But hey, the steaks were delicious ...

(Steve)

The past two weeks with my new host family have been great. They spent two years living in Oklahoma, so they all have very good English. While this means I’ve had less of an opportunity to immerse myself in Chinese, it has also allowed for much more communication: we’ve already had conversations covering everything from politics to astrophysics. Erik, my host brother, loves astronomy and photography, and he just finished teaching me all about telescopes. Last week he gave me a twenty-minute tutorial on Chinese history for the past 3000 years. He’s also the first person who’s been able to explain Chinese politics to me – I still don’t get it, but for once I don’t think the language barrier is the problem; I think their system is just that complicated. Another favorite topic of conversation is college applications; I’ve had to explain the American system to my host parents, Chinese students, teachers – I even had to work on someone’s college essay, something I thought I was done with. I met that student, a friend of my host family’s, a few days later, and he admitted that the essay I’d worked on was drafted by his father. I’d done more of his application than he had!

I also feel that I’m having more interaction with the people at school. Erik’s English teacher had me talk about our trip to Beijing and participate in the discussion of Mark Twain’s “The Hundred Pound Note”. His geography teacher asked me to do a presentation on American geography, which went well given my lack of knowledge on the subject. The “English Corner” we do every day after lunch seems to have recovered from its post-Beijing slump (the first few days back, almost no one came), and one regular even invited us all to tea this Sunday afternoon. I’ve become good friends with a couple of Erik’s classmates, one of whom took Erik and I out to a steakhouse last week, where he treated me to a two-hour explanation of Chinese characters. Then we walked out without paying the bill, and the waitress had to run after us. But hey, the steaks were delicious.

With only a week left, I can’t help wondering what I’ve accomplished in my time here. Obviously, my goal of learning the language has failed miserably. Jill maintains that I understand more than I let on, and Tracy admitted to Candice that she and her friends speak faster when I’m around just in case, but there’s no way I could get by without a translator. Still, I’ve made progress, and I get a bit of a thrill every time I catch something someone’s saying. Besides, I think I’ve had enough other experiences to make up for it – the pandas alone would have made this trip worthwhile. When you add all of China’s natural beauty, all of its culture, its relics, and its incredible artwork, not to mention the incredible experience of submerging myself in an entirely alien culture, and when you top it off with all the wonderful people I’ve met along the way, I think this trip was a pretty good deal.