Tag Archives: Hamburg

Spring 2018 Issue XII: Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone

Words at the Tip of My Tongue

April 19, 2018 Tianhua Zhu

Four years ago, when I was at home in China, getting ready to study abroad in the United States, my family and friends repeatedly advised me to befriend all kinds of people. “Step out of your comfort zone!” They urged. “Don’t get caught up in the Chinese students’ inner circle!” But then, there we were— occupying a table in the dining hall, forming study groups, eating out on weekends, and traveling together over the break. There was almost a natural affinity among us and I wondered why. I gradually noticed that this inner circle comprised of those who were using English as a functional language.

By “functional” I mean the fundamental use of the language to achieve a goal, such as buying a toothbrush, ordering a meal, or understanding the questions in an exam. In my first year, I struggled with even the functional use of English. I could only decline when my friends asked me out for a movie. “Why?” They asked. “Because I wouldn’t be able to understand!” I replied. They laughed so hard that I was bewildered. Isn’t that strange — A college student still relying on subtitles to understand most vernacular English? Language is an interactive tool, but at the same time, a subjective experience. How well was I supposed to understand a speaker? How much did they understand me? Would they judge my intelligence based on my flawed expressions? I had no way to know. As I talked, so many words were at the tip of my tongue. So I paused; I even saw what I intended to say written out in Chinese in front of eyes, but I was silent. My world was muffled, so I strived extra hard to sharpen my senses.

I used to be afraid of overhearing people speaking English due to the fear that it would confirm my inability to understand them. Gradually, I learned to open my ears to the outside world and acquire as much information as possible. I put down my earphones and tuned in to the people around me. Still, I would describe my experience of going outside of my dorm room in my first year as stepping onto a battlefield, since I was easily submerged in frustrations and embarrassments.

I also realized that a more severe obstacle to making friends in another linguistic environment is the expression of emotions. Words don’t just mean what they mean; they also carry loads of emotions. There are words to make jokes and puns, to form swear words and release anger, to trigger laughter and tears, to hurt, and to heal. I felt those words at the tip of my tongue but not in my heart. The distance between my tongue and my heart was the distance between me and others, whose emotions were revealed whenever they spoke.

Deciding to learn German is what saved me. In that classroom, I found something familiar—the deliberateness of sticking to grammatical rules due to an absence of intuition, the hardship of coming up with the right words, and the decoupling of thoughts and the medium that carries them. If I talked about struggling with words at the tip of the tongue, my German study pals were the ones who fully comprehended and empathized with me.

When studying abroad in Hamburg, the American students formed an inner circle, and I was part of it. This is why I smiled when one member of the Hamburg group asked, “why do Chinese students only hang out with each other?” It doesn’t have much to do with the nature of a particular culture or national character, as some may suggest. The familiarity and security within a group is what defines a comfort zone, where people naturally fall back.

This was the time when not only my German but also my English progressed considerably. Every word was a trial and every sentence that I uttered carried the risk of embarrassing myself. But at the same time, each attempt at communication was an endeavor beyond my comfort zone. It was this type of everyday struggle that humbled my friends and me, as well as empowered us. In Hamburg, we faced, fought, and embraced this linguistic challenge together.

Admittedly, language barriers don’t account for all the hardships of making friends in a foreign environment, but language is certainly one of the most significant factors, as it carries the signature of one’s culture, living environment, and family character. It defines insiders and outsiders, and it delineates everyone’s most basic comfort zone. In this context, stepping out of our comfort zone is not the end but the beginning. Just like weight training, knowing how many sets of a routine there are (i.e. when the discomfort will end) is essential, as no one can sustain in an uncomfortable environment forever. But the ultimate goal should be to expand our comfort zone through repetitive and continuous attempts.

What I gained in both English and German environments was not just the languages themselves but also confidence, persistence, resilience, and courage. I now have a greater appreciation for the struggles of living in a foreign environment and more understanding of the tendency for people to cluster together with their peers from the same cultural background. We are not simply wasting an opportunity to improve but seeking a temporary shelter between battles.

Now I know that time will bring the words at the tip of my tongue, one by one, down to the depth of my heart.

Tianhua Zhu ’18 is currently a Senior, majoring in both Government and Linguistics. Looking at the intersection between the two majors, she is interested in the politics of language and seeks to understand the language of politics. She participated in the Smith Program in Hamburg in Spring 2017 and took advantage of the great opportunity to travel around several countries in Europe. Originally coming from Shanghai, China, she would like to accumulate more international experiences and bring together distinct perspectives echoing through the East and the West.

