Prior to high school, I never expected to learn Chinese. Shortly before starting my freshman year of high school at Vistamar School, I met with the assistant head of school to determine my course selection. I was given a choice: Spanish or Chinese for at least three years. I assumed that learning Chinese would be much more difficult than Spanish, but my advisor asserted otherwise, so I chose Chinese. While my growth in Chinese has been fruitful, the rumor of Chinese’s ease proved to be dead wrong. Upon my freshman year at St. Olaf, little did I know that Chinese would become a core part of my education, including my second major. In addition to St. Olaf’s strong liberal arts education, my decision to declare this major lay in part in the strong support and encouragement from the St. Olaf’s Asian Department faculty, who have given me a worthwhile opportunity to integrate an incredibly pertinent discipline into my general education.
Shortly before my freshman year at St. Olaf, I tested into a mid-level Chinese course. While this news reassured me that I had a moderate level of Chinese language skills, it also worried me given the expected steep challenge a non-introductory college language course would pose. Nonetheless, the first two semesters of Chinese were highly interactive, engaging, and enjoyable. I began to add new words to my Chinese vocabulary, learn more advanced sentence structures, craft longer and more complex essays, and improve my tones and speech by working with international Chinese students serving as department tutors. However, Chinese’s difficulty took a sharper turn upward during the beginning of sophomore year, since I was now enrolled in a three hundred level (advanced course), proving to be the toughest yet. I recall my uncertainty and feelings of intimidation by the professor’s significant decrease in communicating to the class with English, the faster-paced Chinese, along with the expectation for students to become more comfortable with not knowing every Chinese word spoken or written. I soon discovered that this new expectation was a natural part of being an advanced foreign language student, and that to grasp the language’s core base of vocabulary, sentence structures, and grammar rules, not everything conveyed to us students could or needed to be fully explained in English. Two years later, my speaking skills are considered “intermediate-mid,” and I still need reminders and reviews from my professors, friends, tutors, notes, and even the dictionary when putting together an essay or when having a prolonged conversation. For someone who has not studied abroad in China, I know I have come a long way.
Either during the end of freshmen year or sometime during my sophomore year, I decided to officially declare my Chinese major. Thanks to the encouragement of my first-year Chinese professor, Shih Laoshi, and my mother, Allegra, I was convinced that Chinese had been a core component of my basic education during high school and college, and would benefit me in some way (I had even taught my dog basic Chinese commands during high school). It dawned on me that Chinese was the primary part of my education day where I felt I could enter a separate world with different rules, a world with a unique writing system, simpler grammar rules, and no conjugations. This separate world has given me a challenging puzzle to parse together rudimentary and sometimes complex thoughts and ideas into full sentences, stories, and conversations.
While a majority of my Chinese major studies have focused on language skills, this major opened new avenues for me to study subjects not limited to the language, thereby allowing me to become a well-rounded Asian Studies student. Due to the additional required courses not taught in Chinese, I was exposed to other subjects concerning China and greater Asia, including Asia’s history/heritage, culture, religion, philosophy, and art. One such class that helped build a foundational and thorough understanding of Asian history was “Asian Cultures 121,” composed of three units focusing on the big three East Asian countries: China, Korea, and Japan. My understanding of Asia was broadened by reading stories about personal accounts of individuals’ struggles, such as individuals who suffered during North Korea’s famine in the mid-1990s, China’s copious civil service system during its imperial period, and even one Japanese man’s experience with witnessing and participating in the Second World War on behalf of Japan; in addition, analyzing short primary sources like famous poems, personal stories, lithographs that conveyed class struggles, horrors of war, and the U.S.’s involvement in rebuilding South Korea during the aftermath of WWII contributed to my overall grasp of Asian history and society: a people who have endured constant struggle and have managed to survive and prosper while almost always putting the group before the individual and practicing filial devotion.
Learning about moral and ethical values that help define core Asian values has been a fascinating and enlightening journey, helping me comprehend why Asia is such a large and influential international player, distinct from the West. Taking “Religions in China/Japan, 256” gave me an understanding of and admiration for Asian religious, philosophical, and cultural values. It is an understatement to say that Confucianism has been one of the most impactful ideologies on Asian society. Whether it is respecting one’s elders and family beyond financially supporting them, respecting hierarchy, being virtuous, righteous or maintaining proper relationships and serving one’s country, studying Confucianism and the history of Asia reveals the lasting impact that Confucian ideology has had on Asian countries’ all-in-it-together effort, whether it has been fighting wars, growing their middle class and economy, or maintaining national unity in the face of conflict; this stands in sharp contrast to the United States, where individuals’ needs and desires are often prioritized over the collective’s. The aversion to individualism and selfishness is further expressed in sects of Buddhism, another significant Asian religion and philosophy, where ending suffering, duality, and perhaps the hardest task, destroying one’s own existence or forgetting oneself, is a primary goal. The distaste of individualism and affirmation of supporting the collective in society is likely one of the most important values emphasized in Asian thought and culture, and one I will always remember. I am grateful to have studied these values in a classroom with open dialogue and discussion, which has without a doubt made me a more thoughtful American and world citizen who plans to utilize this cultural/religious/philosophical understanding when interacting with people raised and guided by these values whether that be in a business deal, an international negotiation in politics, or getting to know a friend.
During my sophomore year, it dawned on me that it would be prudent to improve on writing characters, especially their stroke order. “Asian Calligraphy, 268,” was a gratifying interim course that also contributed to a heightened comprehension of Asian history and philosophy by using language. The origins and evolution of Chinese characters further demonstrated the vast difference between the East and West. While Judeo-Christian values teach that God created human speech, Chinese culture does not account for speech, but instead focuses on writing. Further demonstrating East-West cultural differences, Chinese calligraphy is a part of everyday life, emphasizing variation and personal expression, while Western calligraphy is primarily used for formal applications, reflecting rigidity and perfection. Writing Chinese calligraphy gave me a new appreciation for the evolution of the Chinese language – for example, solving ambiguity issues by adding a semantic element to indicate a specific meaning to eliminate a character’s confusion with another similar-looking character is proof of this language’s adaptation to a modern world. This ancient language’s continued use, whose characters still show traces their origins, is a testament to the society’s commitment to preserving a historic language system and allowing younger Chinese people to stay connected to their language’s origins. While a Chinese reader today can still read classical literature from seven hundred years ago, this is not possible for English readers, whose language has more drastically changed than has Chinese. While trying to follow the stroke order, writing characters with ink on rice paper reinforced my admiration for the East’s reverence for discipline and self-expression, but with a laudable allegiance to preserving and passing down its rich language heritage.
Spending as much time as I have learning Chinese and about greater Asia has been a rewarding experience for me. It is my plan to use this knowledge and experience to give back to my future academic, work, and residential communities by being a more culturally thoughtful and conscious person and helping to foster a clearer communicative environment in Chinese when needed. While it would have been prudent to further develop and tune my Chinese language skills in Asia during my time at St. Olaf, I am mostly pleased with my language ability. I am proud and grateful to graduate from St. Olaf College having received such a thoughtful and strong Chinese/Asian studies education.