Tag Archives: China

I spent two months last summer in Iganga, Uganda working on a public health research project with a medical anthropologist. We wanted to understand how female sex workers’ experiences influenced their access to HIV care and prevention. This experience taught me invaluable lessons in cross-cultural communication, in addition to skills needed to conduct ethnographic field work.

Those two months were the first time I had spent more than a couple of weeks in a foreign country away from my family. I thought the trips to Hawaii and China to visit relatives would have prepared me for my trip to Uganda, but when we finally drove up to our home for the next two months after a hot, dusty car ride from the airport, I was ready to break down in tears.

I eventually found my footing in the following days and weeks. As the streets in Iganga Town slowly became familiar to me, I learned to barter for pineapples in the market and felt completely at ease squeezing onto the backseat of a motorcycle with two other people. The research itself was fascinating — I visited health care centers and clinics, discussed HIV prevention policy with government officials, and had the opportunity to hear the life stories of incredible women.

All the while, my inability to truly “fit in” (I am a Chinese-American) and the more negative experiences of the other students I lived with began to affect my own. The other research student, who is a few years older than me and whom I respected, started to express dissatisfaction with our research mentor, our situation, and Ugandan culture. Unwilling to disagree and cause any sort of conflict, I followed along with her negative sentiments. These seeds of negativity accumulated and soon I started to believe these sentiments myself. I found myself expressing my own discontent more and more often. It was addicting: the dust was so annoying; everyone always stared; the food was so bland. I looked forward to the first hot shower in Dubai (a layover on our way back to St. Louis) as if my life depended on it.

When I finally stepped into the steaming hotel bathroom in Dubai, I relished the hot water and incredible water pressure. But as the brownish water colored by Iganga’s infamous red dust trickled down the drain, I realized I already missed Uganda: I missed the boda-boda rides, the ridiculous unstructured research meetings that would last hours, the food, the people, and even the red dust between my toes. The thought saddened me and I was immediately swept into a wave of regret. I continued reflecting on this experience during the few weeks I spent at home – asking myself what I could have done better and imagining how the two months would have gone if I had just spoken up.

Before I knew it, it was time to head to China for a semester abroad in Kunming. I was excited, but also scared that I would end up making the same mistakes and come home clouded by regret. I would again be forced to face my classmates’ and my own negative sentiments, and I was afraid I would handle it poorly.

Long story short, I learned from my mistakes in Uganda, but I also learned to show myself some self-compassion. Even though I did allow my negativity to affect me towards the end of my time in Uganda, I learned and accomplished a lot in my two months there. Among other things, I played a significant role in the research team and developed many other skills through interacting with others and facing my own biases. I expanded upon these skills in China, where I continued my research on HIV and sex work in a cross-cultural comparison of China and Uganda, and found a community outside of my American peers. In both places, I formed friendships that will last a lifetime with locals and fellow Americans. All of the accomplishments and failures from my experiences living abroad in China and Uganda are marks of success, and I am now realizing the slow process of growth and the need to push past feelings of regret in order to fully appreciate an experience and make the best of future ones as well.

Delphine is a junior at Smith College from California and Washington. She loves to dance and lay in the sun. In the future, she hopes to pursue a career in health and medicine, and incorporate radical listening and community-building into her work.

Spring 2018 Issue XI: Every Picture Tells a Story, Uncategorized

Explaining the Joke

February 20, 2018 Xiaoxiao Meng

I have a weird love-hate relationship with translation jokes. On one hand, that little rift between languages makes me chuckle. I think back to myself in the old days, a clueless kid who only had half of the riddle. It reminds me of how far I’ve come as a person.

On the other hand, how good a joke is doesn’t just depend on the joke. Jokes are inherently social. Whether you’re sharing one on the internet for likes and comments or telling one to a friend, there is a certain satisfaction you glean from being able to cause laughter. Because so many of my friends are American (read: non-Chinese speakers), they don’t get why I chuckle.

All jokes are inside jokes in some capacity. They rely on some sense of community. Translation jokes like this one are only funny to people like me who have hopped between two specific languages, and that reminds me of the weird position I’m in. Instead of bridging the gap between two cultures and languages, I hang between them, suspended, never fully inside of one or the other. I am the overlap of a Venn diagram that doesn’t exist outside of me and a handful of other people. My family, families like mine, and some friends.

Once upon a time, I lived in a monolingual world. It was as long ago as any fairytale. My experience overseas hasn’t just given me another language. It has fundamentally changed the way that I think, the way that I communicate, share, even laugh. I’ve always loved words and how they connect people, but now they are much richer. I can’t even remember what it felt to live with a singular language housed in my brain. Language connects, but it also separates, sometimes even isolates.

In the past, this picture would not have made me laugh. Aside from the fact that I probably have developed a worse sense of humor than I had at nine, there’s also the fact that I have changed in a way that is not quantifiable. In a way, it’s just like a joke–when you explain it, it becomes less funny, less potent, less correct. The exact combination of words always slides out of your grip.

Even so, I try.

The translation here is funny because the Chinese isn’t meant to indicate direction. Many Chinese sentences, such as this one, end with a word that roughly means “to” in order to indicate movement or purpose. English has no equivalent.

When I first saw this sign, I laughed and snapped a picture. I barely thought about it. The thought process had become part of me. There was no purpose in that, no movement of thought. I saw the words and they clicked.

Occasionally, I remember who I used to be. A little kid who was scared of anything foreign, unwilling to assimilate into the unfamiliar world around me. A little kid who didn’t find my thoughts reflected in the new language I was learning. But I don’t think about that so much anymore.

There is a thoughtlessness in languages. In jokes. And that is part of what makes them elegant and beautiful.

Of course, that’s just part of the story.

Xiaoxiao Meng ’19 is a Comparative Literature major and a Translation Studies Concentrator. She has spent half her life in the United States and the other half in China. This makes for a lot of terrible self-reflection on identity, culture, and the difficulty of explaining how good real soup dumplings are to American friends.

Fall 2017 Issue X: Immigration

Chameleon

October 27, 2017 Kela Harrington

I was born in Chicago. When I was three years old, my family moved to Okinawa. Two years later, we would move to Tokyo. I spent two years in Tokyo before moving to South Korea, where I lived for a year. For the summers, I lived in China with my mother’s side of the family. It wasn’t until right before I turned nine that I found myself in the United States again, though I never returned to Chicago. The Pacific Northwest has been home base for several years now. At one point, I also lived in the American South (which is a rather long story of its own). I will never forget my formative years in East Asia. I was always slightly confused about where I was and who I was. Was I an immigrant? An emigrant? An international traveler being dragged from country to country by my parents? What I did know and remember was having to cross linguistic barriers on a day-to-day basis. Translation was something I couldn’t live without; it was a natural part of my every day need to communicate. It wasn’t until I came to Smith that I was finally able to see the artistry in translation and how it brought together different cultures and languages. Before, I had perceived it first and foremost as a tool for survival.

In Okinawa, I was homeschooled. In Tokyo, I attended three different schools–a Japanese kindergarten, a Catholic Montessori school, and a school on an American military base. In the first space, I had to communicate in Japanese, in the second and third spaces I communicated in English. However, I spoke more Chinese at home than either English or Japanese. During the summers in China, I went to a Chinese school, where I spoke only Chinese. I knew a smattering of Korean, but it never quite reached the same level as the other languages, because I only spent a year there and was homeschooled. Only after I came to the United States, did English become my language of highest proficiency, simply because I was now required to use it the most in everyday conversation.

