Sitting in a smoky hotel room in Xi’an, China, with an incessant roar of traffic and human noise outside the window, home seems very far away. Everything that I was raised to do and to believe does not seem to hold any weight in this country of Confucius and communism. When I arrived a week ago in Beijing, even walking around the streets was headache-inducing, the surplus of flashing lights, odors of street food, and constant chattering of Mandarin overloading my senses. Now, I am able to navigate the streets of Xi’an and go shopping by myself, making the cashier laugh with my broken week-old Mandarin.
To simply relay the events of the trip would take far too long, and yet would be insufficient to explain the depth of the lessons I have learned in my time here. We spent 5 days in Beijing, visiting Mao Zedong’s mausoleum, climbing the Great Wall, seeing a Kung Fu show, learning about the history of China’s ancient dynasties and analyzing the engineering feats required to build the Bird’s Nest stadium. Then, one uncomfortable sleeper train ride later, we were in Dalian, a city that goes from towering mountains to beachfront in a matter of miles. In Dalian, we toured a middle school, an American software company, and the most beautiful beachfront park I have ever seen. Now, we are in Xi’an, and we have just seen the famous terracotta warriors and taken a bus tour of this city.
This is what I have done; yet what I have learned cannot be conveyed so easily. At the Summer Palace in Beijing, I walked along the emperor’s Long Corridor, listening to the soft sounds of Chinese flute music and the rustling of the wind off the lake, and I learned how to be at peace even when surrounded by thousands of distractions. At the Buddhist pagoda in Xi’an, I learned that great men like the monk Xuanzhang are born of a relentless pursuit of a higher vision. Talking to the 40 other Penn State engineering students on this trip, I have learned that everyone processes information and lessons learned in different ways
I love China, and I am incredibly grateful for my experience here so far. However, I do miss the environment of the PLA trips, because I often find that I am the only student on this trip questioning how racism plays a role in monochromatic China, or how their history of a ruling royal class influenced the rise of the communist People’s Republic, or why China has never truly been conquered by the West, like other places in the world.
Xie xie
Alayna
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