Kiran Peterson - China 2018

Arrival
Will Farner, Peter Minkoff, and I arrived at the airport at 6 a.m. to meet with Zhang Laoshi, our teacher, before flying to Detroit. We checked our bags and got ready for the long haul, the grueling 13-hour flight from Detroit to Beijing for 3 people over 6 feet tall in the airplane. Of course I, with my monstrous legs, had the fortune of getting the middle seat, but it was an enjoyable flight with the boys nonetheless. Arriving in a foreign country on minimal sleep was a little unnerving, but being together with Will and Peter and going through the same new experiences together made it much easier to overcome the fear of being 3 inexperienced Americans in a country with a culture drastically different compared to which we were accustomed.

Beijing No. 8 High School
The first of the three weeks in China we were set to be staying at Beijing No. 8 High School, one of the more prestigious of the numbered schools, as my dad compared it as “the Harvard of Chinese high schools.” We were exhausted after our flight, and we were picked up by one of the teachers at Beijing No. 8 and driven an hour through the Beijing afternoon traffic towards one of the multiple No. 8 school campuses located all over Beijing. Most of this hour was spent sleeping, but in my time awake I admired the massive city that was the complete opposite of the landscape in suburban Nashville. We arrived at the branch of the school that was supposedly the more international branch, as most of the students attending prestigious schools China aim to go to college in America. The teachers spoke a bit of English, but they encouraged us to speak to them in Chinese even if they were communicating to us in English. It was challenging to get things that come naturally in English across to people who had much less experience speaking to Americans. We were shown to our room, which was a standard dorm room for students, with three bed/desk combinations, where the bed was on top with a desk underneath to complete work and keep various things. Still trying to adjust to the completely flipped timezone, we were whisked off to a famous Beijing Sichuan restaurant, a region in China known for its cultural cuisine. It took a few days for us to get adjusted to the new time, sleeping as early as 7 p.m. and waking up at 4 a.m. During this week, we toured with students at the school at some famous historical sites, such as the Summer Palace, where we were able to get a boat powered by pedaling on the famous lake. We also visited the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where the massive stadium called the Bird’s Nest was located. A couple of the days we went to other Beijing No. 8 campuses, including the main campus, where we got an experience in a normal Chinese school day, attending classes with an assigned student and shadowing them for the entirety of the day. Besides the classical Chinese class that was equivalent to our English classes in America and were impossible to understand, it was very interesting to watch how the style of teaching and studying differs there. Surprisingly, even though students carried on their own conversations during class, they were able to keep up with what was being taught and the teacher was able to keep control of the class even though it was rather noisy. I had to continually ask my students during certain classes like Math and Classical Chinese what was going on, but I learned a lot about the teaching method if not the actual content of the class. We learned a lot about the interests of the average Chinese high school student as well, playing basketball with the boys after lunch and getting to know them through sports. I played one-on-one with the self-proclaimed best basketball player in the grade, and I introduced the American dominance in basketball to the rest of the students.

Painting eggs with the students during the Dragonboat Festival 

We also visited the campus dedicated to the arts, where we took a class learning the traditional Chinese tea setup, and also a calligraphy class where we learned the sophisticated method of ancient writing. However, the experience that stood out to me the most that week was the trip to the Great Wall. The sheer size and beauty of the structure had me awestruck, and climbing up the Great Wall in the mountains may be the coolest thing I have ever done. It was packed with people, but it didn’t take away from the incredible view overlooking the misty Chinese mountains.

The Great Wall and its fantastic view 

Touring with Frank


After saying a sad goodbye to our friends and teachers at Beijing No. 8, we traveled to a hotel in a different part of Beijing with an office worker from WLSA, where we were introduced to one of the more unusual friends on the trip, Frank. Frank was a 30-year-old tour guide that was assigned to the three of us, and we spent 5 days with him touring famous historical sites in Beijing. He was extremely knowledgeable about everywhere we went, easily able to answer our questions and giving us useful historical excerpts to have a better understanding of how the culture developed into what it is today. His English was also very good, and we had no trouble communicating with him. He took us to Tiananmen Square, where we were able to see the highly guarded body of Mao Zedong and the Forbidden City, a massive palace with over 8,000 rooms. During this week we were treated to many of the famous Beijing foods, including Peking duck, which is the iconic meal in the city. The other days we were taken to museums and art galleries by the WLSA employees.

Peter, Will, and I in a Buddhist temple we toured with Frank

Shanghai

At the end of the second week we met up with Zhang Laoshi and her daughter, and we then took a high-speed bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai. The train was one of the coolest parts of the entire trip, as it allowed us to see many parts of both rural China and the landscapes of the different cities as we stopped in many stations. As we arrived at the train station in Shanghai, we were separated for the first time when we divided up to go with our respective host families. My host student was a 16-year-old girl named Tina, and she had gone to Maryland previously for her own exchange program. Her English was better than my Chinese, but I was still able to talk about her life with her family in the Shanghai suburb with her in her native language. On the days that Tina didn’t have school, we would tour different aspects of Shanghai, whether it be the WLSA International School, famous temples, or a regular department store in downtown Shanghai. One of the most memorable experiences was the day that we traveled with Zhang Laoshi to an elementary school in Jiading, where we sat in on one of the English classes, introduced parts of American culture and Nashville to the kids, and taught them duck-duck-goose, which we played for half an hour. We even got interviewed by the local Chinese news. The thing that stuck out to me most about Shanghai was the vastness of the city. Home to 25 million people, different parts of the city had completely different cultures, and that aspect of a large city compared to Nashville was a bit of a culture shock for me in both Shanghai and Beijing. At the end of the trip, I said a sad goodbye to my gracious host family, who had given me my own air-conditioned room and bathroom in their extremely hospitable home, and headed to the Shanghai airport from which we departed.

Farner getting interviewed by the Chinese news at a Jiading elementary school

Thank You I want to say thank you to the Wilson family for making this experience possible, and also to my teacher and WLSA, who collaborated to make our trip as fun and educational as possible. Without all of them working together to further my knowledge of the language and culture of China, I wouldn’t have been able to have this incredible experience with my friends. Most of all the Wilson family, who not only sent me to immersion camp to better my Chinese but also for sending me to a foreign country in an incredible experience.