Being half-Caucasian and half-Chinese, moving to Japan, and then to South Korea, required me to be constantly aware of the customs, culture, and languages around me.

I remember strangers staring at me as I walked down the street. They cast curious glances at me and my parents as mixed race couples still weren’t a very common sight in the various places where I lived back then. It seemed that everyone assigned me to a different category based on my features. When I spoke Chinese in China, I didn’t have an accent, and this startled many people. Still, I passed as a Caucasian person, despite being half-Chinese. And in mostly Caucasian spaces, I was simply Chinese, despite being half-Caucasian. The latter was most evident when I was living in the American South where I was the only student with Chinese heritage in the entire school. Looking back on it all, I was constantly considered someone who did not fit in any of the pre-determined categories, someone who was something of a question mark in almost all spaces. I had to learn how to blend in linguistically- speaking Japanese, Chinese, and English, all with varying levels of proficiency. I was a jack of all trades, adapting as needed to constantly changing environments. Like a chameleon that changes color, my appearance never seemed to be truly static in other people’s eyes. Yet this mobility–immigration, migration, emigration, each move across a cultural or linguistic border–shaped my identity. I now have a passion for language, travel, and bringing communities together. Most importantly, growing up among various customs, cultures, and languages, I’ve learned the value of being a global citizen.

Kela is a junior with a major in East Asian Languages and Literature. She also has a concentration in Translation Studies and a minor in Neuroscience. She is interested in doing research on how the brain processes linguistic information.

Special Issue: Cultural Encounters

In Between Two Shanghai Cities

May 4, 2017 yroh

Last year, when I decided to study abroad in Shanghai for a semester of my junior year, I was excited to discover the modern and vibrant city depicted in the media. The program that I joined described Shanghai as “a bustling international metropolis and global financial center” on its website, and the cosmopolitan characteristics of Shanghai ensured opportunities to meet people from all over the world, speaking both English and Chinese, and to adapt to the culture smoothly. The city appeared to be inclusive of diverse cultures and people. I was thrilled to live in a metropolis where I would learn about Chinese culture while also remaining connected to more familiar western values. However, the Shanghai that I experienced was a city in flux, still new to foreigners, limited in its inclusion of other cultures, and perhaps not as modern as presented in the media.

The Bund and Lujiazui are the landmarks that I first visualize when thinking of Shanghai. Multiple glass skyscrapers and iconic buildings, such as the Oriental Pearl Tower and Shanghai World Financial Center in Lujiazui, and the vintage Western-style buildings in the Bund, across from the skyscrapers, both attract tourists. The alluring contrast between two sides of the Huangpu River is highlighted at night. When the city turns on lights in Lujiazui, the glass buildings become colorful screens that illuminate the area. On the other side of the river in the Bund, dim yellow street lights brighten the old architecture, giving people the impression that they might be in Europe.

The Bund and Lujiazui are symbolic spaces representing the past and the future of Shanghai. The Bund, one side of the Huangpu River, is characterized by Western-style architecture, shows the historical roots of Shanghai as a colonial trading city that opened after the First Opium War in 1839. The Treaty of Nanking, signed after the defeat of China in the First Opium War, allowed foreigners from Britain, America, and other European countries to occupy Shanghai. It is a part of the century of humiliation– an era when China lost face and sovereignty, defeated by Western countries and Japan from 1839 to 1949, yet it indicates the beginning of international Shanghai. On the other side of the past, in Lujiazui, the skyscrapers reflect the new Shanghai that has become a global economic, trading, and financial center, the ‘modern’ future that the city plans to pursue.

However, Shanghai as an international metropolis seemed to be an illusion rather than a reality in the area in which I lived. I stayed in Yangpu District, a northeastern part of Shanghai city, which was neither international nor modern. In Yangpu District, the sidewalks were uneven and narrow, full of puddles of filthy water from restaurants, as a strong unpleasant odor emanated from overflowing garbage bins, and the honking of cars and motorcycles filled the air. Gray cemented buildings in the area – five floors high or lower with signs of Chinese characters – were often closed or empty. Old, odorous, dirty and bereft of attraction, Yangpu District was far from the glamorous depiction of Shanghai as international metropolis.

There were few foreigners or people of diverse ethnicities in this area. I was in a program with other American students, most of whom were white. When my friends walked in the neighborhood speaking Chinese, local people looked curious and confused. Yet they were displeased when I could not speak Chinese well, because they assumed me to be Chinese. When the local people figured out that I was Korean, they either emphasized the possible similarities between Chinese and Koreans or compared me to other Korean women that they saw in the Chinese media, which idealizes Korean beauty and cherishes the beauty of Korean actresses and singers. For them, I was not as much of a foreigner as my white friends, and I had to fit into the stereotypical image of Korean women projected in the media. As I began to realize that my everyday life attracted people’s attention and disturbed their common sense and beliefs, I started to wonder about the unrepresented part of Shanghai and to question the emphasis on modernization and the successful development of China in Shanghai.

The center of Shanghai was definitely modern and fit the depiction as an international metropolis, yet it was still not international in terms of inclusion and diversity. My white friends were treated differently from the Chinese and other people of color. On many occasions, white foreigners were treated as marketing assets in business. Club promoters would encourage my friends to come to clubs and bars and tended to pay for all expenses if necessary, while I had to pay for my cover. As I witnessed the different treatments that my friends received and the easy access open to them, the idealization of white foreigners became clear. One time, one of the promoters told me that once when he had set a table for a group of foreigners, the manager had asked about the race of the individuals in the group and showed his strong preference for white foreigners over black foreigners. This story demonstrated; the ethnic hierarchy or racism in this otherwise international city. The favoring of white people seemed to create the distinction between Chinese and foreigners and discourage diversity in Shanghai. In Yongkanglu, the well-known bar street for expats, expats have also created their own space in Shanghai, further exacerbating segregation in the city. The clear division between the local people and expats, the ethnic hierarchy, and the idealization of white foreigners that I observed in the center of Shanghai did not correspond with the sophisticated image of a cosmopolitan hub that the city claims to be.

Although I was always taken as Chinese because of my appearance, I was more exposed to the spaces where foreigners would go; my position as a foreigner was more accepted in spaces where other foreigners were present. Yet I was overwhelmed by my disadvantaged position and the unfair treatment that I received and thus unable to stand the seemingly China-centric perception and exoticization of white foreigners.

I did, however, have advantages as a student studying abroad. I explored both the center of Shanghai and other districts. Through my constant movements between the center of the city to Yangpu District, I was able to see the interactions between the Shanghainese and my white friends in different social settings. Especially in the spaces of nightlife entertainment, where white foreigners were the most familiar, I was able to see the different social dynamics based on the race and the status of foreigner and the limitations of Shanghai as a cosmopolitan city.

The disconnect between the depiction of Shanghai as modern and international and the actuality of Shanghai in Yangpu District can be explained by the effort of the government to present itself and the city as part of the global trend of modernization or even westernization. Yet this effort has resulted in a gap between the reality and the image. This illusory image of Shanghai then influences the Shanghainese to maintain their reputation of ultimate modernization by idealizing and exoticizing white foreigners, diminishing the value of diversity, and creating otherness.

In my ignorance of Shanghai and with my American values contributing to my outsider’s perspective, I readily believed the government’s depiction of the city as one that merged western and Chinese cultures. My experience, however, in both the center and periphery of Shanghai did not correspond to this idealized depiction. With my new understanding that there are “two Shanghais,” I can acknowledge the discomfort, curiosity, unfamiliarity, and possible ethnic hierarchy or racism that I dealt with. My lived experience of Shanghai may be discomforting in its confrontations with issues of race, modernization, diversity, and representation, yet I hope it is also equally revealing of the limits imposed by my own ethno-centric and American perspective.

