I would be lying if I said I wasn’t initially skeptical about this trip, traveling around the world with a bunch of strangers — some of whom were still freshies — for company. Looking back, I am grateful that I was able to spend the past two weeks with this amazing 11 person team — each member brought their own unique personalities and quirks that made the experience that much more enjoyable. What I didn’t realize before coming on this trip was the responsibility that came with being the oldest (2nd oldest though?) of the group. I was introduced firsthand to the importance of filial piety in Chinese culture. Upon arriving in Beijing with 喻老师 — one of our chaperones — Elizabeth, Maggie, and Larry, I felt that I had an obligation to look after and help them as if they really were my younger siblings. Being the younger child in my own family, this was an entirely new experience for me. My role as the “older brother” throughout the trip gave me an entirely new appreciation for what my parents and older brother do for me as well. I felt what they felt for the other kids on this trip. I cared about each and every one of the students on the team, and I felt that while we could joke on and on about anything, we were all there for each other when the going got tough, and we all had the capacity to switch to a serious and honest tone that really helped to strengthen our relationship. In addition to the other students themselves, I want to extend my appreciation to 喻老师 and 王老师, who made us all feel safe and put all of us before themselves and truly made the whole team feel like one big family.  

Now how do I even start with the teaching experience? Well, there’s no better place than the Chinese kids themselves. From the first day of teaching, they were welcoming and loving, demonstrating a sense of admiration, as revealed by their insistence on getting our autographs and WeChats. This kind of love was unfamiliar to me, and many of my team members agreed with me in saying that it was probably what celebrities felt like when being bombarded by paparazzi. What separates what we felt from what celebrities felt was the idea that we felt attached to these Chinese kids in to return. The kids were bright and hardworking, always ready to learn, and they all had their own unique stories to tell. While I was often told by my parents how grueling and difficult the Chinese schooling system was, I was shocked to see some of the things these kids were doing in their respective grade levels. Even the elementary schoolers lugged around thick stacks of books every day, yet they still managed to maintain their energetic and fun personalities. For the kids there, doing complex Newtonian physics in 7th and 8th grade was completely normal, leading me to further believe that much of learning is dependent upon the attitude of the student instead of restrictions of the school system, which was really inspiring to me. I was further impressed by the English abilities of the students, having expected them to barely be able to converse and understand the language. The students were particularly advanced in their grammar, as we teachers found out on the first day when we sat in on an English class taught by a schoolteacher and puzzled over the grammar exercises they went through. The students were less advanced when it came to their English speaking skills, which is completely to be expected considering the documented difficulty of transitioning from the native Chinese tongue to English. Our 3 person team was tasked with improving their English speaking skills, and we did so through a variety of pronunciation games that were especially effective in keeping the students engaged with the lessons. We definitely noticed a large disparity between the older (8th grade) kids and the younger (3rd) students in terms of their ability. While this may seem obvious, it also meant that we had to approach our lessons with the younger students differently from how we taught the older students. We thankfully had the opportunity to do this, as we spent time every day after teaching fine-tuning and adjusting our lesson plans for this purpose. The school’s teachers also sat in during our classes and offered detailed advice following the lessons, which was extremely useful as we used this information to improve our future lessons. Yu Laoshi and Wang Laoshi stressed that it was important to heed the suggestions of the teachers as a sign of respect and responsibility, which further motivated us to work harder on improving our lessons, oftentimes late into the night. 

Despite our being separated by thousands of miles and carrying entirely different cultural values and norms, we and the kids at Shennonjia were able to bond through shared experiences and humor, reinforcing the idea that some things are simply universally shared, no matter the cultural and social barriers that exist. I remember a number of conversations I had with some of the students, where we would often talk about not only school but what a future looked like for students beyond school. One student was particularly stressed about the 中考, which was the high school entrance exam that he was preparing to take. This one exam determined what high school he would be attending the next year. He also talked about his parents — his father lived in a nearby village, but his mother was away working and he rarely saw her. The extraordinary amount of pressure on this student to perform well in school was particularly shocking for me to see, making me realize just how lucky I am to have such a fundamental school experience at home. 

There is no question that this trip taught me a lot about myself as a person and was a great test of my maturity. Managing my responsibilities, such as watching over our backpack full of valuables and making sure my other team members didn’t do anything dangerous or dumb, was made more important by the fact that we were in an unfamiliar country, with different rules and unpredictable people and circumstances. We had a vast amount of independence when it came to our day-to-day living, and it felt as if we had the hotel to ourselves, as we barely saw anybody else around unless it was breakfast or lunch. All of our problems and annoyances that we would normally rely on our parents to fix instead were left to ourselves. However, everything was made easier by the fact that we could just knock on the next door over to plead for advice on how to properly wash and dry our clothes, what to do if our hair-dryer started to turn red and smell like burning plastic, or just rant about whatever problems, big or small, that we were dealing with. As such, our hotel was a perfect environment for having fun while we learned how to live independently, and I’ll forever be grateful for an opportunity like that. 

I feel like I can say the same about the trip as a whole, from the mistake of eating 四川大辣 in Beijing, to watching horror flicks way past curfew, to meeting all of the amazing kids who each had their own unique stories to tell, to saying goodbye to those kids forever, I’ll always be grateful for the lessons that this trip has taught me — about myself, about other people, about their culture, about their world. For all the amazing people who I had the pleasure of being with for these two weeks — thank you for some of the best times of my life.