Recently I attended a 14-day summer camp in Jiaxing, a local province in China, to discover the depths of my Chinese heritage and its culture. During this brief time, I also had the opportunity to meet fellow Born Chinese kids coming from Spain, Germany, Italy, Canada, the U.S., and France in this small but cozy town. The language barriers we expectedly encountered were really quite a scene, as conversations were never solely in one tongue, but usually three, with the staff and students sometimes resorting to body gestures as desperate attempts to reach the same page.
Surprisingly, these different languages and cultures we had all grown up immersed in became the stepping stones for our dorm discussions, the twenty-six of us curious about the way others lived and the stories they had. At the same time, we all shared a Chinese descent, and this served as the platform for which we built friendship. I gained many valuable memories from this experience, and new friends both around the globe and locally in China, which I now cherish and hold dear to my heart.
Of course, it had not been easy diving into socialising the minute I arrived. I had just come from an internship, having made many friends that I missed greatly and knew whom I would not be seeing again soon. So for the first week or so, I kept to myself, listening to my music and hardly talking to anyone else. By the end of the camp, the realisation came to me that this isolation had been a mistake. Only if you truly open up and allow yourself to see the good in other people, does spending time with them become more bearable, and in this case even enjoyable.
As the two weeks drew to a close, I found myself finally playing cards with all the girls in our dorm room every night, sharing snacks with each other and casually talking about our cultures, hopes and dreams. Many tears were being shed as we said our goodbyes on the last day and hugged. As Winston Churchill once said, “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”
In the midst of the sweltering heat, my fellow camp members made good company as we unearthed the depths of Chinese culture through various hands-on activities and field trips. Among the many sights we saw, a few highlights were the Xitang old town, Nan River, Haining Lantern Museum and its handcraft puppet show, as well as a recycled metal robots park.
At these tourist locations, we spotted square dancing, smelled the sweet aromas of local street food, and lingered, too long for our guide’s taste, in souvenir shops. We also got to see the process and history of leather and silk making, and finally Chinese works of art like calligraphy, painting and brightly lit lantern pieces. I could go on – but really the views are best seen through pictures.
We also engaged in making our own pottery, paintings, traditional weaved crafts, glutinous rice dumplings, cutting paper, conducting a traditional tea ceremony and much more. I sculpted a mug and teamed up with my little sister and our roommate to make the Great Wall and a pot. These activities were quite thrilling, and when putting our mind to it we found that we could create beautiful pieces with our creativity.
I really enjoyed the various mediums through which we got to experience Chinese culture, as it was not simply lecture listening but also cutting, molding, pouring, painting, weaving, stuffing, shaping, drinking, eating, singing, dancing galore. Even our daily routines became habits of Chinese middle school students, as we lived in their wifi-less and squat toilet-equipped dorms, and ate their cafeteria’s food during the camp. I came to love the school and the local province more than before, its original meaning of my parents and grandparents’ hometown becoming more enriched now that I had my own personal experience living here.
The camp was not all fun and play though, as we kids of ages from 9 to 18 had to face living independently and keeping our surroundings clean. Hand-washing clothes daily, enduring the stench of squat toilets, sleeping on hard wooden beds without mattresses, dealing with no AC places, and rotating turns for who got the single outlet to charge their electronics has made me a “tough one”, as they’d call it.
I think what made this part of the camp bearable for everyone was that we had each other to rely on. It helped knowing that we were all going through the struggle to get up and scrub our sweat-ridden t-shirts each night. Somehow living together made independence easier to take on.
Here was the first time that I met so many “Born Chinese” that weren’t just American. It astonished me each time one of my camp friends spoke to their siblings in their native tongue, be it a Spanish dialect or German or Italian. In the U.S., meeting fellow American Born Chinese kids whose parents were friends with mine, we had always connected on American-centric interests in tv shows, celebrities, books etc. But there was not much of that at this camp, where American was a minority.
Thus, Chinese became ever more important in building the bridge for us to talk to each other. There was a pair of Spain siblings who were cousins with German sisters, and they could only really use Chinese or limited English to communicate. It was a strange but simultaneously eye-opening revelation, as the previous American-focused balance of my American-Chinese identity now shifted more towards the Chinese side at this camp. As one of the many kids around the world that have grown up with two vastly different cultures, whether being of dual heritage or born and raised somewhere different from their ancestry or so on, I have come to more greatly treasure the opportunity to interact with the two places I come from. It makes a great part of who I am and a great part of what makes me proud to be me.
I entered this camp unwilling to speak but left it unwilling to leave. Time seemed to fluctuate as days seemed so long or so short, but also froze as the outside world continued to spin rapidly. As I write this, caught up once again in the stress of approaching senior year, SATs and college apps, time has seemed to stop once again.
In a reflection presentation, all the camp members had to make, my sister said that after late night snacking together, emptying the mini supermarket next door together, and suffering through the heat and cases of headaches and diarrhea together, it was hard to imagine resuming our own lives again, apart. Another camp member chipped in by saying that he enjoyed this camp because it was real and it taught us to be independent, and he had a great time meeting people from all over the world in one place.
我完全同意 – I couldn’t agree more.