Yoon Roh ’17 is a senior majoring in Anthropology and Government. She was born and raised in South Korea before she attended Miss Hall’s, a boarding school in Pittsfield, MA. She has love for elephants and hopes to one day volunteer at an elephant refuge camp in Kenya.

Special Issue: Cultural Encounters

To be Always Elsewhere

May 4, 2017 gchoo

I could feel my heart pounding in my small chest faster and faster. I was on the verge of breaking out into an anxious sweat when it came to my turn. The words came out of my mouth sounding alien and awkward: “I am from the United States”. There were no looks of confusion, doubt, or suspicion, but I felt like an imposter. I was an imposter. My teacher and fellow second grade classmates nodded in approval of my response and the boy next to me proceeded to answer the teacher’s question: Where are you from?

While it seems like such a simple inquiry, usually following a trail of other repetitive, mundane questions of what one’s name, age, birthday, and favorite food are, it has continuously been a source of anxiety, confusion, and haunting throughout my life. I went home that day to ask my parents where I was truly from to give rest to my doubts. They themselves seemed slightly confused at my question telling me ‘why the United State of course!’. I proceeded to ask them where in the United States I was born, and whether or not we were Korean. At my early age of six years, I perceived true U.S. citizens to be white and was confounded by the idea that my ethnically Korean family could be from the U.S. All the pale skinned, freckled boys and girls at my school would proudly state I’m from California, Wyoming, and ‘insert US state’ before I moved to Singapore! All the little girls in Disney shows and movies depicting the typical American girl did not look like me. My parents curtly replied that I was born in Englewood, New Jersey, I was indeed Korean, but I was not from Korea because I never lived there. They were astounded as to how I could ask such preposterous questions and carried on with their adult matters as my child self tried to make sense of what I was told.

It was true that I was Korean but had never lived in South Korea. Both my parents immigrated to the United States when they were entering their first year of high school. But what was also true was that I had never lived in the United States either. I had no recollection of this so called Englewood, New Jersey. My mother gave birth to me in New Jersey but almost immediately returned to Japan, where she was living at the time. Technically, I was from Japan. It was the last country I lived in. But regardless of this confusion, I took my parents word as a six-year-old child does, and proceeded to live my life with the belief that I was from the United States. During the following years of my life, a myriad of events occurred that caused me to feel more of an imposter, stranger, and foreigner no matter where I was.

I hailed down a cobalt blue taxi with its signature 6552-1111 Comfort imprinted on its side. The air was thick and humid, as it is every day in Singapore, and I was running late for a family dinner. I jumped in the cab. Hi Uncle, Tanglin Road in front of Tanglin Mall please. A few minutes had passed as I cooled down in the air conditioned vehicle, when the conversation began. You Korean ah? Yes, yes I am. Ahn-yeong-ha-sei-yo (hello in Korean)! Oh wow that was very good! So how many year you live in Korea before coming to Singapore mm? This is the typical conversation I have had with Singaporean taxi drivers during my 19 years of living there. Singapore is an incredibly diverse country, not just amongst its citizens, but also with its array of expatriates who move to live there for the long term like myself. Because of Singapore’s diversity and constant influx and flux of expatriates and travelers, there tends to be an interest in one’s origins and ethnicity. I lived in Korea for a few years but moved to Singapore when I was five. Wow! You like Singapore more? Yes, yes I do. While I lived in Singapore, I was comfortable and even at home. I loved the heat and humidity, the greenery everywhere, the food, the people, the transportation. I have such longing when I see photos of Singapore’s skyline, feel an intense humidity like Singapore’s, and eat dishes with similar flavors as those of Singapore. But it was these day to day conversations with taxi drivers, cooks at hawker centers, and locals that caused me to feel so out of place in a country where I felt so at home. It was a daily reminder that, no, I was not Singaporean and would never be. I did not have any local friends and neither did my parents. We stayed in our expatriate bubble, with our expatriate friends and expatriate schools. I was never asked if I was from Singapore. It was always assumed that I was from South Korea, because I was Korean.

I looked calm, but my heart was racing and a thin layer of cold sweat covered my body under my thick winter coat. I was in Seoul, South Korea, for my winter break in 2016. As I got into the taxi, I pulled myself together and confidently stated gang-nam-yuk (Gangnam station). I rejoiced on the inside as the cab driver silently started to drive. I took out my headphones and plugged them in. Please do not talk to me. Please do not talk to me. But of course he sparked a conversation with me. I know how to say hello, count to five, and a few food items in the Korean language. With this minimal vocabulary, Singaporean cab drivers thought I was fluent. But in Korea itself, I was hopeless. A few seconds had passed since the cab driver asked me something. I swore under my breath and finally replied. Oh, no Korean, Chinese. I am Chinese. Oh you China! Okay. And then silence.

I sat in my own shame and embarrassment for the rest of the ride. I had learned throughout my life that being Korean and not being able to speak the language is an incredible disgrace. My mom has been berated by her aunt-in-law for not teaching me the language. I have been called ‘not Korean enough,’ ‘fake Korean,’ ‘not really Korean,’ and ‘you’re just American’ by Korean peers in both high school and college. There are times when I wonder how different my life and identity would have been if I was fluent in Korean. The conversations I could have joined, the nuances of a culture I could have understood, the possible connection and relationship to my grandparents are all what-ifs. But then I realize the prejudice, shame, and disgrace I have felt by a country and very group of people I could have been a part of. Is language a requirement for belonging to a country? When I speak aloud in Korea, I speak English, my only language, my native tongue. When I’m with my Korean friends, I am called their mee-gook-sah-dam-ching-goo (American friend).

Hi! You Chinese? Ni hao! I finally snapped. I’m fucking Korean! Walking the streets of New York City as an Asian woman can be exhausting some days. I slammed the door on my way into the one room apartment in Brooklyn my two friends from Smith and I had rented for the summer. I was still in fury. The air conditioner was balancing the humid, sweltering summer day. Amidst the heat and my own sentiments, I missed Singapore. I later went to Korea Town for dinner with high school friends from Singapore. I felt safe and comfortable surrounded by other Asians; I could let my guard down. Between boarding school and college, I have lived in the United States for the past eight years of my life, and I am here to stay. Throughout my time in the United States, I have become hyper aware of my Asianess, my race, meaning the very fact that I am Asian isolates and alienates me. This hyper awareness is a hum singing throughout all times of the day. You are our token Asian friend! What are you eating? It smells weird. I heard in Singapore you can’t chew gum. Do Koreans eat dog meat? Are you good at math? Later that night when I returned to my Brooklyn apartment, I thought about the incident again and recollected that I had stated that I was Korean. But was I? Ethnically yes, but identity wise? No. What did it mean to be Korean, American, or Singaporean? A few days later, I was walking around Manhattan. Again, Ni hao! You are Chinese? Go back to China. I whipped around and yelled I am American, there’s nowhere to go back to.

