First Day Of Class

So Friday was the first day of class. It seemed really weird to me to start class on a Friday, especially since our entire stay in Beijing so far has felt like a vacation. I had my first Chinese class in the morning. I was a little nervous because I have not studied a language since high school, but there are only six of us in the class and we are all beginners.

My professor is really cute. She is a little Chinese woman and she looks pretty young. She also brought us all snacks for during class. One of the first things we did in class was receive our Chinese names. Our class decided to have our professor give us traditional names that relate to our personalities, instead of just a translation of our American names. When I told my professor that my favorite hobbies are theater, music, and dance, she gave me the Chinese name pan ai wu. Pan is my surname and is supposed to relate to my last name. I honestly think my professor was just confused by my last name since the surname she gave me doesn’t start with an “s.” Ai means to love and wu means to dance. My professor said my name is special because not many Chinese names use the word wu. I also learned how to write my name in Chinese characters. It is the most complex name of any of the Chinese names given in my class, but I really like writing it because I really like the way it looks.

Even though class was three hours long it went by pretty quickly. I feel like I learned a lot in just one day. We learned a lot of pronunciation for reading pinyin, which is Chinese that is written in letters instead of characters. We learned some vocabulary, mostly greetings and some random words, as well as a little bit about drawing characters. I think I am going to like Chinese because there is very little grammar. For example, they don’t use words like “am,” “is,” “are,” etc. and there are no tenses. The hardest part about Chinese is that there are four different tones plus the neutral tone, meaning that the meanings of words change based upon the inflection of your voice. The tones are kind of interesting because you can almost think of a lot of the pronunciation like singing. I think by the end of the semester, I will have a pretty good grasp on the basics, especially since class meets for three hours, three days a week.

After class, we went to our favorite Chinese restaurant, which is outside of the gate next to our dorm. We call this restaurant “West Gate.” We had our usual favorites including dumplings, fried rice, and kung pao chicken. Eating with chopsticks is getting a lot easier now.

After lunch, I went to meet Professor Yang, my professor for my independent study on Chinese Media and Society, in his office, which is in a different building on campus. It was kind of cool to go to a new building since all of our classes are in the history building. Professor Yang is really nice and he seems really excited about my independent study. He gave me a book to read at my leisure that is basically everything there is to know about communications in China and pointed out some things that I might find particularly interesting about political communication and the Internet.

I am also going to be working on a research project for Professor Yang about social networking on the Internet in China. Social networking sites are recently becoming popular in China. Professor Yang wants me specifically to look at the Chinese version of Myspace and try to formulate a research question about international networking on social sites. I am thinking that it might be interesting to focus on age demographics. I am going to prepare a literature review and a list of potential research questions before I meet with Professor Yang again next week. At the end of the semester, I will turn in a paper about my research. I’m excited about this project because I think it will give me the chance to do some ethnographic research and Professor Yang seems to think that I will be able to find some good English sources. My research this semester will then be compiled with similar research that some grad students are doing for Professor Yang in a city near Hong Kong. Professor Yang also said that once I learn a little bit more Chinese, I can meet with his group of PhD students here in Bejing who are conducting research on Chinese political blogs and grassroots activities. Maybe doing an independent study will turn out to be really cool after all.

I also got an email from Dr. Wu, who will be my professor for my other independent study on Chinese Women’s Studies. She seems really nice and flexible, and I am really looking forward to meeting her on Monday. She is going to meet me in the lounge in the history department and then we are going to walk around campus so she can show me where her office is located.

The syllabus for this study seems a lot more structured than the work I will be doing for my Chinese Media and Society course. There is about 200 pages of reading per week, as well as two papers. However, the topics seem really interesting and I am looking forward to getting back into a more regular routine that includes homework and studying.

I have my last class, China and the Global Economy, on Tuesday afternoon. I am looking forward to telling you more about it then, although I know I definitely have a few friends in class, so it should be a lot of fun. Overall, I think it’s going to be a very different semester in terms of schoolwork. I think I am going to really benefit from more personalized interaction with professors, but at the same time I am looking forward to a semester where it doesn’t seem like I will have too much work to keep me from enjoying the city and traveling around the country.