Spring 2018 Issue XI: Every Picture Tells a Story

Embracing Imperfection

February 20, 2018 Tianhua Zhu

When I first arrived in Germany, I immediately noticed the overwhelming number of flower shops. Around the corner, on a quiet sideway, or even in a train station, I always could find stores full of colorful and vibrant blossoms. And locals loved to decorate their homes with various flowers — especially on their balconies, which greatly beautified the street view. Those little terrace gardens seemed integrated into the traditional style of homes not only in Germany but also in other European countries, such as France and Switzerland. Tourists love to take pictures of themselves standing in front of those traditional houses with little flower boxes by the windows.

Once I had lived there longer and observed my host mother spend a great amount of time working in her mini garden on the balcony, I realized that flowers are not just decorations but an integral part of the life of local residents. After all, gardening takes a lot of time and energy: those fragile plants cannot survive without constant attention. But there is another difficulty that I considered to be more troubling: No matter how much effort you put into prolonging the life of flowers, they still die pretty quickly. The sorrow of this inevitable loss, this sense of powerlessness when watching their transient lives end, had prevented me from using any flower to decorate my own home back in Shanghai. I used only greenery to fill the open spaces of my apartment, which, although still perishable, can at least last longer than evanescent flowers.

But then, while I was in Germany, I constantly came across florists on the street, and I found it hard to move my eyes away from the pure beauty and liveliness of these blooming flowers. I finally conceded and decided to buy a few to put in my dorm room. I chose some pink roses and white daisies at first, and I felt my room immediately brighten. Every time I opened the door, the sight of my flowers brought me joy. This was the beginning of a transition in my attitude toward not only flower decoration but also something beyond that.

Later on, I added some yellow carnations, and when tulips were in season, I brought in their various colors once in a while, and even decorated the Smith Center at the university with colorful tulips. Still, I did feel sad when the flowers began to fade and finally wither away, and I pondered the meaning of blooming—“If only they knew their tragic ending from the very beginning!” I said to myself. How can they embrace their destiny and still express joy so wholly and genuinely?

I couldn’t help but reflect about myself. I realized I had the tendency to not even start something if I thought I could not do it perfectly well. This may be an extreme version of my motto as a “pessimistic optimist,” but I did adopt this perfectionist-leaning belief, which often held me back from unpredictable novel attempts. When applied to language learning, my perfectionist mindset disturbs me, as I have to admit the fact that I may never reach the same fluency as the native speakers. No matter how hard I have tried, I will always speak with a certain deficiency. I will never reach “perfection.”

Studying in Germany and using a third language was yet another endeavor to force myself to step further out of my comfort zone and “destabilize” my life. I have always believed in the meaning of destabilizing one’s regular life, and this time, it proved worthwhile as I learned to embrace the eternal imperfection of life. That is, I was forced to express myself even in a broken way. Before being in Germany, I had always faltered when it came to speaking German, since I had less time to prepare and I feared making mistakes. “I’m not ready.” I always told myself, and failed to realize that I could never be ready unless I took the first step and started speaking more freely. In Germany I began to communicate with all kinds of people and to learn how to bear the embarrassment of making mistakes and the fear of exposing my weaknesses. I thought about the courage of my fragile yet stubborn flowers and entered the uncharted wilderness of a language that is foreign to me. Once, I was afraid that when I spoke up, people would think me rather dull if I could not convey my ideas clearly or made stupid grammatical mistakes. But if I waited until I got every gender and adjective ending in German perfectly correct before starting to speak, I would never be able to voice even one single sentence. Desire to communicate won out: I learned to cast aside my worries about others’ opinions of me and clumsily began to build my German one phrase after another.

I used to ask myself, why should I start something if I could never reach perfection? By the end of my stay in Germany, I finally realized that the premise of this introspective question was wrong — and my wilted flowers knew better than I did. The purpose was never to be perfect but to start, to bloom, to step into the turbulence of life, and to give the best that one can with the gift of life.

Fall 2017 Issue X: Immigration

Shifting the Perspective: From Host to Guest

October 19, 2017 Lucy Hilgers

“But what do you want over there? Why do you think you have to be there in order to ‘find yourself’ ?”

This was an initial response by one of my friends in 2015 when I told him that I wanted to go abroad for one or two semesters. At that point, I didn’t even know about Smith or Northampton, I just had this adventurous idea and a dream. Yet being the first one in my family, and one of two people in my immediate circle of friends to plan on attending university, every topic that was even remotely related to it was treated with a sense of distrust and skepticism by most of those in my close environment.

However, actually going abroad shouldn’t have been that exotic and outlandish for them since they all knew my friend Kelly, who, coming from New York City, had lived with me and my family in Germany for about six months as part of her internship in Hamburg. Having Kelly living with us added a layer of realism to the prevalent image most people have—myself included—of the United States: Hollywood, McDonald’s, patriotism, the first Black president, Miss Liberty, the greatest economic superpower. (Some elderly people might have added Texas, the Grand Canyon, and ranches to that list of typical “American” associations.) For me as the host, I hadn’t needed to adjust a lot. I loved speaking English with Kelly, no matter how often I was told that she had to practice her German with me. I learned new things and also formed a great friendship, which encouraged my dream to somehow make it across the pond in order to get my own impression of her country.