Labels, terms, and categories can have detrimental connotations. But on the other end of the spectrum, they can give one an identity, community, culture, and dialogue to engage with and belong to. It is these positive attributes of defining words that propelled me to constantly search for a category I could compartmentalize myself into. Third culture kid, Asian, Korean, Korean-American, Asian-American, American, expatriate, 1.5 generation, 2nd generation, Asian, Singaporean, international student, and more are all terms that have been used by others or myself to grasp who I am, where I am from, and where I belong. I am a United States citizen, ethnically Korean, and grew up in Singapore. But it is not that simple. There were times when I so wanted to be a Korean, an American, or a Singaporean to each of its own. But I realize that in my own case and that of many others I am none and all of these. When I replied I am American, that statement in itself holds so much meaning and questions. Could I say it because I am a citizen? Did my family moving back to Connecticut recently have something to do with my response? Was it because I have felt more at home here day by day? What if I moved to another country? Depending on the time, place and context, how I define myself is constantly changing. I use to want to fit right into one compartment, having felt like an outsider no matter where I was, but my life has been shaped and influenced by all three countries and its people.

Geena Choo is currently a senior at Smith College majoring in Anthropology. She was born in Englewood, NJ to Korean parents, lived in Singapore for the majority of her life, and moved to Hartford, CT recently. She loves drinking lattes, reading books, and dreaming about her future pet golden doodle and wire fox terrier.

Special Issue: Cultural Encounters

When I Discuss Anthropology with People in China

May 4, 2017 dzeng

Recently, one of my friends said to me, “All anthropologists are lonely.” I had never really thought about the loneliness of anthropologists until that moment. For a long time, I have agreed with the view that almost all humans are lonely, so her comment somewhat sounded like a cliché. However, after a second rumination, I began to understand what she was referring to: anthropologists have an additional layer of loneliness, because they consciously choose to take a step away from a community to acquire a more effective perspective to critically observe, analyze, and criticize social dynamics. I revisited this idea a couple of times, and realized that as a Chinese international student majoring in anthropology at Smith College, I have indeed encountered interesting as well as bitter situations in which I experience this loneliness, particularly when I talk about anthropology outside classes. When I engage in such uncommon conversations with people in China, I have found my academic training and international experiences help me to untangle the invisibility and mysteriousness of the discipline back in my home country.

Anthropology is yet to be a part of public discussions in China. When I tell people that anthropology is my major, they have a hard time envisioning both my academic life at school and the discipline in general. No matter where the conversation happens – at my high school reunion party, at a bank when I was opening a new online account, in an Uber, at the museum where I was interning, or family meetings – the following question is always asked, “What is anthropology?” or, “What does anthropology do?” Sometimes, I hear other feedback such as, “Wait, I have only heard about sociology. What’s the difference?” “Are you talking about ethnology?” or, “Oh, that sounds like the study of the arts of minority ethnic groups in China.” These unexpected, sometimes slightly irritating comments indicate that most Chinese people have not yet established conceptions of modern anthropology as a research field. It takes me a lot of time to introduce the field and explain my experiences in most conversations. In the end, many of my listeners joke that I should prepare a short introduction essay on my smartphone, so that I can ask people to read it before clarifying people’s misunderstandings. (I am seriously considering this advice.) Since most Chinese I encounter lack a fundamental recognition of anthropology as a discipline, I have had many opportunities to analyze the reasons behind such unfamiliarity and to reexamine my own perceptions of the field.

The Chinese outside academia have a very vague impression of social science. The basic education system in the country focuses on science and humanities, and the subjects closest to social science include history, introductory politics and economics, and socialist ideologies. If people have not taken relevant social science courses in college, they probably have not had a chance of encountering, let alone knowing, any theories or research methods in the disciplines, unless they have read about them on the Internet. They might not be able to engage with anthropology’s basic tenet that almost all ideas and thoughts are culturally constructed and people are capable of self-reflecting on what they observe, which is critical not only for individuals’ lives but also for higher-level decision making in all social sectors.

For people who have occasionally heard about social science in China, their understandings of anthropology are largely different from what I view as American anthropology. Their responses reveal certain historical developments and theoretical advancements particular to Chinese anthropology and its own political environment. Chinese anthropology developed from British anthropology. It has its own history and respected anthropologists with whom I was less familiar. Though I could recognize a few European theorists and some early American anthropologists who had been discussed in my theory class at Smith, other scholars and theories were new to me. Chinese anthropology also acknowledges a distinct category of anthropologists from western countries who conducted their fieldwork in China. I needed to construct a new academic toolkit to understand their language of research. I noticed that the focus of Chinese anthropology was different from that of American anthropology. Chinese anthropology focused on minority ethnic groups in Yunnan, Guangxi, and other less-industrialized regions, while the American discipline expanded to study all social groups and industries in society. That is perhaps one of the main reasons that I found people were more familiar with terms and topics related to these minority ethnic groups than immigration, technology, or other heated sub-fields addressed in the U.S. Thus, I needed to insist on the existence of urban anthropology, science and technology studies, or even economic anthropology to people who tried to correct me that we might be talking about ethnology.

The last but perhaps very significant observation I had was about the conscious or unconscious patriotism existing in Chinese anthropological research. When I asked about the current direction of Chinese anthropology, people with some knowledge of the discipline sometimes suggested that Chinese researchers were trying to find their unique theories and paths of anthropological research instead of building on Western knowledge. These assertions derived largely from the broader social context of Chinese history in the last century; after the series of wars in the first half of the twentieth century and the subsequent development of a modern country, a nation-wide intention of regaining respect and rights in the international community emerged across Chinese society. However, the confrontation between communist and capitalist ideologies in larger global politics led to China’s amplified attempts at establishing the visibility of its own political and economic achievements in a global community controlled by the assumed animosities of opponent countries. Consequently, patriotism seemed to become a political necessity, for the nation and for its citizens. In anthropology, domestic social scientists tried to construct their unique specific identities, contexts, and knowledge to gradually formulate the independence of the discipline.

As a student majoring in American anthropology, I then had to approach China and Chinese anthropology in a new way. Because the anthropologists in the two countries have created completely different paths for their research, I could not automatically interpret Chinese anthropology as though I have studied it, which I indeed have not. While I still identify as belonging to China, my anthropological training is distinctly American. My own opportunity to study abroad has been a privilege and a chance for me to gain a singular experience. Though I see the unique traits of Chinese anthropology better now, I also want to deconstruct the complicated domestic puzzles in the Chinese practice of the discipline by applying insights from American academia. I continue to ask myself and will ask others: what is anthropology in China? And, as I pose these questions, I feel the loneliness of anthropologists that my friend and I discussed not too long ago.

Danyi Zeng ’17 is a senior majoring in anthropology at Smith College. She grew up in Southwest China and moved to the eastern coast of China with her family. With the experience of living in different areas and feeling the cultural diversity within the country, Danyi found anthropology is an inspiring discipline that offers her a highly self-reflexive toolkit to re-understand her own identities. Recently, she aims at bringing her knowledge and skills acquired from social science into real-world industries as well as seeking her further academic interests in East Asia.

Special Issue: Cultural Encounters

Waiting for the Train

May 3, 2017 crlee

Could telling my story and finding the right metaphor be the bridge connecting the differences I experienced living and studying in two very different cultures ?

Cassiopeia Lee ’17 is a graduating senior with no immediate plans and a general love for learning and exploring. At Smith she cultivated her passions for languages, human rights, justice, and global perspectives, and knows that she’ll only learn more in her future endeavors.

Spring 2017 Issue IX: The Narrative Behind the Photo

The Shanghai Bubble

March 24, 2017 Sable Liggera

Traveling to and living in Shanghai was an incredible experience. Adapting to a new culture and language, trying different foods and kinds of drinks, and exploring such an incredibly huge and diverse city was amazing to experience.

One of the qualities of life in China that I was most interested in experiencing for myself was the environment of the city. Flying to Shanghai, I was intrigued to see the plane land at Pudong so I could watch the air transition from clean to the quality a citizen on the ground experiences.

