Voices

Today was my last “first day of school” at Cornell. As I was walking to my first class of the semester, I felt as if I had stepped back into a long lost life. I went into the already jam-packed Collegetown Bagels for my old-time favorite Honey Wheat bagel. (I cannot begin to count how often I craved a CTB bagel while eating my mantous for breakfast in Beijing). As I continued my trek to class, it was odd to see all these familiar faces. There was my organic chemistry professor from sophomore year, the jolly bambini man who resurfaces Lynah skating rink, the kid from my freshman year writing seminar, the list goes on…

Nevertheless, Cornell has had a its own changes: I was shocked to see the massive new life sciences building, , the new café and renovations in Mann Library, and cars driving across the new bridge to North campus. My first class was Nutrition and the Life Cycle, an introductory nutrition class that I am TAing this semester. During class, I couldn’t help but notice how much younger everyone seemed. There were rows of freshman girls proudly wearing their bid shirts declaring which sorority they had been matched up with the night before. Many students were anxiously talking about what classes they were taking, which ones they heard were difficult, which ones had the best professors… It was an odd feeling because I could see myself playing their roles just three years ago.

The atmosphere was tense all throughout the day. People all around me were talking about MCATs, job interviews, graduate school applications. Once the lecture started, the room immediately settled down as people frantically took notes. I sat there in awe of it all. I remember being just as intense, if not more throughout my freshman and sophomore years at Cornell. It is so easy to get caught up in the overachieving environment that often pervades the undergraduate student body here. It was sometime in the beginning of my junior year that I began to see that all this stress was not necessary. I needed to learn how to relax, spend more time with my friends, and take a walk through the gorge once in a while.

One of my reasons for studying abroad was to get a break from Cornell and Ithaca. “But how will you ever find a job if you go abroad your senior year?!” Everyone loves to ask me that. There’s an odd belief among the people here that if you do not have your post-graduation plans arranged before winter break of your senior year, your life is essentially doomed. Leaving the Cornell bubble (and even the US bubble) for a semester has allowed me to appreciate the absurdity of this theory. I am currently actively job hunting, but I know that if I don’t find my dream job by graduation, I will still have plenty of other options.

While in China, I did not keep a day planner. This was a first in my historically over-planned life. However, now that I am back at Cornell (and in a sense, back to reality), I bought a new planner for the semester. I’m proud to say that so far it does not have anything past tomorrow’s agenda written in it. This semester I’m not getting too caught up in planning the next stage. I’m enjoying being here, and take full advantage of my last four months of college life.

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The billboard at the gate of my apartment complex read “210 days until the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.” The countdown reminded me every day while I was in Beijing exactly how long there was until the start of the games. Today, as the taxi driver pulled out of the gate, was the last time I would be reading the sign.

After my Asian tour to South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, I returned to Beijing for a couple of days before going back to the States. I stayed at my homestay during the week, and realized how much they have become a second-family to me. When I entered the door, my grandma and aunt rushed over to greet me. That evening, I showed them pictures from my trip. In the morning, we woke up at the break of dawn to send my little sister off to school. On our way back, we bought some groceries, and made lunch together. Now that I was completely free from school and any other obligations, I was enjoying family time as much as possible.

I also went to visit the Temple of Heaven (天坛), as I had not gotten a chance to see it during the semester. I took a bus to connect to the subway, and used my trusty Beijing map to navigate by foot to the site. On the bus, I thought back to orientation week back in August when IES organized a “Discover Beijing” activity. We were paired up and given a slip of paper with the name of a place in the city written in Chinese. Our goal was to figure out how to get there by public transportation (no taxis), and only asking locals for help in Chinese. Our mysterious slip of paper read “沃尔玛.” We asked several people on the street if they knew of the place. They all looked confused as they read “Wo-er-ma,” and said they had no idea that there was such a place. Finally, after asking dozens of people, we figured out that we were to take bus 323 north to get to Wal-Mart. Since it was the first time we had taken the bus, it was quite the fiasco trying to figure out the system. What seemed like hours later, we arrived at our destination. It was probably the happiest I have ever been to go to Wal-Mart. We did some shopping, and then prepared ourselves to try to figure out how to get back to Bei Wai. In all, the whole trip took us about three hours, and I was so relieved to return safely to campus. I was sure I would never resort to taking the bus again. Four months later, I have become rather fond of taking the bus. I even enjoy pushing and shoving my way on, falling over this way and that with the sudden stops, and having my arm fall asleep while holding on to the handle-bar for the two-hour ride. It makes me feel like a true Beijinger.

