Love Lockdown
-Chris Hsu, Summer of Service, Jishou, China
“Who is the best rapper to ever exist? The correct answer in Kanye West.”
This is what Femi said to a full table of students over lunch just a few days ago, with all eyes fixed on him as the students made sure to digest this critical information. Now, you won’t ever see me arguing against Femi’s statement. But it certainly is a statement up for debate. That much was clear when Mr. Alex (DLG) and Mrs. Alex (Herr) began to chime in with differing opinions. Where were Eminem and Tupac in the discussion? But the students, having never heard rap music before, were mostly interested in what started our debate on these modern lyricists — the one and only Kanye West.
Even after only two weeks of knowing us, the students have treated every word we say outside of the classroom with the same, if not more, importance as the textbook lessons we study everyday. So, at Femi’s first mention of an unfamiliar name and an unfamiliar genre of music, all attention was directed at him. Femi became Jishou’s sole connoisseur of rap.
But one of the most astounding things about the students we have here is not their eagerness to explore foreign ideas, but their willingness to listen to unfamiliar notions and reevaluate their own perspectives. At my last office hours session of this week, my students brought me a very interesting question that they had clearly contemplated before: what do you think is most important? Family, friends, or love? Going around the room, I heard stories of affection, heartache, frustration, elation, and everything in between. But I also found everyone had their own concrete ranking of these three things, unwilling to concede that one could equate one with the others — until I shared my own stories.
After seeing how open my students were with me, it felt only right to open up myself to my students in the same way. In my early childhood, tumultuous events within my family shaped my value of family, friends, and love, and my sharing of these experiences has often been reserved for those I am closest with. But, here I was, a little over a week into PiJ, telling my students of the experiences I seldom share.
Many students here feel the pressure to have love “locked down”. They yearn for certainty. But, in PiJ, I’ve been seeing my students embrace uncertainty. Ambiguity is interesting rather than frightening. And the topics of family, friends, and love are no longer mutually exclusive. Because, in just two weeks, we’ve created a community here that encompasses all those things. Here’s to seeing how we grow together in the next four weeks.
-Chris Hsu, Summer of Service, Jishou, China
Originally published at blogs.princeton.edu on July 17, 2015.