Due to my flight and the time change, I actually arrived in Shanghai

When I woke up the next day, I wasn’t surprised by the sky’s lack of clouds or blue, but rather the sun itself– its normal color transformed to a hot, neon red through the lens of heavy pollution.

For the first week or so, I was captivated by this difference. I quickly downloaded an air quality app and neurotically checked it several times a day for air quality index and pm2.5 readings.

Air quality index, or AQI, is a general measure of the amount of pollution in the air. When the AQI is high, you are more likely to experience negative health effects.

At first, I strived not to go outside during poor AQI and pm2.5 periods. However, even as an Environmental Science and Policy major actively studying environmental pollution in Shanghai, I eventually became more and more used to the air, and the idea of exposing myself to it. After all, while some days were better than others, the heavy cloud encompassing Shanghai was there to stay.

Life went on for me and everyone else. Throughout the city, we all had classes, work, and our daily lives. It was a weird feeling, enjoying my time abroad in an environment I knew was slowly killing me.

Experiencing life in a city facing such a pollution crisis had an incredible impact on my perspective, even out of academics. After traveling back to the states at the end of the semester, it was odd in a way to see my fascination with pollution looking back at me in other faces– the most frequent question I was asked about living in China was how it felt living in a literally toxic environment.

It is an interesting time to travel to and study China, simply due to the current political and social climate. Simply by listening to President Donald Trump, we can hear his competitive attitude towards China.

I can sometimes hear this competitive spirit when I speak to people about China’s environmental issues. People want to hear how awful life is. How gross the air is, about food insecurity due to soil pollution, about algal blooms, or desertification. And we want to feel good about America in comparison. “Yes, maybe China is doing better economically, but think of the environment!” And, usually, the conversation stops there.

We don’t want to talk about China being the number one installer of solar panels in the world; or the government’s massive investment in to the development of solar, wind, and other renewable energy. And sometimes we don’t even want to think about how the environmental problems China is facing today are affecting and killing real people.

But most of all, we don’t think about how some regions of the US are facing similar struggles today. To travel to Shanghai, I left my family in Utah, in the midst of some of the highest AQI and pm2.5 levels we had seen in the state’s history. In fact, Salt Lake City is ranked with having the 6th worst air in the country, with an F ranking in both particulate matter and ozone pollution.

Before I left, I certainly saw families wearing face masks and had trouble seeing more than two cars ahead of me on the Interstate. I won’t lie and say our cases are as extreme, but they are far from ideal, especially with the host of reforms President Trump is already putting into place that limit environmentally friendly policies.

As an American citizen, I lack much power to influence the industries and governmental forces causing China’s environmental crisis, but we can certainly positively affect domestic examples… and there is no time more important to act than now.

Sable Liggera, ’17, is an Environmental Science and Policy and East Asian Studies Double Major. They were a Global STRIDE and spent their JYA in Shanghai, China. Last summer, they interned at NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program. They are currently a member of the Global Impressions Editorial Board.

Fall 2016 Issue VIII: Notes from the Field

Mutually Intelligible

October 27, 2016 jbouzaher

“Are you incapable of complexity?” –Mountains beyond Mountains

When twenty-four American teenagers and I stepped off a bus and into our new homes in cities nestled in the heart of China’s Sichuan province to start a six-week study of Chinese, we had been told that we were the brightest crayons in that year’s box of applicants, ready to study the official national language of China, Mandarin Chinese, known within China as “the common language.”

imag0979 I could talk and ponder for hours about the experience that followed, an experience that simultaneously taught, pushed, and comforted me every day, but instead I will only tell you about one thing, a thing that was mentioned only in passing during the program’s extensive orientation process: the Sichuan provincial dialect.

Now, when I say Sichuan dialect, know that in China there are dialects within dialects, and that two people who grew up fifty miles apart within the same province do not necessarily understand each other, especially in the southeast where the dialects are notoriously complicated. People have rightly argued that many dialects can be considered separate languages within a Chinese language family.

Keeping that in mind, take the Sichuan dialect and add in teenage web slang, personal habits of speech, and a few dozen idioms. This is what our host families, friends, and pretty much everyone else spoke to each other every day, which meant we felt out of the loop just studying the standardized national Mandarin in the classroom. In addition, since many of the host families spoke dialect or heavily accented Mandarin directly to us, we struggled to communicate the little Chinese that we had a solid grasp on, not to mention adequately respond if a nice auntie gave us a beautiful toast completely in dialect while her faith in our understanding twinkled in her eyes.

The reality showed we were effectively studying Mandarin and dialect, and so dialect became like the ubiquitous pepper of Sichuan cuisine; present at every dinner table, handled differently by everyone. Sometimes we successfully bargained with it, sometimes we were laughable as we tried to speak it in a stilted accent to someone who knew it intuitively, and sometimes we completely gave up.

imag1015 Dialect was another reminder that the world is a lot more complex than anyone likes to think. Historically, there had been no Mandarin, no internet to unify China linguistically, only vast expanses of geographic, cultural, and linguistic variation. I have seen a teenager code-switch from Mandarin to dialect to English, then tell me that she had just finished a masterwork of classically written Chinese literature. I have walked the tactile paths for the blind in a city with a vibrantly oral culture, and visited its school for the deaf and blind. I have watched national news subtitled with the widely understood written language. I have heard a Sichuan dialect speaker sing a song in Guangdong dialect from the bottom of their heart, and listened to an elderly man speak in dialect as thick as the summer heat.

Let me end this field diary by saying that as a language student I wanted to understand everything and to be understood. I confess I also wished that the standard language and the local dialect were “mutually intelligible”. But as a person, I grew to appreciate the space between understanding and not understanding, the history that silhouettes China’s linguistic complexity, the laughter and smiles that needed no translation, and of course the food devoured too quickly to ask its name.

Julia Bouzaher was born and raised in Northeast Ohio. She enjoys being outdoors, watching Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and other television shows, tea, and bread. She has been happily studying languages since the sixth grade. She is a 2020 expected graduate who is looking to major in Environmental Science & Policy and is interested in languages, literature, economics, dark chocolate, government, cultural and landscape studies, and all things in between. Shout out to her big sib, Khulood!

Fall 2016 Issue VIII: Notes from the Field

Bridging the Gap: Discussing Race in Chinese

October 26, 2016 kgaskin

How do you explain race and the weight it carries in a language that lacks racial terminology? How do you communicate your racial experience when your level of fluency isn’t high enough?

My first conversation in Chinese about race took place sitting on my friend’s bed while we peeled and ate pomegranates with her Chinese roommate. At that point, we had been in Hangzhou for about three weeks and were still struggling to articulate coherent statements in Chinese on a regular basis. I was telling my friend about how my roommate had only recently discovered that I am Black. Her roommate overheard us and exclaimed: “You’re a black person?! But you’re so white!”

Photo taken while I was on a hunt for a bookstore near the campus of Zhejiang University of Technology in Hangzhou, China.

In Chinese, there is no word for “tan,” “beige,” or “light-skinned.” You are either “白 (white)” which means very fair in color, or you are “黑 (black)” which can be even the slightest shade of tan. During my spring semester in Hangzhou, one of the Chinese roommates was nicknamed “Little Black” because he was tanner than all of them. Yet oddly enough, to be considered an actual Black person you have to be very, very dark-skinned.

In my very fragmented language, I tried to explain that Black people come in all sorts of shades and have a wide range of different physical characteristics. The disbelief on her face prompted me to show her a family portrait. Upon seeing my parents, she still insisted I was the palest among them. She seemed to be trying to comfort me. Her behavior indicated she did not want me to call myself “dark,”most likely because in the eyes of China’s beauty standards, it would be similar to calling myself “ugly.”

