It happened in Shanghai

Firstly, I would like to express how extremely grateful and overwhelmingly lucky I feel to have had the opportunity to explore China as a twenty-one year old college student and with such a wonderful professor and classmates who made it even more worthwhile. Secondly, as a reflection of the trip as a whole, I would say there were amazing points and there were good points, but there were no bad points and that is really the mark of a great experience.

Originally, my perceptions of China varied widely but were centered mostly around stereotypes that the Western World has about the exotic and remote Far East. I was really glad that we were able to speak to college-age Chinese students while in Beijing, those conversations helped significantly in dispelling the stereotypes that I held. I thought the Chinese people would be very reserved and cold, or worse, even unfriendly to us because we were Americans and foreigners. However, I came to realize that the Chinese people, while very conservative at times, were very warm and open with us, even in light of our nationality. They were always willing to talk and many of them were extremely eager to talk to us and to hear our opinions on things and to tell us theirs. Even talking about communism, a subject that seems like it would be totally faux pas, was a fairly open and understanding debate. Our two countries have had a tumultuous history and I think a lot of the assumptions I had about the Chinese people stemmed from fear they would associate all Americans with our country’s official governmental repertoire on Chinese-American relations. However, the people were very willing to discuss anything we brought up and were very caring in the way they expressed their criticisms of the Chinese people, the Chinese government, the American people, the American government, and everything in between. I think movies, TV shows, other students, teachers, books, magazines and everything in between shaped my assumptions about the country.