Our 5-week immersion learning program in Xiamen has finally come to a close. We leave for Beijing and Shanghai on our last week for excursions and sightseeing.
This experience happens only once in a lifetime, and I am extremely grateful to the US State Department for having given me this opportunity. However, unless I continue to study and take courses in Mandarin and Chinese culture in the future, all this valuable experience could potentially go to waste in the long run, and that is why I plan to continue taking Mandarin courses in my high school.
The first thing I understood during the trip was that it wasn’t all about learning Mandarin and trying to become fluent in it. It is so much more than that! In these five weeks, I realized that it was more about bridging different cultures and trying to understand one another. All that means is that I was in China not simply to learn Mandarin, but to engage with the Chinese students, to experience Chinese food on a daily basis, to experience what it is like to live with a Chinese host family for 2 weeks and try to communicate with them, to learn about Chinese history while at the same time experiencing it during the various cultural excursions, to buy Chinese gifts for your family back home, and so much more. At the end of this trip, I may not be an expert on Chinese culture, I may not be able to talk in Mandarin as fluently as I should, I may not even be able to use chopsticks correctly, but it doesn’t matter because at the end of this trip, there is a part of me that is Chinese. It is now instinctive for me to reply in Mandarin when someone asks me a question. I may not know a lot about Chinese history but I understand its essence as I have experienced it first-hand, and can explain it.
NSLI-Y is a 6-week summer program whose objective is to immerse students in the Chinese culture and language, and it has definitely fulfilled its job as far as I am concerned! Thank you NSLI-Y!
My Travels in China 