She then asked me: in African-American culture, is it better to be lighter or darker? The question made a gross discomfort rise within me. During times of slavery, lighter-skinned slaves were “treated better” and allowed in the master’s house. This elevation of lighter-skinned Blacks and superficial level of acceptance created tensions within the community that still exist today, particularly among Black women. For example, Kanye West made a casting call for only “multiracial-looking women.” Another example is the stereotype that all light-skinned girls are stuck-up. It is because of issues of colorism that growing up I always felt unaccepted and detached from other Black girls my age. But in the eyes of my friend’s roommate, color is only a “beauty choice.” I felt myself struggling to answer. Is there a word for “colorism” in Chinese? How do I explain that Eurocentric beauty standards are a part of Black women’s oppression, both in the United States and globally?

Although my language didn’t help the situation at the time, I later discovered that racial language is almost nonexistent in China. Why wouldn’t it be? Most people in China do not see a foreigner, or even someone who looks racially different from them, their entire lives. In comparison, America is one of the most racially diverse countries in the world, and therefore our language developed the ability to describe, explain and define racial experience.

I also came to understand that race is perceived differently in China. Without a doubt, racism exists in China, but it is different from America’s particular brand of it. In Chinese culture, for example, the nickname “Little Black,” although highly problematic in American culture, is just a term of endearment and a lighthearted way to describe someone’s appearance. Another Chinese roommate was nicknamed “Little Fat” because he was slightly more overweight than everyone else. In China, if your skin looks dry or you’ve lost weight, people will comment on it. There is not as much sensitivity towards discussion of appearance in their culture. That said, in China, there is a hierarchy of how foreigners are treated and White people are clearly at the top.

Towards the end of my study abroad in China, I had to give a presentation to a class of forty students at another Chinese university. Since I was the only student who had been in the program for a year, my teacher thought it would be a good idea for me to share my experiences with the class. Although I felt a bit scared, I decided I would discuss how I experienced life as a light-skinned Black person in China. I wanted to try again to explain race and microaggressions in Chinese, but I didn’t want to make it seem as if I were attacking China or Chinese culture. So I made this section of my speech humorous. I didn’t use any complicated language or try to look up any special terms. Using only the fluency I had, I tried my best to simply poke fun at the absurdity of some of the situations I’d been in.

The students ended up really enjoying my presentation and laughed at all of my jokes! I was so worried it would be awkward, or that I wouldn’t be able to explain things correctly. However, the audience welcomed the casualness of my speech and my use of popular slang. I’m not sure if any of the students took away anything more than a couple of laughs from my presentation, but regardless, I definitely felt better finally being able to put everything I’d experienced out in the open. I also learned humor is a language everyone can understand.

Kayla Gaskin is a creative-writing, music loving, big boots wearing multiethnic black Aquarius with an addiction to sweets and Buzzfeed videos. She has traipsed all over Southern China & Taiwan, and since become a travel and adventure enthusiast. Her major is East Asian Languages & Literatures with a translation studies concentration – and although she is not quite sure yet what path she wants to walk…her hope is to continue spreading cultural awareness and helping others in whatever way she can.

Fall 2015 Issue V: Tastes

Tasting Community Solidarity with Hands

November 4, 2015 myao

When I was first served ojja, a deep red, Tunisian-style spicy tomato-based stew, at a small street food restaurant in downtown Tunis, I was immediately caught off guard. How would I eat this dish without a knife and fork, a spoon, or chopsticks?

I innocently posed the question to my roommate, Fidaa, who was with me. “Yadik!” she replied, and repeated it twice while laughing (yadik means “your hand” in Arabic). She sensed my dumbfoundedness and asked whether I had ever eaten anything with my hands. I told her that besides pizza and chicken wings, I had not. In America, I’ve even seen people eating pizza and chicken wings with silverware in restaurants because of the social stigma attached to eating with your hands– it is seen as rude and uncivilized.

“Mish mushkila,” Fidaa said (that means “no problem” in Arabic). She brought me to the washing basin near the entrance of the restaurant and let me wash my hands thoroughly. Fidaa told me that a meal in Tunisia begins with washing your hands, and that, therefore, we would be able to find a washing basin near the entrance of almost all restaurants. I dried my hands with napkins and returned to my seat.

In most Muslim countries, people only eat with their right hands because their left hands are reserved for cleaning their bodies. Fidaa said, however, that Tunisians would not be very strict with this rule, and that most of the time eating with both hands was acceptable. She invited me to observe how she ate ojja. Hers had two very runny eggs on top. She first ripped off a chunk of bread, not too big or too small, and then used it to stir an egg into the piping hot stew. She dipped the bread again into the stew-and-egg mixture, twirling and twisting it until it was soaked through, and used her thumb to push the bread into her mouth.

Then it was my turn, but I hesitated. When you think about it, our fingers are much more nimble than silverware and we waste less when we eat with our hands. Eating with my hands was not difficult at all and it seemed so natural, so why did I hesitate? What did I worry about?

Since moving from China to America, I have become assimilated into Western culture, and used to its codes of conduct: I always dress formally when going to a concert; I refrain from talking loudly in public, and I eat according to the “proper” etiquette: I learned how to position my napkin and how to hold a knife and fork correctly. I felt ashamed many times during this process when I thought that my performance was not up to standard, because deep in my heart, I was afraid of being judged by others and labeled an “uncivilized Chinese woman.” I carried this sense of fear and restraint with me to Tunisia, and I never imagined that I would have to confront it in front of a hot plate of stew. I looked around me and saw that everyone was eating with their hands. I told myself, “If you don’t eat with your hands now, you will become the odd one out. Just try it.”

I made up my mind and reached for the bread with my right hand. I tried to recall how Fidaa had torn off a small chunk of it and imitated her action. At that moment, the hot surface of the bread (which I would have never been able to feel if had I been eating with silverware) evaporated my stress and my fear of being judged against other’s expectations; it gave me a sense of relief and freedom. As I dipped the bread into the ojja, my head got closer to the plate and I inhaled a rich, spicy aroma. When I stirred the other runny egg, I could feel the piece of bread in my hand absorbing the nourishing meal, and the sensation evoked an alchemy of emotions, at once warm, gentle, and caressing. When I finally put the bread into my mouth, its taste, along with that of garlic, green peppers, coriander, cumin, and harissa started to blend together. I had to admit that I had never felt so connected to food before. I even felt blessed that I had chosen to eat with my hands instead of a fork and a knife, which I suddenly saw as a nuisance, alienating me from my primal connection to food and prohibiting a mindful and sensual experience.

While eating with your hands softens the formality of eating etiquette, it also creates a sense of community solidarity. Unlike in America, where each individual eats from his or her own bowl (even in American family-style meals, people take their portions of food out of the big plate or big bowl and eat from their independent plates), people share plates of food in Tunisia. On that night, I shared the same plate of ojja with Fidaa. We ripped off hunks of the same bread and dipped the pieces into the same stew. When I found a piece of merguez (goat intestine) close to me that was especially good, I shared it with her, and when she realized that I did not like olives, she ate them all for me. I also learned to be considerate, knowing that we only had one portion of bread to share. In this ritual, food became a new connection between Fidaa and me, cementing an organic bond and shared responsibilities. In this way, eating becomes much more than just the transfer of edibles to the mouth with some metal-pronged sticks — it’s an intimate ritual, connecting us to our food and to the people with whom we share it.

