Beyond Dim Sum :: Personal Narrative Essays

Beyond Dim Sum   There is truth to the platitude that it isnt the computer address that is important, scarce the route that one takes to get there. To say my goals for studying afield were purely academic would be skewing the truth studying Chinese took me to China. just immediately just as from studying Chinese language, I grant gained impertinently insights into Chinas cultural and historical legacy, so too, in going to China mother I gleaned more than just the ability to speak a international language.   I remember arriving in Beijing. I was awestruck. Tiananmen Square on my left, the disallow City on my right, a giant-sized portrait of a deified Mao Zedong smell down on me from above. It seemed unreal. So many times had these images been a ruin of montages in books and on television, I had become accustomed to representations of this amazing place, but had never taken in the real thing.   It was all so surreal, so wondrous, these impressions were unforg ettable. A week into my trip abroad, here is what I wrote as my set-back journal entry I am for the first time in my life truly alone. Alone not just in the nose out that I dont have anybody to rely and depend on, but in that I am in a country where I can besides snuff it with anyone, and beyond that, I dont have a cultural touch how to follow that old travelers phrase When in Rome, do what the Romans do. I am a remoter here. I wear the marks in each sense of the word. It is in the way that I look, it is in my inability to communicate with people, it is in the way I carry myself. Sure, I am nervous, and quite an timid. But, the fact is, I am excited. I am finding in China a new kind of engagement it permeates every excellent of my time. All these activities in my life that I have taken for granted, those that change surface no longer warrant the classification of activity, those things like buying a soda or taking a bus, the regimens of customary life, have now become the instruments of my engagement. Ironically, my vehicle is Chinese until this point, my studies have been so figurative. It is so strange to actually hear people use this language that I have been studying for so long in American classrooms as their everyday mode of communication, as I use English.