China Reflection

In China, I remembered that it’s okay to sometimes skip the party if it means having a better experience the next day.

I also knew that sometimes you have to drag your friends out with you if you know the party isn’t worth skipping. So, I did both.

I fell asleep, accidentally, at 9pm after hiking the Great Wall for 12 miles my first day in Beijing, which I feel is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Once I was back in Shanghai later in the week, though, I sent it at a club until 4 am when I had to be on a bus by 8:30 for a field class that morning.

Both were things I do not regret.

Being with so many college students, I really regretted not going out in Beijing while I was there. But that’s something to look forward to next time and I think I would have died if I had gone out that night. It is the exact opposite for Shanghai, I know I would have regretted not going out with all my friends during our last night in China, while it was also consequentially my roommate’s birthday.

There are ups and downs to every decision we make, but we have to make them anyway. A lot of times, decisions are a little less trivial than ‘to go out or not to go out’, but you get the point. It’s hard to feel like you’re missing out. Especially when you’re never in a single country for more than a week and everyone is doing things all the time and you know you need sleep, but you wish you didn’t.

One secret is that, when you’re with a group of 400+ people, not every single person is always out or doing something fun. There is simply always someone doing something, but you will never be the only one person not doing something cool.

China also reminded me how incredible this great, big world of ours is. Hiking the Great Wall of China was a dream and I’m still not over the fact that I got to walk on such a huge, monumental piece of world history. Being so small on such a large structure built by people centuries before my time was so humbling. I know that we all make up parts of this world and it changes over time, but some things are just more awe-inspiring than others.

I have never felt as star struck as when I was hiking the wall on my second day, looking at all my friends in front of me and feeling like somehow, I was leaving a big piece of something behind me. Whether that was some sort of close-mindedness about the depth of the world or just Marty the trip liaison lagging behind to take pictures, we’ll never know.

Lastly, thanks to my International Mass Communications class (word to Dan Berkowitz), I was super aware of the way that media is restricted in China. More so, I was surprised at how my American WIFI hotspot allowed me zero access to anything. I spent more money than I had hoped on international data, because no WIFI I found in the country actually worked for me. Chinese citizens use WeChat or VPN to illegally get access to sites and social media platforms that the government aims to restrict and that caught me off guard at first. For example, when I was in Tiananmen Square, I found out that most tour guides only learned of the protest and incident that occurred there from American tourists who had asked about it years after the fact.

I will be forever grateful for my experience there, seeing the way that people’s lives can be changed by their long history or their religious practices or access to media took me by surprise at times. For that, I am so thankful. Immersive learning is not taken for the amazing opportunity it is, and I hope more people feel the urge to go out in the world and experience things on their own instead of simply reading about it in a classroom.