After the meal, I felt ashamed of myself for my ignorance and narrow-mindedness. It is true that eating etiquette is at the core of Western fine dining culture, and we should give our respect to that wholeheartedly. But when it comes to other dining cultures, such as those that involve eating with your hands, we should not impose our standards on their traditions. We see many Arab restaurants starting to provide silverware, choosing to abandon their traditional, homey eating rituals to avoid being associated with stereotypes of primitiveness. When immigrants choose to learn the host country’s culture and etiquettes, shouldn’t people from the host country also learn to respect other traditions and embrace diversity?

I felt that I had perpetuated a cultural misunderstanding by mistakenly equating difference with inferiority. Eating in Tunisia taught me a lesson: great food culture does not only come from the West.

Yvie Yao is an international student from Qingdao, China. She considers herself a third-culture kid and a world citizen after living abroad in Singapore, Tunisia, and the U.S. She is currently a junior at Smith College majoring in History and concentrating in Book Studies. She believes in the power of storytelling. She hopes to empower women through story-sharing and connect people across cultures through her writing.

Fall 2015 Issue V: Tastes

Cupcakes and Colonialism

November 4, 2015 gzutrau

He was looking for an intern. I was looking for a reason to stay.

I had just finished a semester of studying Mandarin in Beijing. I made friends with locals. I had pictures taken of me by strangers. I drank qsingtao by the half-liter. I produced a three-thousand character report on the conflict between environmental protection and China’s market economy. I was immersed. After my program ended, I traveled all over the country. Taking over night sleeper trains, touring new cities, visiting my host family from high school in Xi’an, and meeting eclectic characters from across the globe. Everyday that I traveled, I felt China’s magnetism pulling me closer and closer, while I simultaneously felt less and less of an obligation to return home on my flight to Boston at the end of May.

When one of the many people I met in my hostel-hopping in Shanghai offered me a translation internship, I knew that I had found my reason to stay. Less than 24 hours before my scheduled flight home, I made the decision to leave Beijing, and move to Shanghai to live and work in a new city for the following two months. I rented an apartment in a neighborhood riddled with brothels, gambling joints, and the best xiao long bao restaurants I’d ever had the privilege of eating at. Within hours of my decision to relocate, responses to my applications for English tutoring jobs were already rolling in. As a white-presenting native English speaker, I was a hot commodity.

My boss, on the other hand, was a Philadelphia native who had worked a few odd jobs in China but had had some trouble finding jobs that would hire him as a black man. He had decided to capitalize on his baking skills and started a small company called NE Cakes. He was the victim of anti-black racism imported from the west, but he found a way to make the best of it. He was my cake boss, and he was my ticket into Shanghai’s immigrant community, members of which because of their white, rich, or western identities were granted the social license to be labeled as “ex-pats.” Cake boss and I got along great, and I was happy to be helping him spread his delicious cream cheese frosting cupcakes all around the city. My charge was to translate his menu, attract new Chinese customers, and help him with marketing strategies to effectively make his brand appealing in the context of Chinese culture. My first tactic was convincing him that his American-ness was a commodity worth capitalizing on, a marketing technique in and of itself.

On the third of July, I chatted with my roommate in Mandarin as I spent hours turning paper and toothpicks into three hundred tiny American-flag cupcake toppers. What could be more American than spending hours creating things made to immediately be thrown away? The next morning, I delivered hundreds of red-white-and-blue cupcakes to vendors all over Shanghai. When my cake duties had concluded, I did what any reasonable American would do on the fourth of July: I headed over to the French concession with high hopes of meeting up with my American friends. We planned to stroll along the ex-pat-inundated bar streets, namely Youngkang Lu, a street infested with English speakers and craft beer. The concentration of American flag paraphernalia was overwhelming. As I walked through the crowds with my friend, I looked around at the mostly white faces. There were native English speakers, and there were a few Chinese people who spoke enough English to associate with Shanghai’s elite. The most salient feature of the Anglophone mob was my cupcake toppers hanging out of the mouths of so many of the revelers. People shot-gunned Budlight, listened to American pop, and haphazardly set off fireworks in the street. Happy Birthday, America.

This debauchery was a manifestation of all that I’d grown to resent about “ex-pats” in China. Throughout my six months in China, I grew to think of myself as separate from the “ex-pat” communities of the big cities; after all, I spoke Chinese, had Chinese friends, and loved Chinese food.

What amazed me most about living with and talking to my Chinese friends was that, not only was no one similarly resentful, but that people seemed happy and even grateful for it. So many young people throughout the country seem to want nothing more than to learn English and get out while they could. Meanwhile, Western imperialism continues to choke China. On China’s shores, Western factories produce Western products to be shipped to Western consumer economies, ensuring that those Western countries maintain their blue skies. 500,000 people a year die from air pollution in China.

My time in Shanghai forced me to reckon with my status as a colonizer. It is true that I love and am committed to the Chinese language, food, people, and culture, but I benefited from Western/American privilege every single day in China. And when I used that privilege to market an American product, to put Chinese money in American pockets, I exploited that privilege. I found myself in the cross-hairs of an international, interlingual, interracial, and intercultural diplomatic sociopolitical issue. I feel more committed now than ever to using my American privilege to preserve what is amazing and important about China. If I ever move back, I’ll surely have ex-pat friends, but I’ll go out of my way to refer to myself as an American immigrant. As a beneficiary of a long history of imperialism and exploitation, it was absolutely crucial for me to realize a simple truth: even though the medium was cupcakes, the method was still colonialism.

Gabriella Zutrau is a linguist with a proclivity for social justice education and organizing. Although much of her time at Smith has been taken up by organizing for fossil fuel divestment, she also has a keen interest in how language and culture affect each other. More specifically, she is interested in language as a tool and a metric that can be used to liberate or oppress, to humanize or objectify. As a language-learner and traveler, she has forced herself to examine her many identities as politically charged, shifting her views of her role to accommodate new contexts as she move from place to place. She will graduate from Smith in 2016 with a double major in Psychology and Linguistics and a concentration in Translation Studies focused in Mandarin.

Spring 2015 Issue III: Up Close / From Afar

A Moment of Peace

February 9, 2015 Jacqueline Morse

Our plane was delayed two and a half hours in Shanghai, due to smog so thick we couldn’t see the airport from the plane window. We had originally planned to climb the mountain, but because of the delay, and then the fact that we missed our train from Xi’an to the mountain base and had to take a later one, we arrived at Huashan only an hour before dark. Not wanting to climb one of the most dangerous mountains in China in the dark in the winter, we opted for the safer and faster cable-car route.

By the time we got to the top, it was completely dark. There was snow and ice blanketing the hills around us, but the paths were clear. Our plan was to stay in one of the hotels (I use the word “hotels” rather loosely — they were a collection of stone-floored rooms with no beds), but the first one we came upon was 300 yuan a night (roughly 50USD), and nearly full, so we decided to check out our other options before we settled. Hiking around 45 minutes to another peak, we reached a second hotel; this one was, to our dismay, completely full. As the innkeeper turned us away and we resigned ourselves to hiking back to the other hotel, a man wearing a set of long robes emerged from darkness and caught our attention. With the help of my (rather broken) Chinese, I figured out he was trying to tell us to come with him, and that he had a place for us to stay. Sophie, Justina, and I shared a kind of “what the hell, why not” look, and followed him up a flight of stone stairs that curled around the side of a cliff. When we got to the top, we realized he was leading us to a small temple-like building. We entered, and he ushered us behind the shrine, where there was a bunkbed and a few blankets. He only charged us 80 yuan each (a solid deal), and we were really close to where we wanted to be the next morning to watch the sunrise: the east peak.

