’t see it this way! THEY keep talking about furthering their democracy, complaining about the rights that they should have but don’t, but I’m really indignant at the fact that they keep on only talking about Hong Kong. As a mainlander, I feel like, why should you be so special? Why aren’t you complaining about why CHINESE citizens don’t have democracy and freedom of speech? Why are you only concerned with Hong Kong? Are you NOT part of China?

I guess being apart for 150 years does make Hong Kong citizens feel separate, but I’m just angry at their sense of entitlement. China is one country, two systems, but I wish at least the 2 systems were equal.

Welcome to the Princeton University WWS Undergraduate Program Study Abroad blog site. The site is for you to share in the experiences of WWS students who are studying abroad or who have studied abroad.

Only WWS Undergraduate Study Abroad students have access to author new entries by clicking the link in the Submit section of the right hand column on the main web page. However, all University students, faculty, and staff can view the blog content and post comments.

If you have any administrative issues relating to this blog site, please contact Stacey O’Brien at staceyo@princeton.edu.