I came in August knowing nearly nothing about China. Experiences such as my Wal-Mart story not only make for great stories to tell people at home. They have given me a keen, local perspective on Chinese culture and history. It has been an incredible opportunity to live in this city, to see the Beijingers gear up for the Olympics. The games mark a pivotal turning point in the country’s history as it prepares to show the world what it is all about. Who knows where China will be in ten years? It will surely be a completely different place from the one I know.

Goodbye for now, China. I could not have asked for more during this crazy ride around the Middle Kingdom.

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When I was eight I can recall moving from our apartment in Brooklyn to a new house in New Jersey. I remember waving goodbye to my best friend from the neighborhood as we pulled away for the last time. I was sitting up high in the moving truck next to my dad and my little friend seemed so short on the ground. I remember waving goodbye to her and then looking over at my father and seeing the tiniest tear in his eye. The tear scared me a bit at the time because I didn’t feel sad.

I don’t know if I really understood what was happening because I’d never felt nostalgia before. I knew we were leaving Brooklyn because my sister had just been born and our apartment was too small for the five of us. I knew I wouldn’t return to my school the next year, and I knew we were about to have a whole house for ourselves for the first time. But I must have been too young to have a psychological attachment to what I was leaving behind.

Since then I’ve developed a place for nostalgia, which I feel regularly when I leave and return to Cornell after long breaks. Revisiting my old high school building also has a “good old days” effect, as does standing on bare stages where I’ve past performed in choirs and shows. Like anyone, I associate certain places with certain people and sentiments. But in order to feel nostalgia you have to understand that there’s a distance between the place you’re feeling nostalgic for and the place you are at the moment. The problem with studying abroad for one semester in a city you’ve fallen in love with is that it’s too short to feel nostalgic. I feel like I’m being torn away from Paris, sort of like a teething child from a good rubber toy he’s barely started in on.

In the past month I’ve realized how much I’ve learned and seen this semester, and it pains me to know that I’m going to leave on Wednesday with so much left undiscovered. When you live in a place and truly absorb it like I’ve tried hard to do, you start to see things you could never notice as a tourist or even a three-week visitor. Looking up at the tops of buildings instead of eye-level at the people on the street, I see old signage from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Paris. I can imagine what life must have been like when the local cell-phone store was the bakery, or when the underground mall at the Forum des Halles was a huge outdoor market.

In a larger sense, I have also been able to see that France has serious national problems manifesting themselves from day to day in its capital city. Poverty and unemployment are major issues here, as are attitudes towards the immigrant population. You walk the streets and constantly face demands from beggars, and you come out of the metro and see people with deformities crouched in sleeping bags. People who have jobs are often working until eight or nine in the evening and still having trouble paying their sky-high apartment rent. And of course there are always the students, who it happens are planning more strikes for next semester.

I wish there was a solution for all of this, some sort of magical administration that could feed the hungry, pay for medical operations, and erect beautiful HLMs in two days’ time without worrying about the aesthetic sanctity of the city. But all of this is a fact of the country and there’s no panacea for a people like the French. To really explain it all we’d have to go back in time and look at the history of France, its past involvement with colonization, its tendency toward revolution, its place now in Europe, and the dogmatism that’s endured from it all. All I know is that it’s what I have seen and felt in the past four months. I’m thinking along the lines of Baudelaire when I affirm that without the bad there is nothing and without the bizarre there is no beauty. When I leave I will have the impression to be leaving an acquaintance that has just started to become a friend because she can confide in me. I will be abandoning a place that may need me, and forsaking a country that I may need myself.

So I’ve decided to come back. I don’t know when, but I know I will, and soon. Because I’m sorry Cornell, but one semester is too short.

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