An Immigrant’s Reflections
During my first Christmas break at home as a college student, I shared with my dad that attending Princeton was weird because it was America, but a very different America than what I understood my country to be when I was growing up in Hilo, Hawaii. Princeton’s culture was very similar, yet distinct from what I was accustomed to. Four years later, and only after graduating from Princeton, have I realized that I truly participated in a study abroad (of sorts).
However, I understood that my year as a Princeton in Asia fellow lecturing English as a Second Language at the Wuhan University of Technology would truly be a study abroad experience. But how so?
Like Princeton, Wuhan appears more similar than it is foreign. Heck, sometimes I feel as I though I am in America. Fetid piles of trash beside gleaming department stores — that sounds like New York to me (credit to my awesome co-fellow Sam Lutzker for making this connection apparent). Youth culture in particular appears nearly identical to that of American youth — women in stilettos walking on cracked sidewalks, men smoking and staring at their smartphones, couples cuddling on the subway. And then with beggars calling out for spare change, and subway station musicians — how far have I traveled?
Pretty far — even if right now, I can’t tell you how. Beneath this veneer of Westernization, there a “Chinese modernity” being lived — day in and day out.
Yesterday, I started skimming Sam’s copy of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which was written by Peter Hessler about his experience as a Peace Corps fellow in Fuling, Sichuan from 1996 to 1998. What struck me was how outdated, even foreign his experience of China felt. Yet this country has even changed before my eyes.
Three years ago in Beijing, I was hard pressed to find a single infant wearing a diaper (they would have pants with a slit through which they could relieve themselves onto the pavement). Now, I would say over half of infants I’ve seen in Wuhan appear to be wearing diapers. Walking in Donghu Park, I saw two fathers carrying their infant children in strap-on baby carriers, which I had previously thought to be solely a coastal American phenomenon.
I can easily infer the rapid changes in my own neighborhood in Wuhan. The mall beneath the hotel I’m staying in (while the university renovates the foreign teachers’ apartment building) hosts a brand-new mall — except for the fact that it’s empty, already irrelevant in the face of 4+ grand(er) shopping centers in a 500 meter radius. Yesterday, as Sam and I explored potential gyms to join, we encountered a brand new gym (with a DJ corner and TVs on all treadmills) and were stopped by girls handing out flyers advertising 2 more brand-new gyms opening in the next month. China’s modernity definitely seems fast-paced.
Yet what is China? I have spent a little under 5 months of my life in China: 2 months in Beijing, 2 months in Jishou, 5 days in Shanghai, 4 days in Guangdong Province, 2 days in Hong Kong, and 5 days (and counting) in Wuhan. I have seen snippets of a country geographically the same size as the United States, but with a population 4–5x as large. So I am going to narrow my sights from understanding China to understanding Wuhan, which is a much more manageable (???) size of 10 million people.
This blog post has been one of questions, not answers. Yet, while I am here to teach, I am also here to learn. In a sense, I am heartened when my wonderful adviser, Professor Liu Yingliang, pointed out that Wuhan is a city of immigrants. I, too, am an immigrant to Wuhan.