Fast-forward two years: I enrolled at Universität Hamburg with a British and American language and literature major, the Black Lives Matter movement was in full swing, America elected the angry orange president and I somehow earned a scholarship and a place in the AMS graduate program at Smith College. My teachers told me that I had picked such an “interesting” and “exciting” time to visit the US, to which I responded with a smile, thinking how much “ fun” it would be to visit America during this chapter of openly-expressed white supremacy, misogyny and racism. I knew that in America, it was of greater importance that Kelly was African-American, and that I now had to face issues of race and identity that differed from home.

It would be my first time visiting the US, travelling alone, and being away from home for so long. I was curious to explore the USA from the inside, and to see the apparently opposing realities and worldviews Americans held. Moreover, I was interested to see what would happen to me as an individual, being somewhat isolated from family, friends, and the cultural and political environment in which I was raised. But with the current tensions, I was also worried: how would I be perceived as an alien, a woman, a German? What would be the appropriate behavior to deal with racism as an outsider? And as I approached my departure, what would it mean to be labeled as “White” in the US without the identifier “American” coming after it?

I have to disappoint the reader by remarking that I am not yet able to provide answers at this point of my journey. I just shifted my perspective: being born and raised in Germany without an immigrant background, I used to be the host, not only to Kelly but to millions of people, who had at some point left their country of origin. But now I am a guest on American soil. I’m not an immigrant. My role is the one of a temporary resident, who has “the privilege of not being immediately recognized as such,” as Kelly once put it (at least until I opened my mouth to speak ). But I do realize that the color of my skin and my gender have an impact on how people treat me over here, something I haven’t really experienced at home. Often, I feel more vulnerable and sometimes, simply lost. But overall, I remain curious and I’m determined to find some answers and insights to these issues of identity.

Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany as the youngest of four children, Lucy became infamous for talking too much and always writing “the next J.K. Rowling book” whenever there was a writing task in class. Studying abroad at Smith for a year as part of her American Language and Literature major, she takes every chance to pursue her great passions: Writing, movies and chocolate.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

TRANSITION, verb

April 15, 2016 tnehls

I remember the exact moment I realised that I wasn’t cisgender. It was on my way back home in Germany, a couple of weeks before I was going to leave for Smith. I was just getting off the train and as I climbed up the stairs from the platform, I thought, “I am not a woman.”

I wasn’t and still am not able to understand what exactly that means, and I have since realised that figuring out my gender identity is a process that is likely to be never-ending. This is often frustrating and scary, but ultimately I hope that I will be able to see it as freeing. The pressure to conform doesn’t stop with stepping outside of the gender binary. Even as I came to identify as trans, I was irritated at myself: how could I say I wasn’t one gender or another, when gender is a social construct? What would make the gender I identified with any more real than the one I was assigned at birth? I’ve never subscribed to gender roles anyways, so on what basis do I even define gender?

Coming to terms with questions like these is especially difficult in a society that generally doubts your gender identity even exists. I was fortunate to enter Smith and find a place where I could think about gender in a different way than I could have in Germany. It might seem ironic that I would distance myself from being female while at a women’s college, but it turns out that when you take gender out of the equation, there is more freedom to it.* Sure enough, Smith is far from representative of the rest of the United States (although I am not aware of any women’s colleges in Germany), but one part of the wider culture has been incredibly significant in my understanding of trans identity: the language.

While identifying as non-binary in Germany, the way I conceptualised it was to add a male alter ego to my established female identity. English, a language without grammatical gender that has the option of using they as a non-gendered singular pronoun (however frowned upon it might be stylistically, it is established), provided me with the resources to think and express myself outside of the gender binary. Our language shapes our thoughts and thus our worlds. A language without gendered pronouns, for example Turkish, would help us understand the world in yet another way.

Language is a fundamentally social phenomenon. It shapes our communities and they shape it. I understand now that while, yes, gender is a social construct, that doesn’t make us, as people living in society, free of it. As people who exist in relation to one another, the way we are perceived by others will always be a significant part of who we are. As an individual, I have no problem with my gender identity at this point; I just am who I am. It is when others perceive me in a certain way that does not conform to my self-image that the problems arise.

While transgender awareness is slowly growing when it comes to transgender women and men, most people are not aware that it is a spectrum, and even when non-binary is included, it is often as a third category in addition to the binary extremes. Defying gender roles and wanting to be recognised as non-binary/trans is a balancing act. Even though I know that neither activities, nor clothes, nor makeup, nor haircut have an inherent gender, presenting in a way that is socially construed as feminine will result in me being immediately read as female and erase my gender identity. It often feels that in order to disrupt this, I have to present in a way that is especially masculine, or even identify as a transman in order to not be assumed cis.