The next morning we got up before dawn to find the front room of the temple, and the top bunk of our bed, had filled with people overnight. Needing to pee, I remembered a couple of outhouses I had seen the night before, and slipped out before Justina and Sophie, stepping around the people on the floor. The outhouses were built on the side of the mountain, had no doors, and instead of being built over a hole dug in the ground, hung over the side of the cliff. The snow underneath the hole leading down the slope was not clean. A line was forming in front of them and I, still half asleep, did not trust myself to not fall off the side of the mountain, and decided to hold it.

We hiked to the east peak to find a crowd of people already gathered at the prime sunrise-watching spot. There was a fence along the edge of a steep cliff, covered in golden locks and bright red strips of cloth, which, against the rising light in the sky, looked absolutely beautiful. In the summer, many people choose to make the hike up Huashan overnight to reach the peak by sunrise, or they hike up and sleep on the cliff itself, tying themselves to the poles of the fence so they don’t fall.

There was a lot of fog hanging around the mountains that morning (or smog — in China, it’s often hard to tell which, and Xi’an was at the top of the pollution charts that week, so smog from the city could have blown over to the mountain quite easily), so the light from the sun filtered in slowly, changing the sky to a soft, grey-blue color; it made the mountains in the background look hazy and ethereal.

When I look back at my travels abroad, I tend to remember the “from afar”. I forget the details. It’s when I look at my “up close” pictures, of cute bugs or interesting rocks or cool fences on top of mountains, that I start to remember the little parts of the story. How, when we were waiting for the sun to rise, I sat right on the edge of the cliff, holding onto the chain of the fence, cuddled close to my friends for warmth. I remember how, out of a hectic trip where we missed or almost missed every train and plane we had booked ahead of time, we found a moment of peace on top of this mountain.

Jaqueline Morse has always had an interest in travel and in discovering new places. For her junior year abroad she studied in Shanghai, China and Melbourne, Australia, spending the two intervening months WWOOFing in New Zealand. She hopes to someday find a career where she can travel to new places often.

Fall 2014 Issue II: Adapting

From the Smith College Archives: “In the Heart of Misery”

November 12, 2014 Sable Liggera

On March 31, 1934, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001), Smith College Class of 1928, made headlines as the first female recipient of the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Gold Medal, “honor[ing] outstanding explorations or discoveries.” Lindbergh, the first licensed female glider pilot in the USA, was recognized for her work alongside her husband, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, in mapping 40,000 miles of skytrails, spanning five continents.

These exploratory flights inspired Lindbergh’s much-acclaimed memoir, North to the Orient. After her death, one of her heirs donated her manuscripts and artifacts from her travels to the Smith College Sophia Smith Archives, in recognition of Anne’s history with the College.

Anne’s drafts focus entirely on her descriptions of flying over China, which had been struck by a catastrophic flood. As Anne and her husband were mapping out airspace above China at the time, the National Flood Relief Commission of China requested them to chart the affected areas. The 1931 flood devastated a large portion of Northern China, perhaps due to an unusually large amount of rain following a two year period of drought from 1928 to 1930. Estimates of the numbers killed vary from 3.7 million to 4 million with an additional 24 to 54 million people affected by its aftermath (1). Many of these later victims died of starvation, cholera, typhoid fever, small-pox, and dysentery.

The area affected by flood waters extended an estimated 8,000 square miles, largely north of the Yangtze River, the “east part alone of this area equal in size to Massachusetts” and, as Anne recounted, the equivalent of “Lake Erie [being] set down on Massachusetts” (2).

A Hand-Drawn Map of the Flooded Area by Lindbergh

The Lindberghs were asked to carry supplies to villages and relief centers. As food would be too heavy to carry, they instead transported medical supplies and a doctor, who, according to Anne,“was almost more needed” than food due to “the epidemics that inevitably follow a flood.”

Their first flight was to a small village, Hinghwa, marooned on the center of a large flooded area, some 25 miles from the nearest dry ground. Anne describes flying over hundreds of small villages with water covering all but the roofs. “Those inhabitants still remaining,” she details, “were living in small boats” and surviving by “fishing in the streets and where the fields have been.” However, “the vast majority would never be helped. They simply could not be reached.”

When the Lindberghs landed in Hinghwa, they encountered the misery firsthand. The villagers had resorted to living in small fishing boats, and a growing number were facing illness, starvation, and lack of access to safe drinking water. Immediately upon landing, “men [began] leaping from boat to boat, toppling over each other in their efforts to get nearer to the plane,” in hopes that the Lindberghs had brought food.

But the Lindberghs had brought only medical supplies and a doctor, who hoped to develop a relief center for the stranded village. When, however, the villagers discovered that the “brown sack” the doctor carried contained no food, they became increasingly agitated, believing the Lindberghs were unable to understand them. Mutters of “the foreigners do not understand” and “we are starving,” echoed throughout the crowd, as a number of people began to mime eating with chopsticks.

When it became clear that the Lindberghs could not provide the resources that the villagers needed, the crowd became increasingly violent and desperate. The doctor, who had left the plane to talk with the villagers about his plans to open the relief center, later told Anne he had only “hoped he could get back to the plane alive.” When the Lindberghs expressed their intentions to leave the escalating and threatening situation, Anne recounts in meticulous detail the “hands clinging to the wings and tail surfaces” in a vain attempt to delay their departure. It was only when the doctor, a native, screamed in Chinese, “We’re starting the engine! If you don’t get back you’ll all be killed!” that the villagers began to back up from the plane. One woman retorted bitterly, “What does it matter? We have nothing.”

Later in the manuscripts, Anne returns to this nameless woman, describing her as “that last ebb of misery and hopelessness,” a traumatizing figure in her morose acceptance of death. Of her entire voyage to China, what haunted her the most was that one woman, trapped “in the heart of misery.” After witnessing so many people close to death and having to abandon them to their fates, she herself was able to “escape almost easily and quickly as one escapes from a horrible nightmare, in a flash of waking.”

In Anne’s drafts, she reflects on the general lack of knowledge of the flood in the United States, of the number of people affected and the general devastation. Mostly, however, she seems trapped in that helpless moment of realization that there was nothing she could do, no relief she could bring to even one of those people. This recognition of ‘failure’ served as an inspiration for her account of the trip in North to the Orient. While she could do very little to relieve the pain and suffering she saw, towards the end of one of the drafts, she exclaims, “but now I have told you,” conveying the sense of relief she felt at being able to bear witness.

After all, when no help can be given, sometimes all one can do is share another’s story, so, at the very least, their loss can be remembered.

1. “NOAA’S TOP GLOBAL WEATHER, WATER AND CLIMATE EVENTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” NOAA News Online (Story 334b). N.p., Dec. 1999. Web. 20 April, 2014. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories/s334.htm

2. All quotes from Box 79: 1, North to the Orient: Manuscripts, Anne Morrow Lindbergh Writings, Smith College Archives

Photos: Box 79:8, North to the Orient: Passports, Anne Morrow Lindbergh Writings, Smith College Archives; Box 78:21, North to the Orient: The Flood, Anne Morrow Lindbergh Writings, Smith College Archives

Sable Liggera, ’17, is an Environmental Science and Policy and East Asian Studies Double Major. They are a second year Global STRIDE and a second-year Chinese student. Last summer, they spent 2 months in Hefei, China, completing a language intensive program. They are currently a member of the Global Impressions Editorial Board.