As long as we live in a society that upholds gender roles and the gender binary, not conforming to those will be a struggle. But even in this society we can find a community that supports us, in which we can discuss the issues and questions that arise out of this tension, and encourage each other to keep challenging the status quo.

Transition might be read as a noun, but for me it is a verb first and foremost. Life and all that comes with it is unfathomably complex, and there will always be more to discover and figure out. What stagnates will wither, and change is the only constant.

*I am aware that not everyone’s trans identity has been met with love and respect at Smith, but fortunately I have only come across encouragement.

TL Nehls is originally from Hamburg, Germany and has lived in Chile and Northern Ireland before coming to Northampton. Asking them about historical linguistics, memes, or local geology will likely result in a lenghty, albeit enthusiastic, discussion, so be prepared. When not sitting in front of mostly empty word documents, they can be found performing theatre or folk music, or both.

Summer 2016 Issue VII: Transitions

Engaging with New Perspectives on Gender in Multilingual Space

April 15, 2016 dlensingsharp

During the fall semester of my year abroad in Hamburg, I took a class on the poetry of French Renaissance writer Louise Labé which involved readings in French and class time conducted in German. This made me nervous because I found it difficult to speak the two languages at once, but I hoped it would help me become more comfortable moving from one language to another. To be more confident switching between French and German, I would have to participate in class discussions in which both languages were spoken over the course of a single sentence. Though I had never taken a course conducted in two different foreign languages before, my experience in literature courses in French and German at Smith helped me to adapt to this new hybrid model.

lensing-sharp_2016-04-05-essay-image — Dompteuse, 1930. Hannah Höch. Photocollage.

As I navigated the course’s multiple languages, my command of German improved significantly more quickly, as it was the dominant language in the classroom. I gave an oral presentation on the introduction to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which I first read in English, then referred to the German translation in order to convey the concepts to my classmates. This constituted what was essentially my first engagement with theory in a literature course, although some of the basic concepts in Gender Trouble were familiar to me thanks to the open discourses about gender and sexuality at Smith. However, I was fairly surprised when most of my classmates had difficulty understanding the concepts I was discussing, such as the difference between gender identity and biological sex.

Part of the problem seemed to lie in the language itself—any vocabulary used to describe gender was either basic or borrowed from English. In German, Geschlecht means either gender or sex, unless you extend it to Geschlechtsidentität, which specifies gender identity. In a presentation for which I had to distinguish explicitly between gender and sex, I was advised simply to use the English terms as I explained the theory to my classmates in German. Explaining the different components of phallogocentrism (Phallogozentrismus), or the male-centered quality of language, resulted in more confusion. Having attended Smith for two years made me forget that not all or even very many universities encourage conversations about these issues the way Smith does. It surprised me, too, because we often assume that Europeans are much more progressive than Americans with regard to social and political issues. One might think that Germans in particular would have a more open view of gender based on the fact that their language includes a third, neutral grammatical gender. In our class discussions, however, it became clear to me that their engagement with the material began and ended with the theoretical.

This presentation was important to me as a linguistic and intellectual exercise, but was also personally meaningful in a way that didn’t seem to resonate with my classmates. While issues of gender identity have played a significant role in my own inner life and the lives of many of my friends at Smith, the concepts we discussed in this course seemed limited to the abstract for my classmates, who may have only been taking the course to fulfill a major requirement. In comparing discussions I’ve had in German with discussions in English on gender identity, it seems to me that English is a more inherently flexible language, particularly with regard to lexical invention and introduction of new words into everyday speech. This quality has made it easier to facilitate conversations about unique identities, pronoun usage, and other subjects for which a new vocabulary simply must be created.

In the end, it made me more grateful to return to Smith where I would be among like-minded classmates, but it reminded me, too, that there is much work to be done in other less welcoming spaces when I leave. Language certainly shapes the way we view the world, but I realized that that view might not always be more expansive simply because the grammar is. If I want to engage in deeper discussions of gender and sexuality in new cultural and linguistic environments, I’ll need to make the effort to search for the communities where these concepts are treated on a discursive level closer to my own.

Dinah Lensing-Sharp is currently a senior at Smith, enjoying the last few weeks of college with their friends. They are finishing up an honors thesis in Comparative Literature entitled “Sensational Internationals: Gender, Sexuality, and Foreignness in Ruth Landshoff-Yorck’s Die Vielen und der Eine,” which entails a partial translation of the novel as well as an interpretation of its themes informed by critical literary and queer theory. In Fall 2016, Dinah will begin studying for a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.